The Blood-Dimmed Tide: Tony Soprano Slouches Toward The White House To Be Reborn

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/8109

The Blood-Dimmed Tide: Tony Soprano Slouches Toward The White House To Be Reborn
by Alan Bisbort | Jun 14 2007


The Sopranos ended this week. It would be a stretch to say that the show is popular -- even for those of us who don't have cable -- because it has held a mirror up to our political landscape. But, hey, if the shoe fits, wear it.

Sometimes, popularity or not, a cultural artifact like The Sopranos defines a political era. Were I to name some of the cultural artifacts that will offer clues to the Bush era to culture historians 50 years hence, The Sopranos would top the list, followed by Survivor, Paris Hilton-Ann Coulter (separated at birth?), "new country," the Hummer, Matt Drudge, Viagra, Bill O'Reilly and tattoos.

Pitiless stupidity, in other words, has been the signature of this era. Bush has, as W.B. Yeats wrote in "The Second Coming," loosed a blood-dimmed tide and "everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned." No assessment of what has occurred since 2001 can top this line from Yeats' poem: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

Now the rude beast of Bush's legacy -- like Tony Soprano's criminal past -- slouches toward Bethlehem to be born. And, though we should be grateful beyond words that Commander Codpiece's reign is staggering toward the finish line, the next president, and generations, will be saddled with the Herculean task of sweeping out Bush's Stygian stables.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, in The Great Gatsby, also had something to say about this period of time. When he wrote this, about Tom and Daisy Buchanan, he could very well have been writing about Bush and Cheney: "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy -- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made..."

Maybe Americans will never again let such a travesty occur. Indeed, this should serve as a sort of collective cautionary tale about what happens when you don't let the people select their leader; the Supreme Court's 5-4 ruling in 2001 will go down as one of the worst.

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