Analysis: The Importance of the Hourglass

History is not written of the small; rather, it is crafted from broad and important strokes of great events and the people known of the time, either in deliberation or by accident. Whether the irrelevant were many in their numbers or few, history will not write about them in their individual benefit or suffering. History is of monuments in bright places, not of ashes in forgotten graves.

Last year, near the end of the Presidential Election campaign, a conservative magazine opposed to his re-election noted bluntly that George W. Bush II had become an important President, but not of his own hand: on his watch, and because he failed as a sentry upon his watch, in September of 2001, the United States was attacked on its own soil, within its own continent. Upon that melancholy day, Mr. Bush did, indeed, become an important President; but more precisely, he became an important person. History will therefore be written about him, and it won't be the history of the trivial; it will be the history of large and momentous things, the history of the world and its shepherds, its protagonists, its shapers. Mr. Bush's name will be written in the text whose pages are not rotted and then swept away by the winds of time. No person, no group, no future event can now deny him his entry in the index of the timeless.

Those to whom his policies and his acts are shocking in both their depth of venality and their frequency of occurrence cannot make the majority of Americans see Mr. Bush as they do. To the many, he is as deserving of his place on the wall of great Americans as any President before him. School children will one day read about him, and they will see pictures of him at his finest. They will hear nothing about what those who now hate him know to be the truth. Within several generations will come young people who haven't any idea that it was he who was responsible for the unspeakable horrors of places like Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and Falujha. Within the span of a single generation will come many, many people who will recall nothing of the hateful lies that led to a war without justification. Within a decade will come even the educated who will have forgotten about a minimum wage bill that was defeated because Mr. Bush would not stand up for the working poor. Within only a couple of years will come all but a handful who will not know the name of even a single soldier who died in the sand of an awful place where we should not have sent him.

The purpose of resistance is not to change the future's history; it has already been written. The driving force to stop the monstrosity of a man whose every act is mendacious must come from another wellspring, and that source cannot be seen to negate, to diminish, or to otherwise render Mr. Bush unworthy of praise in the years and centuries ahead. The fight must be engaged for the time contained in this moment, for it is in this moment that the large and small deprivations of his policies are happening.

That fight against the wrongs he is visiting upon the nation and the world will for the most part be lost. But just as it is futile to stop the future from praising Mr. Bush, so too is it wrong to depart the battle against him. To quit the fight is to do more than merely surrender the world of tomorrow to the deification of evil: it is to allow history to stand as the truth carved from the whole cloth of lies.


The Dark Wraith has spoken.