Chapter – VI

Bush in World War II

Plut aux dieux que ce fut le dernier de ses crimes!

--Racine, Britannicus

George Bush has always traded shamelessly on his alleged record as a naval aviator
during the Second World War in the Pacific theatre. During the 1964 senate campaign in
Texas against Senator Ralph Yarborough, Bush televised a grainy old film, which
depicted young George being rescued at sea by the crew of the submarine USS Finnback
after his Avenger torpedo bomber was hit by Japanese anti-aircraft fire during a bombing
raid on the island of Chichi Jima on September 2, 1944. That film, retrieved from the
Navy archives, backfired when it was put on the air too many times, eventually becoming
something of a maladroit cliche.

Bush's campaign literature has always celebrated his alleged exploits as a naval aviator
and the Distinguished Flying Cross he received. As we become increasingly familiar with
the power of the Brown Brothers, Harriman/Skull and Bones network working for
Senator Prescott Bush, we will learn to become increasingly skeptical of such official
accolades and of the official accounts on which they are premised.

But George Bush has always traded shamelessly on his alleged war record. During Bush's
Gulf war adventure of 1990-91, the adulation of Bush's ostensible warrior prowess
reached levels that were previously considered characteristic of openly totalitarian and
militaristic regimes. Late in 1990, after Bush had committed himself irrevocably to his
campaign of bombing and savagery against Iraq, hack writer Joe Hyams completed an
authorized account of George Bush at war. This was entitled Flight of the Avenger (New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991), and appeared during the time of the Middle
East conflagration that was the product of Bush's obsessions. Hyams's work had the
unmistakeable imprimatur of the regime: not just George, but also Barbara had been
interviewed during its preparation, and its adulatory tone placed this squalid text squarely
within the "red Studebaker" school of political hagiography.

The appearance of such a book at such a time is suggestive of the practice of the most
infamous twentieth-century dictatorships, in which the figure of the strong man, Fuehrer,
duce, or vozhd as he might be called, has been used for the transmission of symbolic-
allegorical directives to the subject population. Was fascist Italy seeking to assert its
economic autarky in food production in the face of trade sanctions by the League of
Nations? Then a film would be produced by the MINCULPOP (the Ministry of Popular
Culture, or propaganda) depicting Mussolini indefatigably harvesting grain. Was Nazi