[Deraj]

So, last night I'm sitting home alone. After watching some television for a while (News Hour and some C-Span) it occurs to me that I need to read a new book. So I go to the shelf of books I have never read. Why are they there? Forget the why, I don't even know how most of them got there. Gifts? Thrift store purchases? Who knows.

Anyway, my eyes settled on The Politician: The Life and Times of Lyndon Johnson by Ronnie Dugger, former editor and publisher of the Texas Observer - a paper not too friendly to the Texan president. The jacket says Mr. Dugger was able to spend endless hours interviewing Johnson over the course of his presidency, though, because "while Lyndon Johnson often reviled his critics, he respected the seroius ones and spent a lot of time and effort trying to win them over.

Whatever. After reading through the intro and the first chapter I'm quite impressed with the author. I've been meaning to sit down and read another author's - Robert Caro's - works on LBJ for years, but have never made the time. Since everyone seems to think Caro's are the definitive work on Johnson, I didn't think I should waste my time on Mr. Dugger's. But ol' Ronnie did alright - not so much because of his treatment of LBJ but his examination of the presidency as an instution - specifically how it drives our national politics and, consequently, what he calls the "national ethos".

America, he argued, between 1931 and 1981 should be considered the Johnson Period because "Johnson, more than any of the other presidents of the time, helped generate the values and participated in and then presided over the trends that ultimately prevailed." There are some really memorable and well-crafted sentences in the book. For instance, "Our leaders have more choices than they admit or even realize and higher liability for history than they will accept when things go wrong. Expecting to be forgiven their politiccal self-interest, they do not keep enough in mind how paltry that motive is when we can all die together in a thirty-minute war."

I laughed out loud at that last sentence. My, how the world has changed since this book was written in 1981. I don't think many people think about nuclear holocaust any more - not even when considering who to consider as their next president. It doesn't mean they shouldn't. But that's just the fact. They don't.

So, where am I going with this? Why is GW in the thread title? Well, while reading this interesting book it has occurred to me that there may be far more parallels between LBJ and GW than we might readily think. It would be a mistake and completely futile, I think, to work too hard on drawing parallels between the two presidents' policies, but I think there is a convincing case to be made in the similarities in the way they think and decide and behave, and, unfortunately, in the results of their policies. In other words, both men have pushed us in the same direction.

Vietnam is obvious. What needs to be said here? Dugger seemed to think Johnson's foolishness in Vietnam was rooted in his yearnings to be like one of his long-dead relatives fighting Mexicans in frontier Texas. Ha. I don't know why it makes me laugh, but it does. Dugger does a great job producing numerous quotes from personal interviews and meetings and publich speeches in which LBJ recalled his antecedents' sacrifices at the Alamo, San Jacinto, etc. Could we say it was a cowboy mentality? I dont know. Dugger speaks of Johnson comparing the Vietnamese to his toddler grandson; "...he takes one step, then another, and then another, but it's slow; it just takes time." Sounds worryingly like our current administrations view of the Iraqi government, does it not?

Yes, today we have Iraq. As a product of what? I'll leave that for the historians decide. But I just have this feeling that in thirty years GW will be compared to LBJ more than any other President and the way in which he entered and waged war in Iraq will be couched in the same terms we use today to describe what LBJ did in Vietnam.

But it's hard to tell. After all, like Dugger says, "We are so close in among these present events, they come so thick and fast, and they recede into the past at such an accelerating rate, we are not sure what anything means...Yet we also, in this same period, feel that we here and now are participating in the re-formation, or destruction of civilization for a long time, perhaps forever."