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Uncle Frank's
Diary
Number 21 Aug 19, 2004
Glory Days:
Boy George as High-School Jerk
“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They
never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people,
and neither do we.” —George W. Bush, Aug. 5, 2004
Is there a Freudian in the house?
Any practitioner of the classical psychiatric trade would find a
world of revelation in the Weasel-in-Chief’s most egregious slip of the
tongue. From a man who has wistfully remarked on the advantages he would
enjoy as dictator* of the United States, assurances that he is doing his
best to wreck the country are surprising only to the extent that they
are so public. What, one wonders, has George W. Bush said in private
that, given the light of day, would turn even a few of his loyalists
against him?
George W reminds me vividly of an old high school classmate,
whom I’ll call Ron Clark. (If your name is Ron Clark, I’m not speaking
of you; I’m talking about someone else.) Ron Clark epitomized the worst
of high-school snot-nosery, clubbiness, jock-jerkery, and contempt for
those not favored with election to the ruling circle of adolescent
rotarianism.
Ron was a starting guard on the basketball team, a position of
such regal and rarified influence that it infected his gait with a
perpetual loping swagger, and his lip with a curling expression of
condescension toward his inferiors. His inferiors included everyone,
particularly males, not a part of the above ruling circle, and many who
occupied it.
Rights of the Nobility
To all appearances, Ron believed that his transient success with
a basketball imbued him with certain inalienable rights, chief among
them the right to act like a complete baboon’s ass, and to get away with
it.
Ron was a naked cheat. During closed-book exams in our European
history class, presided over by a not terribly alert instructor, Ron sat
at his desk in the back of the room with his book open in his lap,
looking up the answers. Not a student in the room didn’t know that Ron
was cheating, but no one said a word to the instructor.
You don’t rat out the starting guard on the basketball team; not
unless you’re eager to make the ordinary misery of high-school life all
that much more unpleasant. Ron smirked and mugged and cheated his way
through class, confident that no one had the guts to call him on it. As
far as I know, no one did. I sure didn’t.
Ron employed an entourage of not-very bright but well-muscled
sycophants who were adept at intimidating anyone Ron found an annoyance.
Ron didn’t have to do his own dirty work—except the dirty work that gave
him special pleasure. Like aspiring fascists everywhere, Ron found his
favorite targets in those with unusual physical characteristics. He
considered it the height of good fun to call mocking attention to some
classmate’s awkwardness, acne, dumpy clothes, crooked teeth, overweight,
large ears, or other distinguishing marks of a superficial and
meaningless nature. His taste for torment was unquenchable, and he had a
deadly ability to home in on his victim’s most vulnerable point.
A Shared Expression
I hated the guy. He seldom directly bothered me, but I hated
watching him pull his bullying, mean, dishonest, arrogant, smug act, day
after day, and—as far as I ever knew—never pay any consequences for it.
That smug expression of which George W is a master is the same one that
settled on Ron Clark’s face whenever he asserted his nasty notion of
superiority in the face of some hapless classmate, left writhing in
humiliation before Ron’s appreciative, or at the least, acquiescent,
audience.
I saw Ron Clark in George W. Bush the first time I watched Boy
George on television. The difference between the two is that Ron Clark
was a passable high-school basketball player. George W. Bush has never
been good at anything, except selecting a family in which to be born.
True, he operates at a level of sophistication well beyond Ron Clark’s.
Instead of a couple of broad-knuckled toughs at his side, he relies on
thugs like John Ashcroft, Dick Cheney, and Antonin Scalia to carry his
message to the people.
But no matter. The essence of Ron is the essence of W: the
condescension, the assumed superiority, the pleasure in pushing people
around, the pure contempt for those who do not kowtow to his eminence,
or who struggle to survive materially in a world in which he has never
known the meaning of real struggle.
Careers Different in Scale, but the Same in Nature
Ron Clark, I trust, went on to a career of small things:
stealing from his employer, perhaps, or cheating his customers, or both;
abusing his wife, beating his kids, borrowing money from friends and not
repaying it. If he lives yet, he is well into middle age, and no longer
a prince of the basketball court. It is unlikely that any audience
applauds him, or that any retinue of hangers-on hoping to benefit from
his reflected fame is willing to do his dirty work for him. Ron Clark
is, I have no doubt, little more than one more pathetic has-been whose
glory days ended with his high-school graduation.
By any measure of justice, that should have been George W’s
fate. Instead, this prissy, sanctimonious bully occupies the most
powerful office on the planet, and devotes himself, as he says, to
thinking of new ways “to harm our country and our people.”
I never believed anything Ron Clark said, but this is one
statement from Boy George that I think I shall take at face value.
*http://www.newsgateway.ca/bush_dictator.htm
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A column from
Grant
Burns ("Uncle Frank")
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