![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Dec. 9th, 2018 02:13 pmFew days late on this, but I was pondering this a bit on Wednesday, as I had the day off for a "National Day of Mourning" for former president George H.W. Bush, and the news was full of remembrances and thinkpieces about him.
I was born during the Reagan administration, but Bush 41 was the first one whose administration I actually remember in the sense of having any sense of current events at the time. Probably my earliest politically-connected memories are around the election of '88 — I remember watching (one of?) the Bush-Dukakis debate(s), and noticing that Dukakis was basically standing on a giant block at his podium while Bush wasn't and asking my mom about it. She said that was to make Dukakis and Bush look the same height since people were more likely to vote for people who were tall, because they seemed like they were stronger. (this is, btw, a real, documented phenomenon, where the taller of the presidential candidates almost always wins)
I remember the jokes about Bush and supermarket scanners, and his vocal hatred of broccoli, and I definitely remember the Gulf War. I was very heavily into my American Girls phase at the time and was well-immersed into Molly's books about being on the home front during WWII. I had visions of the war being like that (which it wasn't, since it was over in less than 4 months. It seemed longer at the time). My elementary school class wrote cards for a soldier who was over in Iraq, and we spent time learning about where Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia were.
So hearing about all these things from an adult perspective and reflecting on them with what I know now is interesting, since pretty much everything I know about those events is from the perspective of an elementary-schooler. I'm not sure if history is really starting to look upon Bush 41 with a kinder eye as time goes by, or if this is just a case of "speak no ill of the dead" combined with the massive contrast with the current president's vulgarity and bull-in-a-china-shop foreign policy.
Probably gonna add a Bush 41 biography to the reading list. Not sure that it'll actually get read, since my reading list is, at this point, ridiculously long, but I'd like to get more of that adult perspective.
I was born during the Reagan administration, but Bush 41 was the first one whose administration I actually remember in the sense of having any sense of current events at the time. Probably my earliest politically-connected memories are around the election of '88 — I remember watching (one of?) the Bush-Dukakis debate(s), and noticing that Dukakis was basically standing on a giant block at his podium while Bush wasn't and asking my mom about it. She said that was to make Dukakis and Bush look the same height since people were more likely to vote for people who were tall, because they seemed like they were stronger. (this is, btw, a real, documented phenomenon, where the taller of the presidential candidates almost always wins)
I remember the jokes about Bush and supermarket scanners, and his vocal hatred of broccoli, and I definitely remember the Gulf War. I was very heavily into my American Girls phase at the time and was well-immersed into Molly's books about being on the home front during WWII. I had visions of the war being like that (which it wasn't, since it was over in less than 4 months. It seemed longer at the time). My elementary school class wrote cards for a soldier who was over in Iraq, and we spent time learning about where Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia were.
So hearing about all these things from an adult perspective and reflecting on them with what I know now is interesting, since pretty much everything I know about those events is from the perspective of an elementary-schooler. I'm not sure if history is really starting to look upon Bush 41 with a kinder eye as time goes by, or if this is just a case of "speak no ill of the dead" combined with the massive contrast with the current president's vulgarity and bull-in-a-china-shop foreign policy.
Probably gonna add a Bush 41 biography to the reading list. Not sure that it'll actually get read, since my reading list is, at this point, ridiculously long, but I'd like to get more of that adult perspective.
