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Woman on Bush
The misogynistic nightmare of W.’s second term
BY CAITLIN SHETTERLY

LAST WEEKEND I dreamed that I was having sex with George W. Bush. I woke up and thought, "Oh my God, my father will kill me." There is no one my father hates more in the world. I’m sure my shrink would tell me this has something to do with subconsciously wanting to choose a man who is different from my father, but also being terrified that my father won’t accept him, and therefore, me. In the dream, if you’re interested, Dubya wasn’t malevolent, just sort of boring.

No shock and no awe.

Much like his inauguration, where he used the word "freedom" 27 times in 20 minutes of sound bites that reeked of religious zeal. All the while, men in cowboy hats and women in chinchilla coats and kangaroo boots sat in frigid January weather, keeping their eyes peeled for snowballs, which are apparently the biggest threat to National Security.

I don’t know, maybe my mind was on my vagina since we’re coming up on February — vagina month, ever since Eve Ensler made it such. That being the case, with Bush in the White House, I’m worried about my bush. It actually went through my brain after the dream and the inauguration, as I was chomping on an afternoon snack of marinated green pepperoncini and potato chips dipped in mayonnaise: "Oh shit, what if I’m pregnant? Would now be a good time for this to happen, when Bush and his cohorts have not yet totally eradicated abortion, so I can still do that, at least? But if I have the baby and he keeps taking away Medicaid funding and cutting health-care programs for children and making sure that only rich children have good education, then am I fucked no matter which way I go?"

Being a single mother in the land of Bush, it must be acknowledged, is many sandwiches short of a picnic.

The afternoon of the inauguration, it snowed all over the Northeast. I turned on the radio for my cat and ran outside to shovel, like Chicken Little thinking the sky might fall if I had to hear Bush’s voice. And fall it did. I was a good girl, though, and I didn’t spend one damn dime, like the e-mails from truthout.org urged. Not that I had any dimes to spend. Which is part of the problem. I can’t even afford health insurance, let alone a gynecology visit to check out my vagina and make sure the mayonnaise and chips and pickled peppers don’t mean anything beyond being bushed.

What I found myself wondering the next day — I was reading about the $40 million spent on partying when my mom called to tell me that a high-school friend of my brother’s just came home from Iraq blown to pieces because he was in an unarmored Humvee — was, does he know he’s lying? I mean, take this inaugural sentence: "In America’s ideal of freedom, the exercise of rights is ennobled by service and mercy and a heart for the weak." Oh, really? Is that what we’re doing in Iraq? Are we extending mercy to the weak by bombing them out of their misery?

Who’s weak? Weak, in my book, is a man who has to walk as if his balls are always blue and swollen huge, as if his bowlegs can’t fit around them, but who allows young, fresh-faced boys and girls to go to war without the right armor. It’s a war for oil, which, by the way, costs around $2 a gallon right now, putting most people in the Northeast into credit seizure as they try to stay warm. Weak is someone so addicted to his power that he truly might not even know he’s lying even as he does it. I’ve seen this tendency before — in an ex-boyfriend who was a drug addict and lied about even the dumbest shit because he couldn’t help it, and I was somehow supposed to feel sorry for him because he had a disease.

Weak is a woman wearing a baby-seal coat, a fox hat, and python boots, sitting beside her husband, who’s an investor in Iraqi oil. She’s listening to Dubya talk about freedom when she’s got a teenage daughter home in Texas knocked up by her high-school boyfriend, a problem they’re going to "take care of" as soon as she’s done partying in Washington. She promises her daughter over her new monogrammed ATT-cum-Cingular platinum cell phone that "Daddy will never know."

Weak are the Bush women who sit so placid and coy, their heads tipped to the side like curious cats as they listen to their paterfamilias, when they know deep down that their Bush is killing women and children in Iraq and that he has the power to own their bushes. No wonder the girls flock to the Smith Point bar in Georgetown, where they get loaded with open mouths and heads tilted upward to accept cold, slick mouthfuls of vanilla vodka that slide down an ice-luge shaped like a vagina. No wonder they swallow hard. They’re bushed. Just like the rest of us.

Caitlin Shetterly can be reached at bramhallsquare@yahoo.com


Issue Date: January 28 - February 3, 2005
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