Cracked Window

I doubt I’ll ever see anything as wondrous as tonight’s opening ceremonies at the Olympics. Never has a story been told so vividly on such a sweeping scale. Perhaps only an authoritarian government could pull it off. And yes, the story glosses over a shameful past and present. But to conceive and execute it so stunningly and with so many people playing roles — 15,000 — was awe-inspiring.

When the camera found in the audience a slouching George W. Bush, leg bouncing and eying his watch, I surely wasn’t alone in concluding that more than the grandest spectacle ever produced was unfolding; I was watching the ascension of one nation and the decline of another.

Choose your most admired U.S. president. Imagine him saying this:

Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter.

Now imagine him grinning widely and punching the air. And saying it while leaving a meeting of world leaders who had gathered in Japan to discuss combating climate change.

According to a British newspaper, those present, including Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy, “looked on in shock” at George Bush.

Maybe the bigger story is why anyone was shocked.

Fox News calls the Obamas’ playful fist bump a “terrorist” handshake. An on-air guest says half-jokingly that Barack Obama needs to be assassinated. Fox refers to Michelle Obama as a “baby mama” (euphemism for unwed black mother). Now this on the fair and balanced network: digitally altered photos of two New York Times reporters to make them appear older and decidedly less attrative.

People I love watch Fox with a religious fervor. They’re smart and good human beings. I’d like to believe Rupert Murdoch has hypnotized them. Or maybe the glossy, pouty lips and cleavage of his foxed up women anchors did the trick. I wish either explained the inexplicable.

Their Fox fixation is stark evidence of how they and other people who elected a disastrous president and worse vice president can’t see the reality of what they’ve unleashed. They don’t recognize the mistakes, the tragedies, the shame. We live in the same country but occupy realities a universe apart.

Maybe they’ll snap out of it, and the day will come when everyone refers to Bush and Cheney’s first inauguration day like we do 9/11. That way numerical shorthand will trigger not just an image of burning towers and death but a nation losing its soul: 1/20.

THURSDAY UPDATE: Times Culture Editor Sam Sifton says the newspaper won’t respond to Fox:

It is fighting with a pig, everyone gets dirty and the pig likes it.

Touchy, touchy some people are, especially zealots on the way-out-there religious right. The American Family Association’s news web site has a filter that automatically changes words it doesn’t like. So an Associated Press story from Eugene, Oregon, about track star Tyson Gay was “corrected.”

The headline: “Homosexual eases into 100 final at Olympic trials.” The story:

Tyson Homosexual easily won his semifinal for the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials and seemed to save something for the final later Sunday.

And on it went. Read more here, if you can stomach it. The AFA later changed the story, restoring Gay’s good name.

Maybe the AFA’s on to something. Imagine the possibilities with the name Bush.

Sometimes the best insight and analysis of the day’s news comes from anonymous “readers” who, like me, devour our favorite blogs with unbridled fervor. Here’s a nod to just such a person, who takes on President Bush and John McCain for their attacks today on Barack Obama for his willingness to talk to Iran’s president. Imagine that — the audacity to talk to adversaries. (Remedial history 101: Reagan met with Gorbachev, Nixon with Mao during the Cold War).

Don’t wait for the mainstream media to dissect Bush or McCain’s words with such illuminating precision. It will never happen. (Courtesy of Talking Points Memo, one of my favorite sites.)