Note to The Empire: don't drop the casket
As we now know, former US President George H.W. Bush, not to be confused with George W. Bush, is dead and finally buried.
The whole spectacle, the death beginning in Texas and subsequently flown to Washington D.C. for a State Funeral as it's called in the nation's capitol; the death then lying "in state" in the Capitol Rotunda, a privilege last accorded the death of televangelist Billy Graham, which should tell us something about the empire; the State Funeral itself a spectacle (See video of Trump taking off his overcoat and handing it to his page, sitting down in his front row seat like he's about to watch a heavyweight fight between Mike Tyson and Buster Douglas, and the cold curiosity he's aroused in former Presidents, including former ex-officio President Dick Cheney sitting in the second row); the death then being flown back to Texas on Air Force One for a slightly smaller downhome spectacle starting at an Episcopal Church in Houston with a glorious endorsement from the pulpit and a mighty swelling of love from angelic choirs; progressing from there to a 70-mile train trip on a blue and gray locomotive commissioned in honor of the dead 41st president and, finally, to permanent internment of death beside his already dead wife and daughter.
Cost to American taxpayers? An estimated half-billion dollars.
Following tradition for presidential funerals, the federal government shut down on Wednesday. That paid holiday alone cost upwards of $450 million in holiday pay and labor. For the record, President Ronald Reagan's death and subsequent funeral in 2004 cost $423 million, a figure that, if adjusted for inflation, would be $566 million today.
The presidential plane, Air Force One, carrying the dead Bush to Washington D.C. then back to Texas, as authorized by Trump, which includes former President George W. Bush and other Bush relatives, carries a $200,000 per hour price tag, adding at least $2 million in travel expenses. A 21-plane military flyover, honoring the dead president's service during World War II, tacked on another $126,000. Increased security, hard-to-track costs such as lost labor time etc., and incidentals will certainly boost the cost. Couldn't that money and those resources, that money, have been spent more productively?
The spectacle Debord identified fits perfectly here: "The spectacle is the acme of ideology, for in its full flower it exposes and manifests the essence of all ideological systems: the impoverishment, enslavement, and negation of real life." Any illusion that this country is not an empire subsisting on spectacle is shattered when one witnesses the lengths to which the empire goes to create the spectacle, and weighs the cost of its creation in terms of other, real, pressing needs--education, a cleaner environment, less poverty. It this weren't an empire, if there was no such thing as an imperial presidency, a president's death would cost no more or less than the death of a common citizen, if there is such a thing.
Watching this particular spectacle the other night on C-Span, having once met George H. W. Bush, a very nice man, I thought: now, in a way it's never seemed before, the new world order is death.