Time plays tricks on us.
Geology counts years in the millions, while insects measure
lifetimes in hours.
Time plays tricks on us.
Geology counts years in the millions, while insects measure lifetimes in hours.
Each moment spent waiting for word about love, or death, can feel like an eternity, while column deadlines pass in a heartbeat.
New York has its own minute.
But time is also elastic, and the same events can have opposite effects on people. Scheherazade’s thousand and one nights were each an interminable nightmare to the young woman whose life hung on the telling of each night’s tale. For Sultan Schahriah, on the other hand, the time surely passed pleasantly and quickly.
Wednesday we’ll witness another exercise in how we measure and perceive time – how people view the same period through different ends of the telescope. April 26 begins the last 1,000 days of the Bush presidency.
Conservatives will take the Schahriah view. But a majority of Americans now take that of Scheherazade.
The war in Iraq has done that. January 20, 2009 – inauguration day – will be the 2136th day of the war, or so Bush himself has predicted. Our bring-it-on president brought that on us, and now time has turned cruel for the loved ones of those who died there. Bush supporters, like George Will and William F. Buckley Jr., now see the adventure as a tragic mistake.
Those who can’t stand Bush had a glimmer of hope after Sept. 11 that the world would rally behind us, and for awhile it did. But that hope – through incompetence, miscalculation and hubris – has been all but dashed in the 1,684 days since.
Hobbled by scandal and an empty political purse, Bush may well slouch towards the end of his term – once the 2006 elections have been put behind him anyway. Short of starting a nuclear war over Iran, how much worse can it get? Oh, yeah.
Anxiety over this administration’s inability to cope with such challenges is what threatens to make time crawl over the next thousand days. This is, after all, a president who doesn’t admit mistakes, and therefore it’s impossible to know if he has learned anything from them. Other people’s lives are pawns on Bush’s chessboard, sacrificed freely for Karl Rove’s dream of a permanent Republican majority.
But time mocks permanence, in geology or politics. Witness that most Americans distrust George Bush even on the president’s former strong suit of national security.
That is why for a majority of Americans, close to 60 percent most days, time has slowed. Each day they await news of some new scandal, massacre, or foreign demonstration adding another country to the list of where Americans are no longer welcome. Each day of the Bush presidency the world has gotten smaller, slower, warmer, and more dangerous, thanks to thousands of mistakes.
Condoleeza Rice was right about that, but she was wrong that they were merely tactical diplomatic and battlefield errors. The biggest mistakes were in the ideas – the arrogance of Donald Rumsfeld’s go-it-alone worldview, the pandering to the rich, the shunting of sacrifice – both of lives and prosperity – onto the poor.
I am tired of war, tired of a cynical administration determined to have its way at home and abroad, tired of the secrecy and the spying and the lies and the ruined lives. Most of all, I am tired, like Scheherazade, of the nightmare of making up a new story each day to make life more bearable. That is what many of us have had to do for the 1,919 days since Jan. 20, 2001.
For the next thousand days I am going to try to find ways to make time speed up. The key, in the words of Mother Jones, is to pray for the dead and work like hell for the living. The 2006 elections can make a statement: that this president too will pass. With hard work some of the damage inflicted by George W. Bush – to our international relations, to our environment, to our debt-ridden economy – can be undone.
On Jan. 20, 2009 we will welcome a new president, and no matter who that is, he or she will be an improvement. To paraphrase Pres. Gerald Ford at his swearing in on Aug. 9, 1974, following President Nixon’s resignation: Our long national nightmare will then be over.
