A weird person sees other freaks. Across the street, across the room. It’s a simple trick, a skill akin to spotting junkies. I know my own kind, and in so knowing, I say this: let us give current President George “Dubya” Bush a hearty fare-well. I will miss him as deeply as it is possible to miss a public figure with whom you have no personal acquaintance. I will miss him like an estranged friend.

Don’t get me wrong; this ain’t a lament for the war crimes, the torture, the criminal negligence, the incompetence, the buffoonery, the willingness to pass the buck or the petty thuggish malice. I have no illusions about Dubya’s responsibility. We spent six years pretending like Dick Cheney was the problem– but our troubles were emanations from Bush’s heart, manifestations of his rotten character.

Yet for all of his lip service towards the Right Wing, the Christians and Big Business, Dubya was Our Guy– the biggest freak to win the Presidency since Richard Nixon, a dry drunk with daddy issues and a wickedly cruel sense of humor.

For reasons I never understood, Dubya gave people flashbacks of jocks in high school– how many times was he called Frat Boy in Chief? And yet his Yale years reveal so much: frat life for Dubya appears to have been about branding emblems into human skin and leading cheers. This was never a normal man.

We suffered eight years of Clinton’s base philandering and ineptitude– the 1990s were consistently stupid but never strange. Clinton longed to be unique, to be special, but Bubba was only another Rhodes Scholar winking at his reflection in the mirror, reassuring himself that he was dead sexy. As unique as buttermilk. Nine years of Dubya has been spectacle after spectacle; two screwy elections, choking on Pretzels, falling off a Segway, a secretary in state dressed like a dominatrix, name calling, incredibly strange faces, dancing with Ricky Martin, Jenna, shoes being thrown.

The thing with the shoes; how perfect a valedictory! Yes, I understand, the shoe is an enormous Arabic insult, but still– shoes? And what other President could’ve unflappably dodged and cracked wise a minute later? Andrew Jackson? MSNBC ran this text: “PRES. BUSH FORCED TO DUCK TO AVOID SHOES THROWN BY JOURNALIST.”

Perfect Dubya.

So good-bye, George, you misfit. We’ll never see the like again.

Gore has, at this point, assured his reputation as a master of all causes true & pure and positioned himself as a force with which to be reckoned. It’s his game to lose, which is why, presumably, he’s not foolish enough to run for President. Gore’s triumph is as surprising as the complete self-destruction and perpetual humiliation which Bush will spend the rest of his life trying to live down. Frankly, in 2000, it was hard to imagine either men achieving much acclaim or ill-repute; both seemed like mediocrities running in the vacuum of an exiting Big Dog.

Bush appeared to be an idiot-savant heir apparent who was a little less racist and homophobic and classist than other men in his party and Gore was soft centre-left and incapable of campaigning. In his efforts to distance himself from any association with ideas Democratic or Clintonian, Gore was like a dog on its back, begging for the long hand of an imagined Middle America to scratch its stomach. They were, frankly, pathetic. It was inconceivable that one man would end up with a Nobel and the other would go down (at least for the next few decades) as the most unnecessary Presidential war monger in recent memory. (Shallow a defense as it is, let us remember that LBJ and Nixon inherited their idiotic conflict.)

This realization has dovetailed with my own recent thoughts about Boethius and his Wheel of Fortune. The Wheel has been hideously prostituted for television, but for centuries it had been a clever way of expressing the notion that once you’ve peaked there’s nowhere to go but down and once you’ve bottomed out you must also, inevitably, go back up. Both Gore and Bush make me think of– weirdly– Stalin. The Wheel of Fortune metaphor/image’s great flaw is that it ignores the impact of individual personality.

Which is to say, yeah, you might end up at the top of the Politburo, but how does an anonymous bureaucrat end up as an Iron Dictator who falls only upon death? How does a joke President end up destroying his reputation and the reputation of everyone who’s worked for him? And how does a guy best known for wearing too much makeup at a debate end up with a Peace Prize and the toast of the cognoscenti?

Or, to take another example of another candidate having his true nature revealed– would Gore have stood around, helplessly, as a deranged hippie was savaged by the police at one of his events?

When I first heard that Bush had defended, and in the New York Times, the branding of members of his frat, it seemed like another hilarious example of the man’s astounding ability to manipulate his public image. How could an Andover/Yalie old-boy with a Connecticut Senator (and possibly Nazi profiteer) grandfather and a former President father position himself as a Washington outsider?

Now, after Abu Ghraib and post-Guantanamo it just seems revelatory.

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