Papa's Got A Brand New Bag!

One of the strangest, and possibly under-reported stories in modern politics also happens to be one of the strangest stories in art. Strange because it features the one person that I and many other folks would never expect or imagine would have such a passion for art. That person, ladies and gentlemen (drumroll please), is none other than former President George Walker Bush!

WHAT??

You heard it here first friends. Actually, you heard it hear after news outlet Salon and a few others first made noise about the President's artistic aspirations. The latest story says he took to painting with a passion that bowled over his teacher, Bonnie Flood. I'm still trying to wrap my head around the idea of a GOP president who would have defunded the National Endowment For the Arts if that bill had crossed his desk, and whose allies tried, as conservatives tend to do, to wipe out funding for the CPB (that's the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which brings you Sesame Street, Reading Rainbow, and that little-watched thing called Downton Abbey). Never mind that the funding for those entities amounts to an infinitesimal portion of the national budget. Never mind that US government spending for the arts tends to be a target for cuts no matter who is sitting in the White House. Never mind that our spending for the war in Afghanistan exceeds that miniscule amount by several orders of magnitude. Don't let's get wrapped up in all that!

Let's just watch in awe at the under the radar transformation of our former president, who essentially left the country in a pretty bad place, allowed the greedy to profit, etc, etc, into a wine-sipping artiste'!
In case you were wondering (and I really wasn't until this) what ol' Dubya was doing with his time down there on the ranch in Texas, well now you know. We all know now.

He's painting.
Painting dogs. Fifty of them so far. Oh, and there was that thing about him painting pictures of himself in the shower. Some people thought that was strange. So far the sort of stereotypical "weird" tag that's tagged on to artists seems to be sticking to him. He's on the right track. His teacher seems to think he has real potential. So the presidential gig didn't work out so great. It's okay. Maybe this was his calling all along. If only that teacher had gotten to him in 2000.

Ye Gods.


More Later
KCD