Thank you very much.
As I am 97, I really did not expect to still be walking and talking when the careers of men including Karl Rove and Tony Snow and Scooter Libby and Bob Ney and Senator Larry Craig, David Vitter, Mark Foley, and probably Ted Stevens and Pete Domenici and a few others find their sudden ends. With all these fine rats taking their final bow, I'm afraid that just leaves Dick "Shotgun" Cheney chasing little George from room to room and we have seen this movie before: It's called "Home Alone" --and it isn't pretty.
Seriously, if it's starting to look like our old Republic has a fighting chance, give yourself some credit for that.
Most of my own work as an activist has been spent trying to try to get big money out of our politics, because I thought those big donor checks were limiting the common man's access to his representatives in Congress, but who knew you could just go into an airport restroom and make your case?
I have gone to some great trouble that I could have avoided. I walked across the United States, for heaven's sake, when I could have, what? Tapped a shoe in the next stall--though I'm sure I would have been a grand surprise.
When Bob Ney threatened to filibuster the reform bill I had walked for, I went into his office on Capitol Hill with the long list of his unsavory contributors and I read them in an endless filibuster of my own. He withdrew his filibuster. When I was arrested once in the Capitol building for daring to read aloud from the Bill of Rights in the great Rotunda, and arrested again for reading from the Declaration of Independence itself, I had no idea that there were more direct ways to grab hold of a Senator's attention.
Like you, for these past several years I have been most worried that our great Republic was going to just go down like the Titanic. But a Conservative friend of mine--we all agree to call them Conservatives because we are a humorous and good-natured people--said to me that our Republic cannot possibly "sink like the Titanic" during a Conservative government. I asked him why and he was delighted to tell me the reason: "No more icebergs!" he said proudly.
Quite so. Mission accomplished. Indeed, I think there are some overlooked Bushie methods to all this Bushie madness. In that vein, I think it would be useful for us to help Mr. Bush define his legacy by identifying the Bush Doctrines lurking behind his policies.
For an example: Our Conservative occupant of the White House has recently offered a too-little, too-late band-aid for the home foreclosure crisis. That may appear insensitive or incompetent, but what better way to have fewer people stranded on rooftops in the future, than to simply have fewer people with roofs over their heads in the first place? It is the simple math of Bushie tough love.
And it is a textbook example of the genius behind what I will call the First Bush Doctrine, which is that we make our people stronger when we make our government as dysfunctional as possible.
Let's face it: the agencies that have protected the environment, consumers, workers, miners, and protected the Bill of Rights and the Rule of Law itself are but crutches that enable weakness in our people. If not for this First Bush Doctrine, would we be here today, standing up strongly for our beliefs and our rights and our future and our safety and our freedom? Why are we doing it? Well, we are doing it because the Justice Department and the EPA and the other bits of government we pay for sure as shit aren't.
I think we have all seen how the people of New Orleans have gained new strength in speaking out against the crony corruption that has drowned their neighbors and forced them to live in mud and debris, and you have to give Bush credit for this improvement in their speaking skills. The people of an entire region are now thinking about and expressing themselves on much higher-rank issues than they were a mere two years ago.
The Second Bush Doctrine is more sublime, I think.
Even though Christian fundamentalists have been disappointed that Bush has not provided living proof of Intelligent Design, he has supported, in an important way, the theory of spontaneous generation that predates the Theory of Evolution. Spontaneous Generation holds that frogs, for example, spring naturally from mud. Getting back to that way of thinking, the Second Bush Doctrine, very simply, states that enemies of the United States will spontaneously generate from any country we attack for no good reason. Now, if your family, like his, is heavily invested in the defense industry, this is a useful doctrine indeed, for nothing is more profitable, monetarily and politically, than ready enemies, and the Second Bush Doctrine shows the way to endless war and endless wealth.
As to his appointees, well, maybe Mr. Bush is free of prejudice, and maybe he is not. We don't know. But if his secret goal was to raise the bar for any future Hispanic to serve as Attorney General or for any African-American woman to serve as Secretary of State, you will have to give him credit there.
I do not mean to disparage everyone who has found themselves serving in this administration. Many people from many agencies and branches of the service have acted with profound personal courage. Many times, that was the act of resignation. We should honor these people, just as we must someday honor the men and women now in the Defense Department and in the Department of State who are risking their careers to stop a mad rush to illegal war against Iran. We send you our respect, indeed. Much depends on you, and maybe you alone. We salute you.
American politics has changed fundamentally in the last several years. It is no longer the right verses the left. Everything has been tossed up in the air and it has come down differently. It is now those who believe in the freedom of free people versus the autocrats. It is the human scale of life versus the supermachinery of a corporatized state that feeds on fear and war. We are the people. Happily, we always win. But we win because we find it meaningful to spend our lives well, for the worthy cause. In our time, this is the cause.
The powers against us may seem to be on the ropes right now, but they but represent a system we keep in power with our economic votes. You of course know what your political vote is. Your economic vote is even more powerful. It is the way you live, for how we all live, in the aggregate, shapes political power in the world. We have a generation amongst us that, when they were younger, tried to find their way back to the garden --back to a way of sustainable living that respected other people and the earth. It is time they tried again, and we need to go with them. The new divide in politics, in America and the world, is between those who will decide to live beautifully with each other and with the world, and those who will not. We vote in that election 100 times per day.
Thank you very much.