A New Messiah?
Lise LePage
GEORGE W. BUSH could turn out to be the best thing to happen to the world since Jesus Christ. Think about it. A villain to some, a hero to others, he is the apotheosis of the passing era, a horrifying exemplar of New World Order capitalist power. But like Jesus, George could end up being a millennial bridge, a catalyst in the process of global transformation from the greed, violence, and division of the Piscean Age to whatever lies ahead in the Aquarian. Even the timing of George's coming is notable--he took power 2000 years after the birth of Christ.
Jesus came to the world in an era of conservatism. The old institutions of Judaism had become corrupt and calcified; they needed to be challenged. Jesus swept them aside with a radical new doctrine of peace, love, and living in the spirit, and changed the world for the next millenium as the religion named for him spread far and wide.
George on the other hand is a conservative, but the institutions he represents are no less corrupt or entrenched than those in Jesus's day. They need to be swept away and replaced. A member of the elite himself, George's goal is to preserve the rotten legacy of his class. But by taking the doctrine of his class to its logical extreme, he will in fact achieve
just the opposite.
The Lord does work in mysterious ways.
Of course, it all starts at home. Who are we as people and what do we value? Before George, we might have thought we valued our families, our homes, our SUVs, our stuff. We might have thought in a vague way that we valued America, her prosperity and fine reputation. We might have told ourselves that we valued less tangible things too, like love or friendship. But our values hadn't been seriously questioned or tested in a long while. We were getting soft. Then George came along.
In a series of sweeping decisions which have effectively reversed the policy goals of this country, George showed us our anti-values. He stood up for everything we don't believe in. Acting as our agent and prime representative, George told us that as a country, we no longer wanted quality healthcare, a cleaner environment, effective regulation of industry, better schools, or safer food. He told us we no longer needed our civil liberties as citizens. He insisted that we understand the wisdom of tax cuts for the rich and benefit cuts for the poor. Suddenly we were faced with a government aligned, not with our values, but with an eccentric right-wing ideology that ran counter to all we cared about.
Indeed George is a rare kind of audacious leader whose actions, words, and very demeanor galvanize opposition. He woke people up. He forced us all, right or left, to take stands. By spelling out a contrary version of our national values--in official black and white, of course--George helped us to see what our values really are. This is a great gift, because no positive change is possible if we don't know what we want.
The process of awakening has not been limited to America. While Bush the Uniter may have divided America into the good guys and the wimps, he's united the rest of the world quite handily against him. People around the world are afraid of George, of his global ambitions and his cavalier attitude toward the sovereignty of nations. Perhaps they never really liked the US as much as we thought they did, but they really don't like George W Bush. People can smell the danger in him. So, once again, George plays the part of lightning rod, polarizing popular opinion and driving reasonable people to action.
In fact, things have a way of blowing up when George is around--the federal budget, the accounting industry, the Catholic Church, the World Trade Towers, even the Space Shuttle. Not that all these explosions and implosions can be directly connected to George, but his administration has overseen one of the greater meltdowns in history of time-honored myths and institutions. His mission to restore the aristocracy is like trying to save a sand castle. The more he tries to shore things up, the more the tide washes away.
So now George has his war, and with it, the threat of all the plagues that attend warfare -- disease, dislocation, violence, and death. Here in the dawn of the new milennium, George is giving us a last Piscean Age nightmare to wake up from. He will show us, once and for all, in unmistakable terms, what we don't want.
All the same, George is a powerful man with a powerful military at his disposal. Even if all the people of the world stood up against him, would it be enough? How will it all end? That is of course the big question. The Christian tradition of apocalypse holds that there is one last big war, Armageddon, after which the people of the world live on in peace and
harmony for the next thousand years. This last battle is in essence the birthing ground for a new world order, although not necessarily the one you read about in neoconservative position papers. Whether you buy Christian prophecy or not, World War III would certainly do a lot to disrupt the present world order, think what you will of it. And while utter devastation is not the path we might consciously choose for ourselves, perhaps it is the only way to get where we need to go, the only way to free ourselves from the burden of the past.
They say, you don't get the savior you want--you get the one you need. So who knows? Maybe God gave us George. The little man with the big needs and the cold heart. The man of peace who brings us war. The man of Christ who prays to Yahweh. The compassionate conservative who brings misery to the poor, and advantage to the rich. Perhaps it is this man who is showing us the way, this man who will spur us to freedom.++
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