A Short Note on the Passing of President Bush

Kenneth Burke said, “we build...cultures by huddling together, nervously loquacious, at the edge of an abyss." 

As a young man, Bush hurled his Grumman Avenger directly at the abyss. As a middle-aged man, when the world had enough nukes to dilate that abyss to world-swallowing scale, the torpedo-plane pilot had become a public servant. When the Soviet Union, which oversaw a good share of those nukes fell apart, Bush eschewed a triumphalism for a unifying vision of decency and cooperation. At that time he told Congress,

‘Until now, the world we've known has been a world divided—a world of barbed wire and concrete block, conflict and cold war. Now, we can see a new world coming into view. A world in which there is the very real prospect of a new world order. In the words of Winston Churchill, a "world order" in which "the principles of justice and fair play ... protect the weak against the strong ..." A world where the United Nations, freed from cold war stalemate, is poised to fulfill the historic vision of its founders. A world in which freedom and respect for human rights find a home among all nations.’

This did not make him popular: progressives thought he was cynically justifying American hegemony; conservatives feared he was subordinating national sovereignty to global government. In response to Bush’s vision, Pat Robertson wrote The New World Order and, well, today we have Trump, Le Pen, and the AfD. Whatever mistakes he may have made, I see *my* America, and our Stark-Trek-Federation-of-Planets future, in Bush’s vision, which runs counter to the current nationalist and, in some parts of the world, revanchist mood. That vision is, IMHO, still our best guarantor of abyss-avoidance.