a very different time

Comrades,

When I learned that George H.W. Bush had shuffled off This Mortal Coil, I immediately thought...there's a man who came from a very different time...1989 was his first year in his only term as POTUS.

When George took the oath and moved into the Oval Office I'd only recently knocked up the missus who I'd just "shacked-up" with [and of course these days you can't say 'knocked up the missus' without attracting opprobrium] and my first child, who was born a bastard, was just weeks old when the Mighty Balmain Tigers RLFC were robbed blind in the Grand Final and Backdoor Benny still has nightmares about that drop goal attempt that hit the black dot.

The music was absolute shite, the Baby Animals and the Bondi Cigars had only just started off on their brilliant careers as a for instance, and the Jackson 5 and Gladys Knight and the Pips called it quits. Batman and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade were the best they could come up with in popular movies.

I had to look that up in the encyclopedia because if you got me around a dining table now and asked "righto, Craves, take us through the 80's" I'd be struggling big time. But, as a radio news journalist who's stock-in-trade was the telephone, I do remember that any kind of hand-held mobile phone was a real rarity and devices like "The Brick" were still a few years off for common use back in '89 [the radio station did have a couple of 'mobiles' about the size of a car battery and as heavy], the internet was a weird fledgling universe known only to geeks with science degrees, [primitive computers with fuzzy green screens on cathode ray tubes had just replaced great clunking Olivetti typewriters in the newsroom, much to the dismay and resistance of the Luddite old guard - "they'll never catch on. if it's not broke, why fix it?"], Google was still a decade away, Mark Zuckerburg was five years old, and everybody chain-smoked at work.

While Comrade Bob Hawke was cheating on his wife and was well into his third term in office and the former Oxford champion can still chunder a yard of beer at age 88, George Snr's best buddy on the international cocktail circuit was the unlamented Maggie Thatcher and he wanted to spend one last summer at the family beach house at Kennebunkport, Maine, before he died and he ate a few oysters and drank whisky in his final weeks and is consistently rated by the pundits in hindsight as about the 6th or 7th worst US President in history [not including the incumbent].

George did jack-shit about Tiananmen Square, [Jiang Zemin got away with blue murder and he's still hiding in plain view at 92], his military adventure in Panama to depose the late Manuel Noriega is now a footnote to history but The War on Drugs didn't go so well, and then sending in Gen. Mad Dog Schwarzkopf to chase them damned Iraqi's out of the strategic oil reserves in Kuwait [yeah, right, a good cause for a Texas oil man] with pointless loss of life was a swift victory and an abject failure simultaneously. Bush the Elder presided over a world wide recession as the American economy went down the S-bend and he didn't have to do much to end the Cold War; the Berlin Wall astonishingly crumbled overnight to almost everyone's complete surprise and the Soviet Union imploded all by itself, but to his almost singular credit H.Dubbya did sign the START 1 treaty which finalised Reagan's work to the end of the plainly insane nuclear weapons stockpile, and resulted in an 80% reduction in the number of nuclear tipped warheads that could be loosed upon this world - which then stopped worrying about The Bomb. But that's where my praise ends.

I was scouring the new-fangled World Wide Web for a single image that might best sum up the Bush presidency, and was having a hard time of it, before this one popped up.

How little we remember, how much we forget...