Stephen Gerard Dietemann Design

George Bush is not well liked in Great Barrington. Recently, while strolling through the downtown I spotted a sticker with a picture of the president captioned, “George Bush / International Terrorist”. It was not the first time I had seen such virulently angry images – or heard equally angry talk -- in Great Barrington concerning this administration. While conceding that I do not include many fans of the president among my friends (there are some, believe it or not), the response to the president in Great Barrington represents a level of animus I have only seen in more traditionally left-leaning places such as New York City or Boston.

This is particularly interesting because few places have seen the kind of meteoric escalation in property values now being experienced in Great Barrington in particular and all South Berkshire County in general. Spurred in equal measures by the vast redistribution of wealth upwards largely as a result of revised tax policies originating with the Reagan Administration, fear generated by the September 2001attacks on the city, the presence of important cultural venues such as Tanglewood as well as the periodic ebb and flow of people from any large city such as New York, the once somewhat hardscrabble town of Great Barrington has become the locus of many upscale retail businesses, restaurants and residential properties. Rents and prices are extremely high almost everywhere. This trend has accelerated noticeably during the last few years when many of those newly constructed residential properties are both extremely expensive and – what other word can one use? -- massive. Moreover, these houses are often second or even third homes, used primarily on weekends. Ironically, perhaps, one result of this housing boom has been a paucity of affordable housing in the area because the construction of so many expensive houses and other upscale development pulls up the prices of all surrounding housing. This includes what had once been affordable rental units. It will surely be noted by future generations that one of the enduring visual images of our age was the juxtaposition of large, empty houses with an epidemic of homelessness.

As anyone who has read this column surely knows, I am no fan of this president, but the anti-Bush rhetoric emanating from Great Barrington has lately begun to make me feel uneasy. First, I am increasingly wary of slogans intent on conveying political position. I have seen how easily such efforts are used in the service of demagoguery. I am convinced that the global balance – the sense of ‘fairness’ -- for which I am constantly advocating cannot be achieved with a manipulated language, regardless of political direction. Secondly, and more importantly, I am forced to ask why a wealthy community such as Great Barrington would take such a stance against George Bush and his policies in the first place? What George Bush is, when striped down to his essence, is a front man for corporate interests. By extension, those interests demand that he be, in the final analysis, a militarist carefully dressed as a democrat. After all, what the war in Iraq is really about is the seizure of resources, in this case oil, both directly and indirectly; as the old saying goes, when you really want to know, follow the money. Nor is this the first time the United States has engaged in manipulative and violent activities designed to control other nation’s resources; just read what United States policy makers wrote after the end of World War Two. In brief, they saw a world full of resources which needed to be controlled lest they be nationalized (read: controlled to the possible benefit by those who actually own them), and if an iron fist was necessary (as they knew it would be) it must be covered in a velvet glove. That, of course, lead to countless interventions from Chile to Vietnam. Bush’s current policies are simply a bit more fist and bit less glove. Even if you chose not to look at the historical record, common sense indicates that this is true. Without a huge army and the will to use it we in the United States would not have all that we have because we have too much of what there is to have in a finite world. No one, you can be sure, wants to be poor or see their children starve. Regardless of where they live, people really are all the same in most ways.

So how does all of this tie into Great Barrington? Well, since wealthy communities have even more of the world’s resources per capita than less affluent communities even within the United States, George Bush is in fact doing our dirty work. The forces he represent could well say to many of those protesting here, “You want the second home, the SUV, the apartment in the city? You want air conditioning and a second or even third car for the kids? You want to eat a great deal of food whenever you desire? Well, so does everyone else in the world and there isn’t enough to go around. So, you fight to keep your lifestyle or you lose it”, and they would be right. Don’t be distracted by religion and politics; in the final analysis it is all about resources. You can be sure that Bush and his friends know that.

So those of us who protest George Bush’s policies here need to ask ourselves some tough questions. The first two being, what do I really need to live and – more difficult still -- what am I willing to forgo to avoid the alternative of continuous war? To simultaneously insist upon maintaining a lifestyle most of the rest of the world could only imagine – and never will experience -- and screaming against George Bush and his policies is naïve at best and outright hypocritical at worst.