I’ve been reading Glenn Greenwald’s new book,
A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency. As you might expect, it’s a mighty depressing read.

Salon contributor Greenwald’s thesis is evident from his title:

• Greenwald believes the whole BushCo machine is run by a cabal of pompous authoritarian dweebs suffering from delusions of Godhood. These dudes n’ dudettes have cynically manipulated politics, the media, and the whole social zeitgeist for their own collective power/money trip.
• One of their principal tools has been to spread fear–fear of the unknown, fear of the stranger, fear of the foreigner, fear of the brown-skinned, fear of what conservative-bashing liberals call “teh gay,” fear of the intellectual, fear of the different.
• In a related tactic, they’ve positioned themselves, at least in their own minds, as the guardians and sole assayers of all that is Truly Good. Anyone who dares to differ from or disagree with the BushCo line is, if not directly Evil, then at least Evil’s co-dependent, hence deserving of the most virulent insults and smackdowns.Everything that’s gone so titanically wrong in the Administration, and in the country and the world, is either a direct result of this mentality or has been markedly worsened by it.

That’s all fine and scandalous as far as it goes.

And it fits something I once wrote in an essay in which I attempted to become the next Robert Fulghum: “The really evil people don’t say ‘I’m evil.’ They say ‘I’m so completely Good, I can do evil things and it’s OK.”
But how accurate is Greenwald’s depiction?

What if the Bushies (or at least some of them, some of the time) aren’t really that inflexibly bull-headed?

What if some of ’em know they’ve been behaving like SOBs and con artists? What if they privately relish in this behavior, in a bad-boy “ain’t I a stinker?” way?

It wouldn’t change the horrible mess the Bushies have made of our economy, our ecology, and our Constitution.

But it would change history’s judgment.

And besides, as I’ve said before, demonizing The Other isn’t just something “Those People” do.

Just look at the comic strips This Modern World and Get Your War On, which conflate anti-war and anti-Bush protest with the most prejudiced hipster square-bashing, as if all short-haired necktie wearers were reactionary neocons and vice versa.

In reality, there are many “nerds against nukes,” and more than a few right-wingers with hip aspirations of one sort or another (fundamentalist punk bands, metrosexual CEOs, etc.).

America can’t defeat the influence of brutal intolerance by imposing it on our own people.

And the left can’t win over America’s hearts and minds if it practices its own reverse prejudices.