Profiles in Sociopathy

(Tip o' the tinfoil hat to faithful and long-suffering reader, CC)

     The New Yorker once asked, "(George Bush) looms small in memory... Having obliviously made murderous errors, Bush now obliviously atones for them. What do you do with someone like that?"
     It's a good and a fair question. Now, Bush has been out of his purloined office for over eight years, nearly 100 months, and he still threatens to inspire intellectual vapor lock in the ablest and most nimble of us. Looking back on it now, it's a miracle I was ever able to cogently to write about this walking brain stem for my first four years as a political blogger.
     And the "atonement" to which the New Yorker had referred happens to be Bush's latest artistic project, unironically entitled, "Portraits in Courage", which shot to #1 on Amazon for perverse reasons we'll never know, the proceeds of which going to the equally unironically named George W. Bush Center's Military Service Initiative in Dallas, Texas.
     Bush had hygienically painted (off photographs) the portraits of 66 veterans (Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch, oddly, didn't make the cut) whose bodies and/or minds were fucked up beyond recognition by Bush's lies and the war crimes that resulted from them. This would be ironic if he'd never sent them into an illegal war of regime change on behalf of oil companies considering he's a draft dodger who used Daddy's connections to get him into a champagne flight in the 60's. But considering he did dodge the draft then sent tens of thousands of souls into that quagmire known as Iraq, while seriously floating the idea of cutting their pay and benefits at the same time he was bloating the Pentagon's budget... well, that falls under the heading of monstrous irony.
     This series of clumsy paintings that literally look like something Van Gogh would've produced if he had just a torso and instead had to paint by sticking a brush up his ass proves the psychiatric adage of "once a sociopath, always a sociopath." One does not get better from this condition just as psychopaths and those with Asperger's Syndrome don't just get better one day. This was proven during Bush's salad days as a wannabe Winston Churchill, a man who actually saw the consequences of sending men into a war, when he began painting self portraits and other world leaders. It took all these years for Bush to finally realize that, hey, there are other people in the world who aren't heads of state and that real human beings fight wars.
     You'd think if the man had an ounce of human decency, he'd donate the proceeds of this improbable #1 bestseller to those whose lives he'd ruined or at the very least compromised by ordering them into a war that never should've been waged. Not to some ironically-named thing with his name already on it.
     But that, too, would arise from the faulty assumption that Bush has any scruples or human decency instead of being the disingenuous sociopathic war criminal that he's always been and always will be. And lest you think I'm rudely interrupting the carefully spun narrative that #43 has mellowed in his old age and is even now morphing into America's kindly grandfather, allow me to pass on this tidbit that has slipped through the cracks:
     In another article linked in the one above, there's an anecdote of Bush finally meeting in person one of his subjects on (of course) a golf course. This man had lost an arm and an eye on his third deployment in Afghanistan and Bush actually quipped in front of this man, "Looks like your modeling career is over", to raucous laughter. Because, yes, it's hilarious after a while when our warriors who are thrust into a wrong-headed war lose body parts thousands of miles from home.
     We can only hope that this piece by the Onion becomes true because God knows in this world we coddle war criminals no matter how heinous their crimes. From Operation Paperclip to the strenuous attempt to gentrify one of the world's most notorious mass murderers, this trend continues. And if this life won't exact due justice, then perhaps the afterlife will.