Tipsheet

Misdirected Hostility? Lefty Poet Jumps For Glee Over The News Of Barbara Bush's Passing

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  April 18, 2018 1:35 PM

Okay—so by now you’ve heard that Barbara Bush, the former first and second lady, has died. With the Barbara Bush Foundation or Family Literacy, she became passionate about improving and expanding literacy in America. Yet, we’ll allow those who know her best describe her life and legacy. For some, like poet Mira Gonzalez, it’s time to jump for glee. She wasn’t alive during the first Bush presidency, but I guess if you were a die-hard progressive or all in all anti-Bushie, you’d love to hate people you don’t know either. Our friends at Twitchy have been following this rather distasteful social media exercise in which she said, “it is taking all of my self control to not tweet ‘barbara bush die slow b*tch.’” That tweet has been deleted, but the Internet is forever. Recently, Mrs. Bush said she would stop further medial treatment for her various illnesses and focus on comfort care instead. She passed away at the age of 92.

Gonzalez took to Twitter saying, “Ding dong the witch is dead.” She wasn't the only one to celebrate either. As Leah wrote this morning, Fresno State professor Randa Jarrar tweeted last night, among other things about the former first lady’s passing, “Barbara Bush was a generous and smart and amazing racist who, along with her husband, raised a war criminal. F**k outta here with your nice words.” She has since protected her Twitter account. (UPDATE: Free Beacon has more tweets from her here.)

Now, we could all get whipped into a frenzy over this—and understandably some will—or we can recognize that the Left and Right both have their bomb throwers. The Left has hated George W. Bush for years. It should not be shocking the younger ilk feel the same way. With the Left, there’s that fetishistic need to be on the so-called right side of history, so engaging in ghoulish behavior is part of that. The long game in the erasure of someone from the history books through character assassination. These people are so evil so f**k them. And if you say this over and over again, poof! They vanish into thin air. It really doesn't work that way.

I was upset over these tweets, but only for about 30 seconds. This is free speech. There are people who are insufferable, but they have the right to voice their misdirected hostility towards anyone—within reason of course. Just ignore and don’t feed the trolls. Not every liberal on Twitter needs to be called out; there’s more important things to do. Then again, for all you horrible progs who are dancing on Mrs. Bush's grave, you're putting yourself out there. Don't cry when conservatives on Twitter take you to the woodshed for your nonsense because it will happen.

Leaving her deplorable tweets, in 2015, Gonzalez got a big shout out when Lily Allen posted a photo of her poem collection on Instagram; there was UK tabloid speculation about Allen’s marriage at the time (via The Guardian c. 2015):

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Gonzalez was 21 when this first collection was published, and she is only 23 now. Judging by her social media presence, she appears to spend most of her time in LA, and is often either babysitting or hanging out with a young sibling. She does a lot of poetry readings, and i will never be beautiful enough to make us beautiful together was nominated for a Goodreads Choice award and a Believer award. Her second book, Selected Tweets was released last year, and is a selection of tweets collected alongside those of the novelist Tao Lin. Although Gonzalez, with her young, west coast literary life, is not someone you would expect to find in the middle of a UK tabloid storm, there is a certain perfection in her becoming caught up in a story involving a celebrity and a picture from the internet.

Gonzalez writes about the internet a lot, and has a particular talent for describing the absence that a life spent online can create. “And we will understand the phrase ‘alone together’ is not an oxymoron anymore,” she writes in a poem titled symbolic interactionism. In her spare, lower-case poetry, the author edges around loneliness without falling in. She fantasises about snorting Ambien, dedicates herself to being “neutral”, and remembers sexual encounters without shame or emotion. The persona she presents is radical in its contradictions – her voice is both punk and disinterested, both promiscuous and not particularly sexual. In the poem I can read a novel out loud while you lie on my floor with your head in my lap and we can feel happy because we are touching each other and I am using my voice and we don’t have to think about climate change or death, she writes “while we had sex on my floor/ I made noises with my mouth/ and watched cartoons on the TV”.

Whenever I read Gonzalez’s poetry, I think of that scene in the pilot of Lena Dunham’s Girls, in which Dunham’s character Hannah announces to her parents that she is “if not the voice of my generation, the voice of a generation”. I am sure that Hannah would respond well to descriptions like the one in Gonzalez’s poem here is what I ate today: coffee, curry vegetable thing from whole foods, plum: “i feel like 400 dead jellyfish on a freeway.”

Whatever the case, we’re not snowflakes. Let the progressive Left act deplorable. They’re experts in this field. In the meantime, normal people will offer prayers and condolences to the late former first lady. Also, thanks for giving us one of the greatest former living presidents of all time: George W. Bush.

Oh, and if you want to get out of the left wing cesspool and read something about the late Mrs. Bush, please Jon Meacham's op-ed about her:

Mrs. Bush, who died on Tuesday at age 92, never flinched, appearing at Wellesley and using her commencement address to explore the complexities of life’s choices. There was no single path, she told the graduates; one followed one’s heart and did the best one could. “Maybe we should adjust faster, maybe we should adjust slower,” she said. “But whatever the era, whatever the times, one thing will never change: Fathers and mothers, if you have children — they must come first. You must read to your children, hug your children, and you must love your children. Your success as a family, our success as a society, depends not on what happens in the White House, but on what happens inside your house.”

The loudest applause came when she remarked that perhaps there was someone in the audience who would, like her, one day preside over the White House as the president’s spouse. “And I wish him well,” Mrs. Bush said.

It was classic Barbara Pierce Bush: politically skillful, balanced — and good for her husband, for she presented herself as at once reasonable and reasonably conservative, which was the essence of Mr. Bush’s own political persona.

Barbara Bush was the first lady of the Greatest Generation — a woman who came of age at midcentury, endured a world war, built a life in Texas, raised her family, lost a daughter to leukemia, and promoted first her husband’s rise in politics, and then that of her sons. As the wife of one president and the mother of another, she holds a distinction that belongs to only one other American in the history of the Republic, Abigail Adams

[…]

She was tireless in her advocacy for literacy, and in 1989, at a time when AIDS was still shrouded in mystery and misunderstanding, Mrs. Bush visited a home for H.I.V.-infected infants in Washington, and hugged the children there, as well as an infected adult man. It sent a powerful message — one of compassion, of love, of acceptance. Her popularity as first lady was such that, in 1992, some voters sported buttons with a final plea for the World War II generation: “Re-Elect Barbara’s Husband.”