Have things really gotten that bad? → U.S. government is cruel, despotic, a threat to people → despotism → embarrassing, pampered god-emperor in the White House

There’s a story that doesn’t much get told, and I sometimes wonder why, and that is what a pampered little princeling the President is. Not just Dubya, though he certainly fits the bill and then some, but any modern President.

Where his dad tried and failed to strike the right populist note with his pork rinds, Dubya seems to be able to convince his flock that he’s a just-folks ordinary sort of no-nonsense heck-with-all-this-pomp sort of guy.

And yet he does this not with any subtle finesse, but with a silliness that seems tailor-made for parody:

Fancy state dinners aren’t all the new White House chef will need to do — the Bushes are looking for someone who knows barbecue and other good old American fare.

Laura Bush told Newsweek she doesn’t expect that any of the celebrity chefs with books or television shows will be interested in becoming head chef at the presidential home. But she’s looking to fill the job with someone who “can really showcase American foods.”

The previous White House chef, Walter Scheib Ⅲ, has left to pursue new opportunities after nearly 11 years of cooking for two presidents, and the first lady is looking for a replacement who can cater to the first family’s native Texan pallets.

Yup. Just plain folks, those Bushes. Meanwhile, there’s reality.

Between the US president’s 9:45am landing at Frankfurt airport and his afternoon departure, the sleepy Rhineland town and birthplace of Gutenberg will turn into a steel fortress.

In a contemporary echo of the Lady Godiva legend, anyone living on the route of the presidential motorcade is being discouraged from taking a peek at the 60- to 80-strong column of vehicles conveying the US president. In police leaflets, residents have been asked to keep their windows shut and stay clear of balconies “to avoid misunderstandings”…

Neither driving nor parking will be allowed in the zone, where garages have been emptied, mailboxes unbolted and 1,300 manhole covers sealed.

To keep all travel options open for the president, four highway sections east of the city will be blocked to traffic. Schools will be shut and many workers will be taking a “Bush day.” The nearby Opel and Nescafé plants decided to move their shifts or suspend production.

Even our military brass (hush, don’t tell anyone) isn’t averse to lifting the pinky and letting their snooty side show.

Somewhere in Iraq, a young soldier is handing his three-starred boss a bottled water on a platter, or pressing the general’s uniform, or serving his dinner guests dessert — from the left side, of course.

The military has always provided personal assistants to top brass: There are 300 “enlisted aides” who cater to three- and four-star generals and admirals. But now the Air Force and Navy are sprucing up their service by enrolling some aides at the Starkey International Institute for Household Management, the country’s premier school for domestic help. The Pentagon, in short, is now training butlers.

Mary Starkey — that’s Mrs. Starkey to you — started the eponymous institute in after nine years of running a staffing business for butlers, cooks, maids, and nannies. Students live at the school’s Denver mansion for anywhere from a week to two months, where they learn skills such as silver polishing, flower arrangement, and cigar etiquette, as well as household management training, according to the school’s course catalog. The school has published five texts on household management and has more than 600 alumni serving in wealthy households worldwide. Starkey grads work at the White House, the Pentagon, and the vice president’s residence, a school official says.

Which reminds me of Dubya’s $2 million mushy peas from a year and a half back:

It was billed as a quiet pub lunch in the English countryside: a chance for President George Bush to mix with ordinary folk, sample traditional fish and chips and enjoy a kitchen-table chat at the constituency home of his friend and ally, Tony Blair.

The political fiction was always going to be hard to maintain, but even by the standards of the President of the United States of America — and a Texan at that — ’s visit to Sedgefield was quite a performance.

Two jumbo jets, two liveried presidential helicopters, four more US Navy helicopters, a motorcade of limousines, 200 US secret service agents and 1300 English police were required to unite Mr Bush safely with his fish and mushy peas. Total cost? £1 million ($2.3 million).

Not all heads of state choose to travel in such style.

While Mr Bush clattered off from the Buckingham Palace lawns, heading to Heathrow and then to Sedgefield in County Durham, the Queen boarded the train to Winchester to open an army museum.

By Teesside Airport resembled an international air show as Mr Bush transferred for the 18-kilometre drive to the village of Trimdon Colliery and Mr Blair’s modest Victorian constituency home, Myrobella.

The village football pitch was transformed into a helipad as hundreds of police, some with dogs, created a buffer zone of several hundred yards to keep out the locals.

They were almost too effective as Mr Bush, after exchanging greetings with the Blairs, looked around desperately for an English hand to shake only to find himself posing for a photograph with Mr Blair’s press secretary.

Amazing, isn’t it? All the flag-waving, macho, no-nonsense, hard-working, values-loving, pop-beer-cans-with-their-teeth, Christian, red state, middle-America types tripping over themselves to pledge allegiance to this pompous, Ivy League cheerleader and his enormous taxpayer-funded retinue?

Seems like such an easy bubble to pop, and yet it never does. Maybe one day we’ll come to be ashamed of our acquiescence… of how we treated a dope like George W. Bush like a god-man Pharoah — but probably only in the way we sat around in our two-tone, skinny-tied suits in and wondered how we ever wore our wide-lapel polyester shirts and bell-bottoms .

And, from TomDispatch, some more on the weird, regal, sedan-throne life of our god-emperor:

“The great motorcade,” wrote Canadian correspondent Don Murray, “swept through the streets of the city… The crowds … but there were no crowds. George W. Bush’s imperial procession through Europe took place in a hermetically sealed environment. In Brussels it was, at times, eerie. The procession containing the great, armour-plated limousine (flown in from Washington) rolled through streets denuded of human beings except for riot police. Whole areas of the Belgian capital were sealed off before the American president passed.”

Murray doesn’t mention the 19 American escort vehicles in that procession with the President’s car (known to insiders as “the beast”), or the 200 secret service agents, or the 15 sniffer dogs, or the Blackhawk helicopter, or the 5 cooks, or the 50 White House aides, all of which added up to only part of the President’s vast traveling entourage.

Tom quotes a letter from a resident of one of the towns in Germany that Bush descended on during his tour:

Last Wednesday for his arrival, all Autobahnen (highways) around Mainz were closed for several hours. A helicopter flight from the airport to the city might have seemed like a more practical way to transport the President than cutting the veins of the most frequented Autobahn-segment in Germany — and that was just the beginning of our voyage into the absurd.

Many citizens of Mainz weren’t even able to drive their cars. They were forced to park kilometres away from their homes, simply because they lived near one of the maybe-routes the President’s convoy might conceivably have taken. Using the railway system might have seemed a solution, but unfortunately over 100 trains were also canceled (and a similar number of flights at the airport in Frankfurt during the time that Air Force One arrived).

One could imagine George Bush sitting in a car, but in a train? If you smiled at that, you’ll laugh when I mention the Rhine River. The route of the President crossed the Rhine and so the whole river was closed to shipping. (Estimated losses in profits only for this: 500,000 euros.)

The Apotheosis of Washington

Lew Rockwell turned me on to this amazing bit of insight into the self-importance of politicians and the idiotic idolatry of patriotism:

The Apotheosis of Washington in the eye of the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol was painted in the true fresco technique by Constantino Brumidi in . Brumidi () was born and trained in Rome and had painted in the Vatican and Roman palaces before emigrating to the United States in . … The figures, up to 15 feet tall, were painted to be intelligible from close up as well as from 180 feet below.

In the central group of the fresco, Brumidi depicted George Washington rising to the heavens in glory, flanked by female figures representing Liberty and Victory/Fame. A rainbow arches at his feet, and thirteen maidens symbolizing the original states flank the three central figures. (The word “apotheosis” in the title means literally the raising of a person to the rank of a god, or the glorification of a person as an ideal; George Washington was honored as a national icon in .)

Some short bits of interest from around the web:

American conservative newspaper columnist Westbrook Pegler had a soft spot for conservative tax resisters. Here’s another example, as found in the Evening Independent:

Copperhead Refuses To Help Pay Harry’s Traveling Expenses

I have a letter from a typical Copperhead, in the late Roosevelt’s meaning of the term, who reveals a determination quite un-American, according to the same lexicon, not to pay her just share of President Truman’s $50,000, tax-free increase in pay disguised as an expense account, nor her fair portion of the cost of his recent nonpolitical visit to the far-flung haunts of the Faceless Man. I trust that the treasury and department of justice will send her to prison that the majesty of law and justice shall not be mocked.

“Faceless Man” was a favorite Peglerism, though it’s not always clear to me what he meant by it. It may have just meant how an individual person looks faceless when seen merely as a unit in a mass — a member of a demographic, or a voting bloc, or “the workers,” or some such. In the context of taxation, it may have been something similar to “The Forgotten Man” of William Graham Sumner.

Pegler goes on to quote from the letter, in which the writer complains of how her husband was treated. Her husband worked for the telephone company for 30 years, dying in after a long and expensive battle with cancer. She received one year of his salary from his company as a death benefit, and was outraged when the commissioner of internal revenue later decreed this benefit to be taxable income. By this time, the money had been spent on medical and funeral bills, and she was living on (and supporting her elderly mother on) her husband’s life insurance.

Asked of her reaction to the commissioner’s ruling, she writes: “I said: ‘You can tell them I will never pay. I will take the whole matter to Mr. Pegler.’ ” Pegler’s sarcastic response:

Let me hasten to wash my hands of this sordid cause. I do not know this Fascist-minded evangel of greed and civic anarchy. I do not endorse her reluctance to contribute to Mr. Truman’s $50,000 tax-free raise and the cost of his barnstorming trip in the interests of the Democratic party. I don’t want no trouble with no tax collectors.

“On , I filed the income tax form. I will never pay the tax. I will go to jail before I will pay.”

I shall try to learn the outcome of this rash defiance of our laws and report this offender’s progress toward prison.

Pegler brought up this new $50,000 travel allowance for the president many times in his breathlessly outraged columns, though today this outrage sounds quaint. For example, a single trip that President Bush took “to mix with ordinary folk, sample traditional fish and chips, and enjoy a kitchen-table chat at the constituency home of his friend and ally, Tony Blair” cost $2.3 million — or, in 1950 dollars, over six times Truman’s extravagant new annual travel allowance.