It is a long-standing tradition in the U.S. that our fearless leaders build their own Presidential Libraries after their time in office is over. These are not libraries in the traditional sense of being repositories of books that people can check out and read, but are instead a vast collection of Presidential documents and historical materials that no one in their right mind would want to check out, even if they were allowed to. The first President to create a library to house his Presidential papers and historical materials was Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1939 and Presidents have been doing it ever since, in large part because the government foots the bill for these architectural representations of egotism.
The reason that I bring up the Presidential library is that our current Commander-in-Chief will be leaving office soon, which means that in 195 days or so President Bush will be given loads of cash to go out and build his own library. It almost goes without saying that this is a patently silly idea as President Bush is very much opposed to reading documents of any kind and not fond of writing them either. As for his cabinet, they have a tricky little habit of “misplacing” or deleting documents that incriminate them in any wrongdoing, which leaves very little to put into a Presidential library. What we would end up with is a 150,000 square foot library holding about a hundred or so e-mails from Bush to various staff members about how he was going down to Crawford for the weekend and archived video clips of him doing African Tribal Dances on goodwill missions.
An enterprising group of young men and women calling themselves The Presidential Memorial Committee of San Francisco have come up with a rather ingenious solution. They have decided it would only be appropriate to change the name of the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant to The George W Bush Sewage Plant. So far, the group has collected over 12,000 signatures to have the initiative put on the ballot in the Bay Area for this year’s elections. Petition organizer Brian McConnell told reporters that, “In President Bush’s case, we think that we will be cleaning up a substantial mess for the next 10 or 20 years. The sewage treatment facility’s job is to clean up a mess, so we think it’s a fitting tribute.”
This idea of creating unflattering memorials for President Bush to reflect his time in office, while comic in nature, might actually lead to the first productive thing to come out of the Bush presidency, even though it would come after he had left office. I like the Committee’s initiative and sense of irony, but I think they’ve only touched the tip of the memorial iceberg. I propose that we spend the money that would have been used by President Bush on his Presidential library–$165 million based on what Ex-President Clinton spent in 2004–to aide some of the people that he has fucked over in his eight years in office.
Enter The George W. Bush Presidential Library of Casualties. This facility would be the size of a Presidential library, about 150,000 square feet (based again on Ex-President Clinton’s library), and would be used to help every man, woman, and child that was directly hurt by President Bush’s policies. The 2,000+ Homeless Iraq and Afghanistan War Veterans would be housed there. Any Veteran injured, either physically or mentally, in those wars will get treatment there which VA medical centers like Walter Reed failed to provide. And, the countless thousands whose lives were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina and by FEMA’s sheer ineptitude will receive all the monetary reimbursement and proper housing that these funds can provide. The Library of Casualties would use every penny of that $165 million to try and help right the wrongs of the past eight years. President Bush might be upset about the usage of his name on sewage plant, but the fallout from his presidency should be far more embarrassing.
