Legacy

I actually feel sorry for George Bush.  I know, he stole the election in 2000, got away with it again in 2004, started two wars based on lies, allowed the financial inmates to run the asylum and generally neglected everything a real President should pay attention to.  Make no mistake, we can’t forgive him for that, and we can’t ever forget or it’ll happen again.
   But, seriously, didn’t you feel just the slightest bit sorry for him during the last three months of 2008?
   I did.  As the economy grew worse, and as the truth about just how bad off we had it became clear, you could see his transformation.  He went from a smirking, proud, vain peacock to a troubled man carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders.  No more smiles, no more aggressively ignorant ramblings.  And this was in the prime of his lame duck period, when he should have been strutting like Tony Manero at the beginning of Saturday Night Fever.
   But he wasn’t strutting.  Because he knew that the debacle the American economy had become would be his legacy, he knew he’d be remembered for the impotence and mismanagement of the last six months of his office, not for the self-aggrandizement and hubris of the prior seven years.  He’d tried so hard to make a name for himself, to cement his place in history as a do-er – as a decider – but it just wasn’t meant to be.  George Bush’s legacy is to be remembered as the most corrupt, most incompetent President ever, a man who squandered the economic and military might of the United States.  He stood revealed as what he was, the frat-boy President, unequal to the task of governing and unable to do anything but watch as his crony appointees rode the economy down the toilet like the stinking turd it was.  You could see it in his face that October, November, and December, the realization that he’d been revealed as the fraud everyone suspected he was, an emperor with no clothes, a credulous marionette to corrupt puppet masters.
   As much as I despised his policies and everything his administration stood for, no man should have to endure that kind of soul-wrenching realization in full view of the entire world.  Of course, no man had failed so spectacularly or in such a public fashion either.  But still…
   It makes me wonder what my legacy will be.  Right now I’m pretty sure there isn’t one, except for all these ramblings on this blog, which, I’ll admit, does not have a wide readership.*  What is any man’s legacy, really?  How long past his death will the average person be remembered?  Ten years?  Thirty?  Who do we remember from the past?  Why do we remember them?
   Or are those perhaps the wrong questions?  Being remembered by your descendants is kind of the first form of reality TV, after all.  We only remember the bad ones.  Wouldn’t it be better to create something good, something that makes the lives of others just the smallest measure more bearable?  Shouldn’t your legacy be a contribution to society, whether your name is ever attached to it or not?
  I don't know... maybe I'll build Stonehenge in the backyard, or maybe I'll write an epic poem that will be passed down for thousands of years.  Maybe I'll try to make my corner of the world a little bit better, and not worry about anything else.  We'll see.


*  Except in Russia, oddly enough.  Привет, друзья!