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Why wasn’t a single reference to George W. Bush made by anyone–including Ellen DeGeneres in her gently laid-back stand-up routines? Probably for the same reason that I rarely heard Bush mentioned by anyone in conversations when I was recently in Rotterdam, Toulouse, and Paris. Why beat a dead horse?, the deceased in this case being the fate of the world, or perhaps innocent civilians in Iran, not a spry but clueless leader. Once it’s become accepted and mutually acknowledged that the overall will of the world’s population and the will of the American people–insofar as either will can be correctly inferred–has almost no bearing on what Bush decides to do, speaking out of rage and impotence about a stupid dictator’s whims won’t accomplish very much. So instead of cracking jokes about how Clinton risked impeachment for getting a blow job while Bush risks nothing but a little wrist-slapping for endangering the survival of the planet as well as his own country, DeGeneres brings out a vacuum cleaner. The closest she ever got to evoking Bush was implying at one point that more of the American public voted for Al Gore. The overall implication: when in doubt, lie down and turn on the TV. Which is presumably why such PC questions as the importance of someone using the word faggot elsewhere on TV is supposed to matter so much. Once you give up on the prospect of saving the country or saving the planet, much less improving the quality of your own life, there are still loads of other things to get even more worked up about.
