Empathy for Bush: expectations tough to meet

Listen. This is not what I signed up for. I understand that as legendary columnist Arun… Listen. This is not what I signed up for. I understand that as legendary columnist Arun Butcher I am entitled to a good deal of celebrity. But this has gotten ridiculous.

Don’t get me wrong. I loved the fame at first. My e-mail inbox was inundated with fan mail and marriage proposals. My ego feasted on every person that stopped me in the streets to commend me on my boss-ness. I am a man of the people, so I would pause and take time out of my overflowing dance card to pose for pictures with the plebs or sign copies of my column. Not only did restaurants clear the bathrooms whenever I needed to tinkle, but for me, their food was always half-off. But prices didn’t matter, for the ladies – and even some fellas – beat down my door every night to take me to dinner. I scoffed at my friends’ dating troubles from behind screaming lasses just clamoring for a chance to know me – biblically.

Hollywood publishing houses couldn’t offer me enough money to purchase the rights to my life story. Brad Pitt and Ashton Kutcher scheduled a death match to decide who would land the coveted role of Arun. John Grisham and Dan Brown raced against each other, furiously trying to type out my unauthorized biography first. Mighty Zeus himself shook with rage when it became obvious that not even his strongest lighting bolt could match my star power.

I was a testament to my race. I was one of the good ones. I won awards from every brown person association and a Latin Grammy, thanks to my crossover hit “Lindsay necesita comer.”

In short, I was on top of the world that was simultaneously my oyster – as long as I continued to churn out bomb-ass columns about hypocrites and opossum revolutions. All of a sudden, I had a fan base with expectations for their loyalty; companies who expected returns from their endorsement. I had to be places, meet deadlines, placate the masses with my humorous stories and snark-sodden screeds against the Bush administration every week.

My fame has become a burden. My fame has become hard work. Ironically, it took this incessant fame based upon bashing George W. Bush to truly understand and empathize with our president.

I mean, he was elected – cough cough – by the people, and now they expect him to do things! The man can’t even enjoy a short, five-week vacation every six months. What has this world come to when the leader of the free world, commander-in-chief of the biggest H-bomb-packing nation and head of the most geopolitically entangled state on the planet can’t just relax and clear brush at his ranch? Madness, that’s what.

And people are so quick to blame! Some lady even had the nerve to yell at Bush for killing her son. Don’t they understand what he’s had to deal with all his life? Rather, don’t they understand what he hasn’t had to deal with all his life? Anything.

He has never needed to worry about anything! And even though that was very evident during all of his campaigns, the mysterious 51 percent that voted for him suddenly expect him to start when some silly catastrophe like a terrorist attack or a hurricane happens. How dare they be so insensitive?

Can’t they see that he’s just waiting for someone to help him out of his messes, like every other time he was in trouble? A cursory glance at this life story shows that when his draft number was selected for the Vietnam War, he got his daddy to shove him in the “champagne unit” of the Texas Air National Guard so he wouldn’t get all sweaty and/or bullet-ridden like those poor suckers without billionaire fathers. He even had his military records, which embarrassingly showed that he didn’t even show up for the majority of the time he was enlisted and refused to take mandatory physicals because he had some problem with his nose, lost by the Department of Defense. When his oil company, Arbusto, was sinking, he got his old buddies to keep the company floating long enough for him to sell all of his family’s stock just one week before the company, then renamed, Harken Oil and Gas, announced millions in losses.

Just as people expect me to handle the constant pressures of fame despite the fact that I have never been famous before, how can people expect George Bush to handle the constant pressures of the presidency when he has no experience with pressure in the first place? It’s just unfair. And if Bush is anything, he’s fair. Shouldn’t he be able to expect the same from you?

Arun Butcher really appreciates all the undergarments thrown at him. E-mail him pictures at arunbutcher@gmail.com.