“Where are the Bush Supporters?”

Posted on September 25, 2002 in Conservatives The Home Front

Alexandra wrote at Jennifer’s blog:

Isn’t it funny how nobody seems to have actually voted for Bush, yet, some how, he managed to become President?….The average Brit is NOT with Blair on this one, at least not any of my family memebers, friends or other relatives in the UK. Everyone is moaning, just like most Americans. They all want to know what the hell is going on. Don’t we all.

Alexandra’s sentiment seems to be “Where are these Bush supporters that we have been hearing about? Do they exist?”

I have seen them, Alexandra. They live all around me, with “God Bless America” signs skewering the turf next to their doorways.

Two devotees of the American civic religion sipped cappuchinos at a table next to the newsracks at Tully’s this afternoon. One fellow smirked as he talked about how terrorists would pop bioweapons into suitcases. He never touched the miniscule goatee that gave him a dark pit like a second mouth which he could use to accentuate his grin. By his own admission, he didn’t know much: he took Newsweek and read it through to catch up. He referred to key foreign leaders as “this Hussein guy” or “this Sharon guy”. It made him happy that Sharon had announced that if Hussein attacked Israel he would not hold back.” He brought out a pair of glasses, wiped them on his gunmetal t-shirt, raised them to his eyes to lend himself an air of authority, and then segued into a discussion about stereos and, after that, the local housing market.

I grew bored eaves-dropping on his verbal descriptions of mathematical curves and spreadsheets. The Los Angeles Times had two lead stories that interested me: an abortion of a fire that chewed the womb of the Angeles National Forest and Tony Blair’s speech to Parliament. The print edition showed pictures of a alledged bioweapons plant that could have been an oil refinery and a digitized picture of a rocket that the caption called “a Hussein Missile”. Hussein’s missile looked to be made of large pixels and I honestly wondered if it had been digitized. Blair’s evidence had not been produced by any optical camera — of that much I could be certain.

I listened in again to the two twentyish males carrying on about gizmos. The other fellow — a stubby but fit fellow — listened in awe as the self-appointed expert rattled off what were to him beautiful numbers. They got up together and ambled out the door, circling each other as they spoke of fascinating war topics which were quite scrubbed of splattered viscera and mangled bones. Only missiles as blocky as any in a video game would perish, I could imagine them thinking. This faith in the dirtiness of Hussein and the cleanliness of the upcoming war to be waged by America was what made them keen on it.