E-Mail This Article to a Friend The enemy of ideas George W. Bush and the United States of Idiocy

GEORGE W. BUSH is no mere conservative. He is a reactionary, the most backward-looking president in over 100 years, arguably in the nation’s history.

Bush favors old money — his tax policies benefit the rich who make their money from dividends rather than those who make their money growing companies; old industries — he protects steel but hamstrings stem-cell research; old practices — the 19th-century trend toward monopoly, whose consolidation, liquidation, and loss of jobs hurts workers and enriches corporate chieftains; and he embraces old ideas — as many as 80 percent of his core constituency of evangelical Christians believe that Armageddon, the violent end of the world that will precede the rapture of salvation for those born again, is close at hand.

Educated at Andover, Yale, and Harvard Business School, Bush represents the fourth generation of economic privilege. His father was president, his Wall Street grandfather a US senator, and one of his brothers is governor of Florida. The family fortunes are largely the result of crony capitalism: inside deals among financiers and energy companies and arms dealers and professional baseball for spice, many of whom have or had ties to the intelligence community and the national-security establishment. Yet Bush styles himself an " anti-elitist, " which might be ironic if it weren’t for the magnitude of the lie.

In reality, Bush is anti-intellectual, and not in the populist sense of middle Americans who distrust pointy-headed professors from the Kremlin on the Charles or the Peking on the Pacific social-engineering their lives. That was Nixon’s, Reagan’s, and his father’s game. No, ideas and culture threaten the shrink-wrapped world of preference and power that is the domain of his merry band of political malefactors. His cronies seek a docile world order so they can go about their task of promoting the prosperity of the few upon the backs of the many.

Bush is well on his way to establishing a system of what can only be called — if only 51 percent of the country would stop to think about it — thought control. Ideas, music, and images from abroad are suspect. Including the idea that couples of the same sex should be able to marry — which, according to Bush, threatens the marrow of the republic when the only social denominator more prevalent than marriage and family is divorce. Go figure.

There are very real negative economic consequences to this fear of ideas and suspicion of foreign culture. Muscle and machines once powered the growth of prosperity. Today, ideas do that. The vibrancy of what Richard Florida, one of those pesky professors, has called " the creative class " is one of the best indicators of future growth and well-being. A key indicator of that, enrollment by foreign students in American graduate schools, is falling. Restrictive immigration policies and a scorn for ideas at the highest level are making our nation uncongenial to people who work with their brains. Biomedical companies and research laboratories are emigrating to South Korea and England, to cite just two instances, because the climate for making practical discoveries that might arrest, treat, or cure conditions such Alzheimer’s and ALS are more appealing. The world leader in adding creatively driven jobs? Ireland. The US holds a huge lead in the number of such jobs, but this very small nation is adding them at a rate that far outstrips our own. These details, if not the larger picture, are disturbing.

Equally disturbing, but harder to calculate, is the cost of the larger crackdown on culture from abroad. Groups as diverse as the Peking Opera Company of Jilin, which had extensive concerts scheduled, and a quintet of Grammy-nominated Cuban musicians seeking to attend the Los Angeles ceremonies were denied visas. (The beloved and admired 76-year-old singer from the Buena Vista Social Club was among them.) And that’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the suppression of every kind of US-Cuban interaction.

The cost and red tape encountered by foreign artists seeking to perform or exhibit here has grown to the point that various artists from England, France, Germany, Japan, Argentina, and Denmark have all canceled plans to tour in the US. The government has even gone so far as to prohibit the editing of work from Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Sudan, and North Korea, because that would be aiding and abetting our enemies in the war on terrorism. Who’s fighting back? That notoriously subversive organization the American Chemical Society, which rightly holds that this is not only counterproductive, but foolish and dangerous.

All praise to the chemists. And shame on George W. Bush, president of the United States of Idiocy.

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