MAGAZINE REVIEWS

Bush-whacking

by Seth Rogovoy

(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., July 23, 1999) - I'm still not convinced that George W. Bush is not scoring so high in opinion polls because people are mistaking him for his father, the ex-president, and are not simply responding positively to his name out of some sort of unconscious nostalgic reflex. But apparently even if that is so, it is not going to matter.

Short of some profoundly disturbing campaign-trail gaffe or revelation about his past (which would have to be felonious in intent in order to lose him votes, things being as they are these days), Bush will be the Republican nominee for president next year, and one who looks to be a strong contender for the White House.

Rolling Stone

Journalists have hardly had time to catch up with Bush the younger. Early out of the starting gate is Rolling Stone, that once-venerable magazine of the counterculture, and thus I turned with relish to "All Hat, No Cattle," the profile of Bush in the Aug. 5 issue by Paul Alexander.

Alexander, as it turns out, is no Hunter S. Thompson (now there's an assignment begging to happen - Rolling Stone should turn Thompson loose on Bush). His portrait of the would-be president is quite conventional, and in keeping with Rolling Stone's current format as the People Magazine of pop culture, affords Bush a level of credibility and respect his own story shows he hasn't yet earned on his own merit.

But that is precisely the theme of the story - how Bush has gone cakewalking through life without earning any achievement on his own.

In spite of his poor grades in prep school, Bush attended to Yale University, where we are expected to believe he was admitted not through any favor to his alumnus father. (Then what was it, his stint as head cheerleader in high school that made up for his undistinguished academic record?)

At Yale, George majored in history - that well known redoubt of jocks (I know whereof I speak because I majored in history and was one of the few non-athletes in my classes) - but according to those who knew him then, he was a mischievous, party-loving fraternity brother right out of "Animal House."

After graduation, Bush dodged the Vietnam-era draft by joining the National Guard - again with the debatable assistance of his then-congressman father (in contrast to Al Gore, who enlisted). Bush spent his Guard years living in a "singles" apartment - kind of a co-ed fraternity house, where he partied hard when he wasn't tooling around Houston in flashy cars. By 1976, when he was 27, he was such a pathetic loser that on the way home from a drinking binge with his 15-year-old brother he smashed into the neighbor's trash cans. When he got home, big daddy Bush was there waiting to bawl him out.

Finished with Guard duty, young Bush was rejected from the University of Texas Law School, but mysteriously accepted at the Harvard Business School. By age 30, with two Ivy League degrees attained by the skin of his teeth (and the weight of his family name), Bush was bumming around the prosperous Texas oil community, looking for something to do with his life. With no real work experience and an utter lack of purpose to his existence, he did what came naturally - he ran for Congress in 1978. He lost - daddy's money couldn't buy him the office, and then embarked on a business career distinguished by utter failure and perennial bailout by taxpayers and daddy's friends and associates.

Alexander quotes a Republican historian to the effect that Bush's lust for the presidency is "Freudian" or "Shakespearean," and Alexander says that Bush wants to be president because "it will bring him not just more power and prestige but also personal vindication…He will finally be able to say that he is just as successful as his father."

Does anyone need more reason enough to vote for him?

Washington Monthly

Since the major-party nominees have already been determined a year in advance of the conventions at which delegates will go through the meaningless motions of voting for their parties' standard-bearers, it is time to focus on the race for the vice-presidency.

In the July/August issue of the Washington Monthly, editor Alexandra Starr handicaps "The Running Mates." Starr calls Evan Bayh, Bill Richardson and Zell Miller the favorites to share the Democratic ticket with Al Gore, but finds fault with each of them, as well as a handful of "longer shots," including Diane Feinstein, Joe Lieberman and Bill Bradley.

On the Republican side, presidential contenders John McCain and Elizabeth Dole both look good for the number-two spot, as does Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge. She also thinks George Pataki would be a meritorious choice, as it force the Democrats to pour resources into a state they could otherwise count on as pretty much a lock.

Mother Jones

Where is Jerry Brown now that we need him? The former California governor, space cowboy and perennial presidential candidate - the Democratic party's "Don Quixote," according to Dashka Slater's profile of Brown in the July/August issue of Mother Jones -- has resurfaced as mayor of Oakland, where he has taken on the challenge of rebuilding one of the nation's saddest cases of urban desolation.

Brown's plan to reconstruct the city begins in its downtown, where he has already made great strides in reducing crime and to which he hopes to attract 10,000 new residents, with businesses to serve them soon to follow.

Some have criticized Brown's approach, accusing him of fomenting just another case of white gentrification of a prominently Africa-American neighborhood. Brown of course denies such intentions, saying that he sees the salvation of the inner-city not in terms of skin color, but in terms of green, as in disposable cash being spent.

The same issue of Mother Jones includes must-reading in "System Failure" by Jon R. Luoma, an essay that takes a look at the possible unintended side effects of the "veritable chemical revolution" that has swept the globe in the second half of the 20th century. With 75,000 new chemical compounds having been synthesized and widely applied for purposes ranging from pesticides to plastics, the vast majority of them without being tested for the capacity to interfere with human biology, we may have unleashed an environmental scourge much worse than any our species has faced in a million years.

PCBs and dioxins are just a couple of the best-known chemicals with which we now co-exist, much to our peril. Unusual spikes in cancer rates and learning disabilities might be traced to many of these contaminants that lie hidden in many household products and in our food supply, particularly animal foods and those derived from animals.

[This column originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on July 24, 1999. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1999. All rights reserved.]