If there was a turning point in the noughties – a moment that we can point to as the decade’s fulcrum – the gravitational mass weighing on the rubber sheet of goodness pulling it all down into the y axis of shit – then it has to be the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004.
Not because I especially hated George Bush – I hated him a normal amount – and not because of any ridiculous anti-americanism that paints George Bush as a worse leader than the tyrants and terrorists: The problem with George Bush’s unequivocal, uncontested trouncing of John Kerry was the way it just left everything feeling hopeless. Scared beat clever. Swiftboating beat arguing. Religion beat, well… pretend religion. It was almost as if The West Wing wasn’t an accurate reflection of reality – a notion I refuse to entertain.
There was nothing to cling to. No hanging chads or false consciousness – just the truth: that everybody in the world was pissed off with everybody else and that nobody cared too much to hide it.
And, just to make it worse, was the horrible realisation that lots of us had gone along with Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 and were now tainted with the same shit as the winners and consequently were unable even to enjoy the moral highground once everything started to fall apart.
We’d ignored the mawkish sentimentality, logical contortions and crude demagoguery. We’d plugged it, discussed it, even paid money to see it. We’d sat back and taken it while Michael Moore argued that it was awful that black people were being sent to die in a war while simultaneously arguing that more troops needed to be sent to die in a war. We’d lapped up the carefully worded innuendos about the ‘white house’ arranging for members of the Bin Laden family to be flown out of the US after 9/11, even though Richard Clarke had taken sole responsibility for the 9/20 flight before the film went on general release.
We’d watched this bit, where, without captions to tell you who we’re actually looking at and with only the most cursory, barely connected nod to ‘human rights’ at the end – we are shown an extended pop video of White house staff and Bush family members standing next to people who look foreign and scary.
Are we supposed to recognise all these carry on up the khyber-style Arabs? Which ones are the ones that gave the money? Which ones did the human rights abuses? It doesn’t make a blind bit of difference – this is just an appeal to racism that can barely even be bothered to dress itself up as anything else – and we all lay back and took it.
We nodded along with slackjawed approval as he intruded on people’s grief, presented pre-war Iraq as a happy land of swingsets and hobbits, used every tabloid trick imaginable to manipulate us… and it didn’t even fucking work.
If it had done what it was supposed to – if it had reached a large enough audience of middle ground voters to swing the election – then it would still have been a horrible, greetings card mockery of an argument but at least it wouldn’t have mattered. As it was, Bush got re-elected anyway, and the Limbaughs and Hannitys and Coulters could walk around with a new air of smugness, happy in the knowledge that, however much you lower the bar, there will always be some fat fucker willing to limbo under it.
The noughties saw us forget that our enemy’s enemies are not necessarily our friends. It’s a lesson we should try to remember.
