Like many I found my forefinger wiping a tear from my cheek. President Buhari of Nigeria helped me to understand. The angst of the world today – in sorrow squeezed from our souls in grand cathedrals by military philharmonics – comes from our conflict about what the hell to do with our elite:
“President Buhari of Nigeria said of George Bush that “the late president’s love for his family and country” ensures that “his children take up leadership roles and are steadily breeding a new generation of great thinkers and leaders.”
Fertile elite, praised by African elite.
Jealousy, Loss and Anger. Bush was not as spectacular a leader as was his funeral.
Much was said about his excellence in foreign policy and the successes he achieved maintaining a world order post-Soviet collapse. That strikes me as grandiose, but I’m more certain that Bush’s foreign policy in Africa was among the most destructive in American history.
Deutsche Welle’s Isaac Mugabi confirms, “There [was] little reporting in Africa generally about [Bush’s] funeral, perhaps because of his failed foreign policy on the continent.”
Mugabi sums up the many mistakes in Africa that Bush made during his short four years in the single travesty, “Black Hawk Down.”
This incident epitomizes America’s many failures over the last century: Misplaced support for dictators and warlords in conflicts artificially diagnosed globally as East-vs-West, then pitifully restrained military action that fails, followed by an abrupt withdrawal that destroys the initial ally.
This couldn’t be more different from the accolades for Bush’s post-Soviet “global maintenance.”
That’s because in the 1990s Africa didn’t rank “global maintenance.” Its exclusion from the interest of the elite rulers of the world followed their maxim to pay less attention to people than GDPs.
Bush was a good, loyal and faithful family man. He was a steady, institutional conservative ruler. He was part of an elite dynasty that controlled the world.
He could afford to be good and compassionate and humorous, because he and his family were richly protected from the failures he actually suffered. I would love to have had such a life. Now it’s gone.
It’s gone because the power of the elite for the first time in human history is being rattled from pole to pole. Yellow vests and temple shootouts, opioid orgies and neo-fascism, neglected Puerto Ricos and 80 mph speed limits, Brexits and bitcoins – it’s all a massive, indistinct and unstoppable protest against the elite.
Trump and others like him emerge from this maelstrom because the elite still have enough power to exclude any viable alternatives to them. We have no choice.
They force on us the old nostalgia or the random, uncertain reign of the chaotic infidel. We have no other choice, and it’s infuriating. The nincompoop now over reigns the casket. In the moments of peaceful exhaustion this grows tearful.