Context N°13
My Dearest Americans,
I have maintained a respectful silence about George Junior for a long time, but as his mother, I must speak up in view of the onslaught of criticism and name-calling that has gone on since he began his campaign to bring American-style freedom to the Iraqi people. Senior and I have compiled a short list of some of the names hurled at Junior, names that would make any mother cringe in horror: imbecile, idiot, Adolf, Stalin, the American Osama, Mr. and Mrs. Bush’s Mistake, mass murderer, child killer, and worst of all, Texan.
You have to understand that Junior has not had an easy life. In a family where none of the boys were too bright, George was called “slow” by all of us. Not stupid, just slow. Well, maybe stupid as well, but very slow. At an early age he built up all of these resentments and a lot of anger. We were reluctant to leave him home alone for fear that he’d burn down the damn house. He always wanted to be destroying things. He was funny that way. I mean, we were all kind of scared of him. His favorite movie was Star Wars, and that’s when he got it in his head that there were evil empires. He thought it was a documentary. That seemed kind of funny at the time, because he used to take turns deciding which of us in the family was part of the axis of evil. Then he’d make plans for destroying us because we had weapons of mass destruction (you can tell that he has always had a one-track mind). And now you can see what all this has led to.
Sometimes I think he may have had brain problems as a result of how his brothers would play with him. When they had nothing else to do, they played a game called “George’s Head.” The point of the game was to bang his head against the wall. That was it. Just to bang his head. And it was about then that he got the stupid smirk going on his face. And that’s of course how he got his family nickname of “Scrambled Eggs,” because that’s what we thought his brains must look like.
Then by the age of twelve of course he started drinking like there was no tomorrow and got into drugs. There was a good reason he wouldn’t answer reports during the election about whether he ever used drugs. And no wonder his daughters have their drinking problems, seeing dad in a drunken stupor night after night.
But it was the anger that concerned us, and the fact that he thought he was always right. You put together slowness with anger and arrogance, and you got yourself a handful. He used to come home drunk as a fish and start lecturing, waving that damn finger at us the way he waves it at the entire country now. And the smirk he’d get on his dumb little face. Senior did everything a father could to wipe off that smirk, but Senior had his own problems. When you go from being head of the CIA to President of the United States, you just know that people are waiting in the bushes for you. They just see everything as a conspiracy. So Senior was too occupied to do a decent job as a father for little George. He kept him out of Vietnam and arranged some business deals for him, but he really couldn’t be responsible for too much else. And besides, he had to spend so much time trying to get George’s brothers, Neil and Marvin, out of all that trouble with the savings-and-loan scam they were running that cost Americans millions and millions of dollars. You’d think the people of this country would have learned something about the Bush family after that.
Well, instead of rehashing a whole lot of bad memories, let’s cut to the chase here. Senior and I were flabbergasted when the Republicans picked him, and then scared out of our wits when he became president, even though we know there were some funny goings-on that election night. But what were we supposed to do? Tell Americans that they were as stupid as Junior for electing him? I mean, when you have a grown man running for president who doesn’t know that Africa is a continent rather than a country, wouldn’t you think that the American people would have had a clue about there not being something right up there in his head?
I guess what I am trying to say is that Americans got what they voted for and what they deserved. And I won’t even mention all of those nitwits who voted for Ralph Nader. Those are the ones really responsible for getting George into the White House.
Well, Senior and I have a place up in Canada that we will be moving to on a kind of permanent basis soon. We really don’t want to be around here to face the music of this war that George keeps telling Americans they have no business knowing about. He scares us more now than when he was a kid. But then Americans are scaring the hell out of us as well. The last I read, 67% of Americans approve of what he’s doing as president! Senior and I laugh sometimes and say that Americans have got to be dumb as cows. And speaking of cows, have you noticed that Tom Ridge, who is supposed to be protecting us all with that Homeland Security nonsense, looks like a cow that’s just been hit between the eyes with a two-by-four? And of course Junior has that evil man Rumsfeld egging him on all the time; back in Senior’s day, we used to call him bipolar Donald, and he apparently never did get on the right medication. So, take it easy on Junior and remember that he has a mother somewhere up in a Canadian province who is sick to her heart every time he’s called one of those names. And good luck to you all down there, you’re really going to need it.*
——————————————
- This wasn’t really written by Barbara Bush, but people here at CONTEXT get all nervous about satire at a time when the country has gone crazy. And so they asked me to write this disclaimer. I like to think, though, that this is what Mrs. Bush would write.—A. B.
