Hey...be thankful....thankful you're not BUSH
Be Thankful You're Not Dubya
By Mark Morford
San Francisco Chronicle
Wednesday 26 November 2003
Craving more juicy reasons to offer up profound gratitude this T-day? Try a few of
these
This Thanksgiving, as you sip the wine and hug the family and toast the friends and hoard the
stuffing and curse the airport security, remember to give thanks you are not G.W. Bush. Hey, it's
important.
1.Be thankful that you do not have to suffer Dubya's massive crushing karmic burden, as wrought
by inflicting heaps of environmental disaster and vicious unnecessary war and a stunning string
of lies lies lies like a firehose of giblet gravy splattered all over the planet.
For it really is all too plain: G.W. Bush is one of the most reviled and openly disrespected major
world leaders in modern history. America has never been so embarrassed and reluctant to send
a president abroad. We cringe when the man takes the stage. We offer humiliated apologies to
our former allies, and to the 200,000 Bush/war protesters in London, just last week.
In Bush's defense, it cannot be easy to be so undeservedly powerful, yet so bumbling and
inarticulate and globally loathed for your abhorrent policies and hollow corporate agenda and
baffled doofus manner. This Thanksgiving, be grateful you are not him.
2.Thanks, you might want to give, that you are not Iraqi. Be grateful you did not go from brutal
scowling despot who at least kept the damn lights on to brutish occupying army no one asked
for that is right now laying waste to whatever remains of your once semi-proud oil-rich nation.
Give thanks, furthermore, that you are not one of the estimated 10,000 Iraqi civilians killed to
date by U.S. forces, not to mention one of the untold tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers who
were hammered by our million pounds of billion-dollar ordnance in the first few days of the
massacre. Be grateful you are not dead in the name of American political and petrochemical
profiteering.
3.Give thanks you are not a member of the much-abused U.S. military. Sad but true. Be grateful
you are not right now suffering that sickening sinking feeling that you are not, in fact, protecting
America from any sort of marauding terrorists, or defending our honor, or our way of life, or
guarding innocents from swarthy evildoers and nonexistent WMDs.
But that you are, instead, a wholly disposable henchman for the BushCo corporate regime, with
the odds increasing every minute that you will soon join the more than 9,000 U.S. wounded or
more than 430 "necessary" dead U.S. soldiers Rumsfeld mentions when he shrugs off the latest
round of guerrilla bombings that killed another batch of your friends. Support our troops. Bring
them home right now.
4.Be grateful BushCo's ratings are slipping lower than an SUV's mpg rating, and there is only one
year left until he joins his father as one of those embarrassing historical footnotes, a jagged scar
on the heart of a wary America that other countries point to in years to come and say wow that's
a nasty scar where'd you get that, and we reply, George W. Bush, and they go, oh my God,
that's right. So sorry.
5.Be grateful you are not right now in any way related to, or serve as a spokesperson for, or are
employed as one of the apparently very deranged or heavily drugged plastic surgeons who
worked on Michael Jackson. This is a gimme.
6.While you're at it, give thanks you're not Paris Hilton, Anna Nicole Smith, Bennifer, Britney, Liza
Minnelli, Joan Rivers, Howard Stern, Ann Coulter, Ashton Kutcher, Bill O'Reilly, Anna
Kournikova, Madonna or Mary Hart. These are lives you probably do not want to lead. Give
thanks your soul is not all withery and Botoxed and that it still manages to radiate cool colors
like one of those funky cheesy fiber-optic lamps from the '70s.
7.Be thankful they have yet to figure out a way to blot out the sun. Or, for that matter, the moon.
8.Offer immense gratitude that despite a massive ongoing Herculean effort on the part of
numerous world governments to rape and pillage and pretty much slap down most all tender
offerings of the planet, Earth still manages to produce for us an astonishing array of flora and
fauna and oxygen and edible delicacies and awe-inspiring trees and relentless merciless
beauty.
9.Be thankful the planet rather effortlessly continues to baffle scientists and confound astronomers
and completely entrance biologists and philosophers and poets. We still, for example, have no
idea why whales sing, or how long they live, or where blue whales, the largest and most
magnificent creatures on the planet, go to mate. Be grateful for the Mystery.
10.Kneel down, right now, for free speech. Oh yes. We must. Because it is under severe duress.
To exercise it now, to speak out against BushCo and war and global corporate profiteering, is a
true sign that you are a traitor and an al Qaeda operative and a personal friend of Barbra
Streisand. This is what they sneer at you.
Give it up, instead, for free unfettered alt-news sources like truthout.org. And
commondreams.org. And alternet.org and counterpunch.com and buzzflash.com and
smirkingchimp.com and even Slate and the BBC and The Onion. Cheney scowls, Rove oozes,
Ashcroft would love nothing more than to shut down the entire impious godforsaken Internet. Be
grateful they can only quiver and hiss and rattle their chains. So far.
11.Molly Ivins. Gore Vidal. Michiko Kakutani. David Foster Wallace. Don DeLillo. Maureen Dowd.
Caroline Myss. W.G. Sebald. Tom Robbins. Starhawk. William Rivers Pitt. Rob Brezny. David
Attenborough. Dave Eggers. Joseph Campbell. Lewis Lapham. Haruki Murakami. Katha Pollitt.
Et al. Thank you.
12.For baskets of locally grown organic small-farm produce delivered to your door. For handmade
whiskey-filled chocolate truffles smeared over a lover's tailbone. For Bernese mountain dogs. For
the return of Opus. For Rufus Wainwright and Beth Orton and the Mini Cooper. L'Occitane
honey incense and the Apple iPod and "Six Feet Under." For Cate Blanchett, The Sun
magazine, The New Yorker, Peet's coffee and "Spirited Away."
13.Here is the big cliché. Here is the final praise. It cannot be overstated: Despite an impressive
assault on civil liberties, despite savage BushCo attacks on everything from national forests to
air quality to rivers and oceans and water quality and health care, despite attempts to numb the
national consciousness overall, we must give enormous, unfettered thanks for this incredible and
kaleidoscopic America.
Ours remains the most breathtakingly beautiful, diverse, epic, multifaceted, multiorgasmic
landscape on the planet today. It's true.
We tend to forget. We take for granted. We presume it must be like this everywhere. But
one quick trip abroad will only serve to remind you and reinforce your devout appreciation for
what this country can offer, the free expression and the religious autonomy and the clean water
and the good dentistry and the fresh produce and the space to explore.
We are deeply flawed. We are massively arrogant. We are bratty and insolent and abusive
and sloppy and violent. But we balance it with astounding acts of love and beauty and art, nature
preserves and activism and organic awareness and sex positivism and community awareness
and quiet personal spiritual questing and lots and lots of great bookstores.
14.Here is where you make you own list. Here is where you set aside the cynicism and the sighing
and the bitterness, just for a moment, and get quiet, look around, look inside, check the karmic
inventory and offer up heaping pies of gratefulness for what you find.
Sure it seems clichéd. Of course you don't need some holiday to be deeply thankful for the
radiance in your life. But, hey, an opportunity is an opportunity. Just remember, big meaty drumsticks
of general gratitude are absolutely fine. But the divine, personal gravy is where the real flavor is.
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