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So DU has been around for 10 years now. God damn we are getting old.
I haven't been here since the *very* beginning; the earliest thing of mine that I can find that was posted here was from July of 2001. At first, I didn't spend much time in the forums; I saw DU as an outlet for all the writing I couldn't stop myself from doing about how bad things were. So when I wrote up a particularly long thing I would submit it to EarlG's email address and it would either go up on the front page eventually or it wouldn't. As I spent more time on the site I began getting into conversations with people and eventually people started to recognize me when I showed up, and then it started to feel like home.
Skinner talked in his interview about how much DU has changed since the 2008 election. It has changed--a lot--and so has the country. In fact, as I was going over some of my old journals and columns and whatnot, I was really shocked to see just how much I had forgotten about how bad things really were during Bush's presidency.
For instance, here is a partial list of individual Republican politicians or political operatives who were involved in what at the time seemed like major scandals during those years. See how many you can even remember:
Alberto Gonzales
Porter Goss
Jack Abramoff
Mark Foley
Jeff Gannon
"Scooter" Libby
For so long we waited for the scandal that would FINALLY reveal the corruption at the heart of that regime to all and sundry...and it never happened. Remember how eagerly we all awaited Fitzmas? Do you even remember what Fitzmas was?
No, the scandals never led to the grand juries and the impeachments and the jail time that so many of us were really hoping for. And yet, all the same, the exposure did happen: by the time Bush left office, all the shit that we'd always known about him and his cronies had been verified many times over in the national media. It's just they never got busted for it. They were instead allowed to slink ignominiously off-camera. You barely ever hear from George W. Bush now. Cheney haunted the margins for a while but even he has disappeared.
It's so weird to see how huge a part of my life George W. and his maelstrom of destruction were while he was in office...and how fast, and how completely, I and a lot of his other erstwhile subjects seem to have forgotten what it was like to live with him.
It's clear, for instance, from a lot of the posts I was looking at that I really did believe for a while that we might never have another real election in this country--that they had gotten so powerful that they had engineered permanent one-party rule. YOu can look at what's going on now and say, well, it is one part rule because the Democrats are also owned by the corporations...but that's very different from what I was worrying about. It really felt, for a really long time, as if we were living under a fascist regime. Who knows, maybe we were. It's just that it was a phenomenally clumsy and STUPID fascist regime, and that eventually became so apparent that it turned out to be possible to turn the tables on them after all.
And the years I spent following all the news I could find coming out of the Iraq war, and just getting sick to my stomach over and over again. I wrote up a whole journal entry on a massacre of civilians at a place called Haditha...I had forgotten that ever happened. The razing of Fallujah I remember. Now, I hear the reports about who got killed by what bomb there today, and it's like it doesn't even register. I hated that war so much--even before it got started. But as bad as I thought it was going to be when I was protesting it before it broke out...it was SO UNIMAGINABLY MUCH MORE WORSE once it actually started to happen. I eventually had to stop trying to keep up with it. My writing about it didn't make any material difference and it certainly didn't seem as important as keeping up with PJ was.
I'm not as active here as I used to be. But DU is still incredibly valuable to me--not just as a community but as an archive. It's a record of the first crazy decade of the 21st century, and not just of the events but of the feelings and perceptions they inspired in us. It really matters to me to be able to look back at all that stuff and realize how much we've all lived through, and how it's all probably still inside us somewhere.
The Giffords shooting, for instance. For all the talk about Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck and the new right wing voices and whatnot, I think people--including, until recently, me--have forgotten that before their stars ascended the heavens we had eight years of the Bush presidency working overtime to make violence something that so pervasively saturated American public discourse that people would stop noticing that they were bathing in it. In Bush's public comments about America's adversaries, for example, he often reveled in fantasies of assassination, and chortled over assassinations that had actually happened. Now, this was all in the context of assassinating hostile foreigners...but still, he made it OK to fantasize in public about assassination as a solution to ideological conflict. All that "wanted dead or alive" bullshit. And Bush, remember pioneered the "Bush doctrine" of preemptive war, which is basically the doctrine of shooting first and asking questions later or maybe never. They were the ones who made torture patriotic, and who made human life cheap not just here but around the globe. They were the ones after us 24/7 to idolize "the troops" and all their weapons. And...oh yeah. You remember? That time Cheney shot his friend in the face and it was two days before anyone else heard about it? Great Daily Show material that arose from all that but...really. Years later, you still have to stop and think about that incident and ask yourself: WTF? W T F? W, by God, W T F?
Anyway. What a crazy fucking time that was. A time of real danger, a time when we didn't really know for sure that America was going to survive this "presidency." And I'm really glad I had DU to go to during that crazy time--especially in the early years, when only lunatics like us realized that this Bush guy was Really Extremely Very Bad For Us.
The problem of how to make things better now that there's a Democrat in the White House is complex and perhaps more demoralizing and difficult to solve. Maybe that's why I don't post here as much as I used to. But damn, I would not wish those first 8 years back. Except for the community I found here on DU.
I will always remember going to Khephra's funeral. It was the first time I met other DUers in person; first and only, now that I think about it. DU, in addition to being a "liberal website" or whatever we are, was a place that welcomed the whole person. Out of the tens of thousands of people here, individuals somehow managed to find each other and to forge real connections. It was unbelievably touching to see all that materialize in that funeral home in Indiana. Khephra was a huge loss to this place but we were all right about one thing--his legacy survives. All the stuff he built here on DU is still standing, and still growing. And so are we all, each of us adding our little strand to whatever it is that we're weaving.
It gets ugly in here sometimes; perhaps more often now than it did during the crisis years. But for what this place meant to me then, I will always love DU. For those of you who were here for the beginning, thanks for helping me survive all that, and congratulations on making it through yourself. For those who have joined since 2008, welcome aboard. It's a good place. It is the kind of place that cannot be made in a day or a year. It is a real community, and it matters. I hope it will be good to you like it was to me all those years.
Happy birthday, DU,
The Plaid Adder
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