A Geeky Side of Bush's Legacy that Must Be Overcome

Part of the project of climbing out of the deep, deep pit George W. Bush tossed our nation into has a geeky quality. We need to learn to stop using computers to lie to ourselves.

You don't need me to point out the Bush years were poisoned by illusions. We loan-sharked ourselves, pretended New Orleans was dry, and invaded the wrong country.

But take a moment to notice how we all succumbed to the process of wasting the precious time we have on this Earth in order to enter stultifying lies into computers in order to make Bush's illusions seem real.

During the Bush years a great many Americans -- perhaps most -- and in every walk of life spent an astounding amount of time entering phony data into information systems in an attempt to enforce some illusion or another declared from above. Every era has its illusions, of course, but the Bush years brought an unprecedented level of tedium to the process of illusion coaching.

One thing that was weird about the Bush era was the ritualistic "make work" quality of the tedium everyone had to endure. For example, Chief Financial Officers reshaped companies to generate mountains of hard disks filled with Sarbanes-Oxley documentation, while at the same time buying up preposterous mortgage-backed securities, which resided within a monstrous underworld of hard disks containing undisclosed, esoteric contracts. In the old days, executives with sticky fingers would have just committed breezy malfeasance.

Similarly, military and political figures laid out an intensely detailed brief for the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. (Fooled me, by the way... ) In the old days, someone would have just fabricated a provocation, as happened at the start of our presence in Viet Nam. I am not saying one wrong way of getting into a war is worse than another. But how did Bush get us all to buy in to his obsession with a phony-work ethic? Why all the tedium?

One possibility is that it's the closest approximation to a work ethic that W could imagine, given his privileged background. Another, more optimistic, theory is that at least putting effort into pretending to pay attention is a positive evolutionary step. Under that theory, faking evidence IS a little better than faking a provocation.

Americans were coached to fill out forms to get mortgages that would blow up in their faces a few years later. In the late Clinton years, by contrast, Americans were able to inflate the dot com bubble with the light touch of online day trading. The dot com bubble might have been ridiculous, but it wasn't tedious and time consuming to inflate. During the Bush years, we had to pretend to be working very hard to inflate our bubble.

The pattern repeated everywhere, at every level. Schoolteachers during the Bush years were forced to teach to the test to create the illusory documentation of "no child left behind." All the teachers I know feel they are doing a less authentic job, creating an illusion of education. Similarly, NASA scientists had little choice for a while but to create doomed research proposals as if they were part of an illusory mission to Mars. Doctors have been spending a preposterous portion of their time on paperwork wars with insurance companies. These companies attempt to get the doctors to enter data into the system that enforce the illusion that each patient only needs a predetermined level of care.

Our hard work to create illusions in the Bush years didn't amount to much. What a waste of time! In each case above, the reality would have been preferable to the illusion.

The Bush White House put far more effort into responding to the illusion generated by the tedious fake documentation (invading Iraq), than to a horrific, genuine provocation (9/11.) We chose the worse of two evils, when the lesser happened to be the truth. 9/11 was awful. (I was there, by the WTC.) But an attack from Iraq with weapons of mass destruction might have been worse. But it was never in the cards, as it happens.

The pattern repeats in each case: Making informed investments makes more money than buying toxic debt. Getting people into plausible mortgages generates more profits, taxes, and a wealthier populace than getting them into traps. Treating a patient when needed costs less than delaying treatment until there's an emergency.

Bush, and by extension, the nation he governed, did not live in denial, but in anti-denial. He preferred the worse case, because that means there would be more forms to make everyone fill out.

The Bush years have been like a ritual performed by a tribe that believes that whatever is the most tedious must be the most real.

Comments

[RRG64]

Haven't you heard it's a battle of words
The poster bearer cried
----

Us and Them

[Radarman]

Sarbanes-Oxley, wasn't that named after its' sponsors Senator Paul Sarbanes (D-MD) and Representative Michael G. Oxley (R-OH)? The bill was passed by the House by a vote of 334-90 and by the Senate 99-0. This means it was not just make work forced on us by Bush, it was introduced by a Democrat, and passed almost unanimously by both parties. You seem to be writing about the spin we suffered at Bush's hands by spinning the facts yourself.

[insanityfollows]

I appreciate the dark humor of this post. I will say, however, that the last 4 years especially have also seen the backlash that took on a new life because of the internet. Obama's campaign flourished because of the internet. Fact checking and debate took on a new life because of the internet. So, while what you say is true, there were a lot of keyboards out there, including mine, that seriously worked the other side of midnight, and I think that phenomena has been part and parcel in bringing down the GOP/Rove machine, and putting Obama (truly the right man at the right time) in office. I think computers have changed forever the debate and the nature of open debate in this country.

[lovetoread]

i feel like people are already scrutinizing obama in detail and he isnt presidnet yet

if only people payed this much attention to the bush-cheney admin -- would we be in such a shape as we are now?

i only wish i had a memorized list that i could graciously drop at any moment---billions increase in deficit spending compared to 2000, the massive increase in government --when the stock market dropped this week-- how many poeple said "this is what happens when you elect a democrat"== what BS!! the week we find out another 200K jobs vanish

it seems obama has to prove to the middle he isnt going to increase government--not going to increase taxes--what a joke when the prior repub and repub congress did BOTH!!!

i want a government truly interested in increasing government efficiency --we have to acknowledge that government actually exists (unlike concervatives who renounce it then ignore it)-- and the only way to make it better is to discuss it and increase/enhance its ability to delliver what needs to be deliverred to the people--we can only do this by maintaining awareness and vigilance

[aslinged]

Does this kind of article--stretching the word--help with the ladies in SF or what?

You're supposedly a genius right? And you believe filling up more space with this utterly superfluous, near neutral commentary on fake work is actually of some value, somewhere?

Dude, how bout you use your brain to calculate the possibility of Obama actually pulling the troops?

Or canceling the Patriot Act?

[Yermammy]

It used to be called "baffle them with bull sh#t". I guess excess paperwork discourages people to find the truth.
Dennis Kucinich has a lot of paper work. 35 Articles worth. And it isn't bull sh#t.
Until we rectify this, we can't go forward.
Impeachment for Bush and Cheney is required.

[bgoodric]

I agree, Mr. Lanier. And yet the real the problem isn't the tedious fake documentation itself. That's a clever strategy designed to 1) slow down the opposition, which must then waste all that valuable time reading it and disproving it, and 2) distract those who don't yet know better. (Funny, isn't it, that the same right-wingers who decry "experts" are so happy to obfuscate with bad data?) In each of the cases you mention at the end, the bad debt buyers, the skanky mortgage brokers, the make-a-quick buck haphazard medical system, there are people who benefit in the short term and manage to pass the deal on before it blows up in the long term, or to externalize the costs, or avoid the consequences in some other way. The wealth keeps drifting upwards in each complicated con game. Blame those who benefit most from this corrupt version of corporate capitalism. They're the real problem.

[psomerset]

As an expert in VR, you seem to be seeing all of this activity as virtual activities. I do agree, nevertheless, that we would be much better off just doing what needs to be done rather than just pretending to do it. Do insurance companies really believe that doctors are making work for themselves by doing unnecessary work? And that they propose to fix that by injecting artificial layers of bureaucracy that adds back all the costs they claim to save. W/r to education, the Bush admin believes that tests are the best way to measure academic effectiveness, but the presence of the tests forces teachers to teach to the test with the result that the kids are learning by rote instead of learning to think.

[RumiSouth]

Not to mention that teaching kids to the test means that the test is doing the teaching -- and in many cases, that means enormous gaps are deliberately created in the knowledge of our students.

During a recent parent-teacher conference, I was dismayed to learn that my daughter's high school biology teacher is a creationist. But her excuse for leaving evolution out of the course was that no questions about natural selection appear on the state graduation exam. IOW, my state has decided to keep children ignorant of the basic structure of all biological science by leaving it off the test, ergo keeping it out of the courses.

[TRYKER]

That was the whole purpose of NCLB, to dumb down the people, the easier to control them and get cheap labor and more prisoners.

[Mike Bonifer - Huffpost Blogger]

Great post, Jaron. Your insight is dead-on. I think one of the biggest differences between Bush and Obama is not just the big difference in their work ethic, but in how they see the act of work itself.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-bonifer/getting-to-work_b_141614.html

[JustAxin]

I'd say the biggest difference is in their Leadership capabilities.