A rendezvous with Bush

A curious thing has begun to happen to me, at odd moments, strange angles. Every now and then – walking down the street, turning the corner, waiting on a railway platform, standing in a café queue – it strikes me that I've seen the faces around me before. It feels as if I've entered some curious hall of mirrors, that some other past is visiting my present, and I have seen that person before. It's not just that the features are familiar, or the body is carried at the same slope, or that the hat is tilted in some familiar way, I often experience the shock of absolute recognition, and I end up convinced that I know complete strangers. It stops me in my tracks, walking along Broadway, or waiting in the station at Astor Place, or strolling through the springtime bloom of Central Park. A moment of odd panic as I think: I know them. Their eyes flicker and roll, a blank slate of incomprehension. They tuck a shoulder and walk on.

I end up arrested by a brief terror that I've somehow let whole sections of my life slide by without paying attention. Is it just that I'm getting older and the memory is sliding, or that I've met too many people, or that I'm still negotiating the space between yesterday and today? But then memory, blood and footstep come together, and I realise that I have indeed seen them before – they're old acquaintances, or distant friends, or people I know quite well, but they've somehow slipped into the floorboards of my life, only to reappear in a different guise.

In the end the mind does not want to forget. We are what we have been. As a matter of pure survival, we rendezvous with our old selves.

Every time I see George Walker Bush on the TV these days I am reminded of this rendezvous with what we once were.

Bush looks panicked. He has the schoolyard look of the kid who has just bullied one morning too far. It's as if a sudden moment of startling recognition has entered his own life. His bravado has no assurance about it. He tries to pull up his body to make it larger, but it looks as if his torso doesn't belong to him. His eyes look heavy. His shoulders are someone else's. The lope of his walk remains behind him. It is as if he has stepped into an acid bath and he's shocked by how much of himself had disappeared.

Life is never quite so bad that the desire for something better is ever extinguished in any of us. I've been looking forward to the dissolution of the Bush regime since the first few days of his administration. I always thought I'd find myself cheering when the rats started to clear the sinking ship, as they're plainly doing nowadays – Tom deLay, Scooter Libby, William F Buckley and countless others have joined in the chorus of dissatisfaction. Colin Powell suddenly seems visionary. He walked an early plank. Even the right-wing Christians are at it.

I was convinced that I'd laugh in the faces of people who had taunted me, cheapened what I thought was valuable – I wanted to get a charge out of watching Bush fall.

But looking at Bush now, I can't celebrate his demise. I, like many others, just feel saddened and defeated. A part of me wants to believe that he'll finally learn the value of grief, that at long last he'll able to put his finger on the pulse and feel the depth of the wound he has inflicted. I want to think that maybe he will understand the consequences of his reckless dishonesty. It's as if he now has the chance to finally grow up, to stop huffing and puffing, to quit using the incompetence of others as his defence, to stop using the prospect of the future to vindicate the evils of today. It's doubtful, if not outright naïve. It's also dangerous – ascribing a morality to the Bush agenda might lend it a decency and credence it doesn't deserve.

When you fall you never fall halfway. Two years is still a long time – he will, of course, not leave office until the end of 2008. The sound of the thump is still coming. There is always Iran. There's always Guantanomo. And there's always another storm off the coast of New Orleans.

It would be nice, of course, to look in another direction, to see a face we truly recognised, but the gleeful hand-wringing of the Democrats can't disguise a lack of purpose on their part. And watching Bush fall feels curiously like watching ourselves take a tumble.

The real problem is that the Bush we see on the television today is the George Bush that we have seen all along. Behind the defeat there is still that smirk. He has that Roy Keane how-dare-you stare. Beneath the hollow eyes there is still the willfulness of his own conviction. He's that person we recognise when we walk down the street but we're not quite sure where we know them from. Once he's gone past us we remember that he's the bully from the yard, but it's just a little too late to turn around and nip him in the heels, because he's already falling of his own accord...

Colum McCann's column for Round Midnight with Donal O'Herilhy on RTÉ Radio 1 (11.40pm) goes out every Tuesday night