Did Bob Gates miss seeing the movie “Titanic?”
Everyone knows you swim away from the sinking ship — not toward it.
Why is Bob Gates, the career spook who came in to academia from the cold, leaving College Station, Texas to be US President George W. Bush’s new secretary of defense?
Doesn’t he know that swimmers to the scuttled Titanic that is the foundering Bush administration risk being fatally trapped in its whirling, sucking vortex?
Or has a hero finally come to deliver us from the Republican’s mess of Iraq?
Gates was a big man on campus here in College Station, greatly admired, appreciated and even beloved. He was our hero. Just last week, while waiting in the supermarket checkout line, I scanned a copy of “Texas Monthly” that someone had inexplicably mixed in with tabloids about Brittney Spear’s amazing weight loss and Nicole and Keith Urban’s substance abuse woes, and it announced that Gates planned to “save” Texas A&M University.
Gates has a knack for being inspiring, for making the great speech, taking charge of faculty meetings and getting things done for the first time in, well, at A&M, perhaps almost a century.
Why leave now?
Not that there aren’t lots of good reasons to leave College Station, Texas, where Gates has spent the past few years first as dean of The Bush School (yes, there really is such a place and yes, George H.W. Bush, the current president’s father, is actively involved), and then as president of Texas A&M University. Maybe he’s sick of saying “Howdy!” all the time. Maybe he doesn’t really like cowboy boots. Maybe Gates wearied of College Station’s only having two seasons — sweltering hot summer and...January. Maybe his dry cleaners kept breaking all his shirt buttons.
Or maybe he got tired of eating tortillas with everything. See, I’ve noticed that in College Station, Texas, you hardly see any Mexicans, but you know they’re here somewhere because restaurants are always asking you not whether you’d like some tortillas with that, but how many and what kind of tortillas you’d like with that. Flour or corn? Whole wheat or paprika or spinach tortillas?
And if you dare say, “No, no tortillas with my Chinese plate lunch, thank you, though,” they stare at you as though you are from...from...well, not from College Station, that’s for sure.
Even French restaurants in College Station, or rather, the French restaurant in College Station is not immune from Mexican infiltration. Check out those seafood crepes, and wrapped around all that shrimp and crabmeat and gloopy cheese, well, is it really a crepe? It looks suspiciously like a tortilla to me.
I’ll bet in Washington, D.C., they don’t do that.
In College Station, even the McDonald’s figured out they could sell more fried chicken things if they wrapped them up in a tortilla. When I asked the local deli why my tuna salad was so crunchy, the manager said, “We take all the leftover tortillas and toast them, chop it all up, and put it in the salad.”
It can get to you.
So I understand why Gates might want to leave. But since taking polls is all the rage, when I heard that Gates was no longer staying to flail at undesired tortillas and save Texas A&M, I drove A&M’s campus and took my own little poll about what A&Mers felt about Gates leaving. The result?
It’s not about Bush’s sinking ship. It’s about America.
Gates, by all accounts, is the real deal when it comes to integrity. He’s forgone saving Texas A&M to save the nation and its democracy. Everyone I polled said that Gates, a former Eagle Scout, has an exceptional sense of duty that goes deeper than patriotism. He clearly believes the country’s interests are now at risk through its Iraq misadventures. He sees the big picture. He only recently returned from Iraq, where he was horrified by the constant carnage. “I can just hear him saying, ‘If I can possibly help, then it’s my duty to do so,’” one colleague mused.
The Bush administration needs to promote immediate and substantial change to not only resolve its debacle in Iraq and Afghanistan but to save civil liberties at home. Colin Powell, Bush’s former secretary of state, military man, and former head of the joint chiefs of staff, recently warned Bush, “The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism.” Yesterday at the polls, the American public sent Bush’s White House and the Republicans who ride its coattails the same message.
Gates will bring change to Bush’s White House, and because of his long ties with the Republican Party, he can do this with, in the words of one A&Mer, “the least amount of upset to Bush.”
Perhaps that is the key to the changes Americans now seek.
