Want to read something warm and fuzzy about George H.W. Bush? Then don't read this.

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Monday December 03, 2018 · 6:32 PM MST

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The New York Times has devoted the past weekend constructing a hagiography dedicated to George H.W. Bush. The Grey Lady columnists could barely hold back their tears, gushing their heartfelt tributes all over the Times’ pages. The front page of the Times’ site was so sticky with sentimental Bush stuff, it’s positively oozing off the screen and onto my keyboard. We have learned how his service dog sat morosely near his casket.

That’s great. We should all be blessed with such dogs.

But Scott Thrasher of The Nation must have received a different memo, because he is having none of it.

When I teach AIDS history, I always show a clip of ACT UP’s October 11, 1992, ”ashes action” at the White House, in which brave activists took the cremated bodies of loved ones who had died of AIDS and hurled them onto Bush’s lawn. (If you’ve never seen it, I dare you to watch without crying).

Here’s George H.W. Bush on AIDS:

“It’s one of the few diseases where behavior matters. And I once called on somebody, “Well, change your behavior! If the behavior you’re using is prone to cause AIDS, change the behavior!”

And there is a video of people throwing the ashes of their dead sons and brothers on the White House lawn.

I get it. Compared to the hateful Republican thing we are currently saddled with, George H.W. Bush was the epitome of measured civility. In fact, as he’s lowered into the ground, his amazing “civility” has been brought up again and again. And I am sorry if I’m bursting any bubbles in retrospect.

George H.W. Bush was a prime example of studied, indifferent Republican neglect.

The same indifference and neglect that we are now experiencing every day, with Donald Trump and the Republican Party that supports him, just on a broader scale. In fact, he and Ronald Reagan crafted the template of neglect, and as pointed out by Garance Franke-Ruta, writing for New York Magazine,  his response to the AIDS crisis was one example.

Bush’s actions cannot be explained away as simply reflecting the times, either; during those years, there were politicians who stood up for the humanity of gay people, even as the majority of Americans turned against them and poll-measured disapproval peaked. Nancy Pelosi was one of them. You can see that in this 1987 video her team released on World AIDS Day.

Bush may have been lovely to those inside the circle of concern, but he drew that circle narrowly during a moment when it would have meant the world to draw it larger.

People forget. That’s natural. But this is what happened:

ACT UP was founded in 1987 in the epicenter of the HIV epidemic in America — New York City — to demand action to end the AIDS crisis.

Today it is remembered as part of the Reagan ’80s, but the reality is that much of the group’s most intensive work took place during the administration of George Herbert Walker Bush.

I remember George H.W. Bush for two things: extending the Reagan regime another four awful years, and cynically appointing the incompetent sexual harasser Clarence Thomas to replace civil rights hero Thurgood Marshall on the United States Supreme Court. Aside from those salient “achievements,” and signing the Americans with Disabilities Act into law, he was a one-term mediocrity, presiding over a failed economy that got him booted out of office.

A president lies in state, as Bush is to do beginning today, not because he is kind to his family or has delighted those closest to him with his thank-you notes and a patrician manner, though those stories are important for historians to gather. A president lies in state simply because he was president; because he held power over the fates of hundreds of millions of citizens, and the direction of the world.

How he used that power, or failed to use it, must be reckoned with by any who seek to fully understand his legacy.

Bush not only failed to use his power to combat the AIDS epidemic that killed hundreds of thousands of young Americans. As Thrasher points out, he exacerbated it.

Bush’s words are not just cruel; they fundamentally misunderstand what causes AIDS and how to effectively address it. Sex—yes, even gay sex—is a part of being human, and the people who died of AIDS did so because of societal neglect, not because of their human acts. And while he was nominally better than his predecessor (a very low bar) at addressing the consequences of AIDS, he’d been unforgivably quiet as Reagan’s vice president.

Bush’s job, before he fell into his brief Presidency, was as the head of the CIA. In that job, as Thrasher points out, he helped created the conditions in impoverished countries that spread the AIDS epidemic. True, that wasn’t directly his fault. It was simply an extension of Reagan’s murderous philosophy and cynical foreign policy. But the impact was the same:

AIDS is caused by broader social problems: homelessness, inadequate access to to health care, political instability, racism, homophobia, and the violence of capitalism. And on these fronts, Bush is guilty; his “behavior matters.” As a former head of the CIA, Bush created political instability in nations around the globe where AIDS would thrive. He hyped up racism with his Willie Horton ad, by replacing civil-rights titan Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court with Clarence Thomas, and by vetoing the Civil Rights Act of 1990.

He may not have thought about what he was doing very much. In fact, he probably never thought about it at all.

But that doesn’t entitle him to a free pass.

Sorry. You can go back to regularly scheduled programming now.