George Bush’s America (or: Play That Funky Music, White Boys)

Our parents talk about where they were when they found out John F. Kennedy had been killed. We talk about where we were on 9/11. Well, I can tell you exactly where I was when it hit me that George Bush would get another four years in the White House.

It wasn’t watching the returns on election night. It wasn’t watching Kerry’s concession speech the next afternoon. I knew I would be too exhausted the day after the election to react to a Bush victory. I’d just be happy the election was over. Happy that I didn’t have to knock on any more doors. Happy that I wouldn’t have to give John Kerry anymore of my anytime minutes. Happy to get my life back.

The night of the election and the night after, I dreamt that I was still knocking on doors, still trying to get out the vote, unaware that the election was over. Me and my volunteers were like the last soldiers in the jungle, still fighting a war that had ended. Each morning I had to wake up and realize that Bush had won, all over again.

It didn’t sink in until tonight.

It was A.C.’s best friends birthday and we all went to a bar in South County.

I hate bars and I hate South County.

No offense… to bar owners.

Anyway. It was this really cheesy place, full of women whose physical adornments could be suffixed with the word “job” (dye-job, boob-job, luckily “hand-job” has already been appropriated so I can’t apply it to their overy aggressive manicures). Women with carefully done hair, carefully applied make-up and carefully chosen outfits, being hit on by guys in tennis shoes, jeans, hoody sweat-shirts and baseball caps.

This horrible cover band with no identity (even for a cover band) took the stage. They played everything form Donna Summer to The Captain and Tennile. J Giles Band to the Pointer Sisters. Gloria Gaynor to Meatloaf. Prince to Poison. All badly.

Listening to this awful band got me thinking about how only as an adult have I been able to wrap my mind around the word “cover” with no racial connotation. As a kid, I thought of one artist’s recording of another artist’s song as a “remake.” Cover songs always made me think of how, during segregation, when a Black artist had a huge hit song, the record company would have a white artist do a “cover” version to play on white radio. To this day, a side by side comparison of Little Richard and Pat Boone doing “Tooti Fruiti” says more to me that decades worth of those lame “black people do it like this, white people do it like that” jokes they still tell on BET.

So I’m in this bar listening to the DJ try to sound cool by trying to sound Black (“Somebody, anybody, everybody, scream!”). Listening to the lead singer of this cover band try to sound sexy by trying to sound Black (“I know I got some bad girls in the crowd tonight! Toot toot, heeeey, beep beep!) and I was totally overwhelmed by the bloodlessness, the mediocrity, the midwesterness, the whiteness of it all.

This isn’t even a cover band. Son of Starchild was a cover band. Sky Bop Fly was a cover band. This is a cover of a cover band. One more step removed from the original. The bar was a cover of a bar. The waitresses’ uniforms were from Hooters. The girls dancing on the bar were from Coyote Ugly, all the exposed navels and ass-cracks were from a Christina Agulera video. Everything felt like a copy of a copy. Homogenized for your protection.

And, I’m thinking, as someone who by no conscious decision is isolated within a a group of liberals, this may be the biggest group of Bush voters I have wandered into in years.

John Kerry won in the cities. He won the youth vote. He won among minorites. He won St. Louis and St. Louis County by a large enough margin to have given him the state in 2000. Meanwhile, 88% of Bush’s votes came from white people.

I look around this bar and I see a big piece of George Bush’s America. A room full of middle class, suburban, white people who want to crawl to the edge of what’s hip, so long as it’s not too Black, or too gay and doesn’t involve going into the inner city. People who are afraid of any culture they can’t appropriate, water down and dance off beat to.

Sitting in that bar, it really sunk in that George Bush was still the president. That life after the election was just business as usual. More of the same. The rational veneer that I’d kept up for the previous two days melted a way. All my “the people have spoken, they just didn’t say what we wanted to hear ” bullshit, faded. I felt physically ill. I almost cried.