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Censorship and Silence in the Bush years
Dec. 5th, 2018 07:30 amToday is apparently an official National Day of Mourning for George HW Bush, the US's 41st President, who died last week at the age of 94. I prefer to observe it more as a day of remembrance, as I don't feel any particular urge to mourn.
Smack in the middle of the Trump regime, scrolling through my social media feeds, I've seen some half-serious fits of nostalgia about a time when our country was being run by an actual statesman—any actual statesman—rather than a childish, semi-literate tyrant with no impulse control. That reaction is understandable, but we need to fight it. Reagan, Bush, Cheney, Bush, Rove, Helms, and their ilk may have known better how to do what they wanted to do than Trump does, and they may have (sometimes) been more diplomatic in their public statements, but what they were doing was still egregious, and it was still egregious in ways that led directly to where we are now. Trump couldn't have parlayed race-baiting, misogynist, homophobic, anti-press nationalism into a presidential bid if he hadn't been standing on the shoulders of decades of activism by the Christian Right. And Bush Senior was every bit a part of that.
It's overwhelming to summarize an entire presidential administration, and I'm not going to try. Since the topic of censorship is on all our minds due to Tumblr's adults-only ban, let's just look at a few specific lowlights for free and effectual speech during the Bush administration:
( Muzzling of the press during Desert Storm )
( Anti-Abortion Global & Domestic Gag Rules )
( Attempts to Censor Flag-Burning as Protected Speech )
( Lip Service and a 'Kinder, Gentler Indifference' to AIDS )
Even through the lens of silence and censorship, there's so much more I could write about. In particular, I'd have liked to get into the increased funding under the Bush administration for so-called abstinence-only sex education, which is not sex education at all but fear-mongering obfuscation whose ineffectualness at reducing teen pregnancy has been proven time and again, and which muzzles any sexuality education in schools that addresses safer sex practices or sexual pleasure.
But I'm already half an hour late to work, so I'll just say: the lasting legacy of the Bush/Reagan years, a legacy with which we are currently living, is one of silence and oppression. If we're devoting a day to the memory of George HW Bush, let's speak true of the dead.
Smack in the middle of the Trump regime, scrolling through my social media feeds, I've seen some half-serious fits of nostalgia about a time when our country was being run by an actual statesman—any actual statesman—rather than a childish, semi-literate tyrant with no impulse control. That reaction is understandable, but we need to fight it. Reagan, Bush, Cheney, Bush, Rove, Helms, and their ilk may have known better how to do what they wanted to do than Trump does, and they may have (sometimes) been more diplomatic in their public statements, but what they were doing was still egregious, and it was still egregious in ways that led directly to where we are now. Trump couldn't have parlayed race-baiting, misogynist, homophobic, anti-press nationalism into a presidential bid if he hadn't been standing on the shoulders of decades of activism by the Christian Right. And Bush Senior was every bit a part of that.
It's overwhelming to summarize an entire presidential administration, and I'm not going to try. Since the topic of censorship is on all our minds due to Tumblr's adults-only ban, let's just look at a few specific lowlights for free and effectual speech during the Bush administration:
( Muzzling of the press during Desert Storm )
( Anti-Abortion Global & Domestic Gag Rules )
( Attempts to Censor Flag-Burning as Protected Speech )
( Lip Service and a 'Kinder, Gentler Indifference' to AIDS )
Even through the lens of silence and censorship, there's so much more I could write about. In particular, I'd have liked to get into the increased funding under the Bush administration for so-called abstinence-only sex education, which is not sex education at all but fear-mongering obfuscation whose ineffectualness at reducing teen pregnancy has been proven time and again, and which muzzles any sexuality education in schools that addresses safer sex practices or sexual pleasure.
But I'm already half an hour late to work, so I'll just say: the lasting legacy of the Bush/Reagan years, a legacy with which we are currently living, is one of silence and oppression. If we're devoting a day to the memory of George HW Bush, let's speak true of the dead.
