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and teach me how to make a movie. To my astonishment he said yes, and so for one week in February of 1987 Kevin Rafferty and Anne Bohlen traipsed around Flint with me, showing me how to work the equipment, giving me invaluable tips on how to make a documentary. Without your cousin’s generosity, I don’t know if Roger & Me would have ever been made.

I remember the day your dad was inaugurated as President. I was editing the film in a ratty old editing room in D.C. and decided to go down to watch him be sworn in on the Capitol steps. How weird it was to see your cousin Kevin, my mentor, sitting next to you up on the dais! I remember also walking down The Mall and seeing the Beach Boys playing “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” at a free inaugural concert in honor of your father. Back in the editing room, my friend Ben was on the screen, all choked up about going crazy on the assembly line and singing the same Beach Boys song over scenes of Flint in shreds.

Months later, when the film was released, your dad, the President, ordered a print of Roger & Me sent to Camp David one weekend for the family to watch. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall as you all viewed the havoc and despair that had been visited upon my hometown—thanks, in large part, to the actions of Mr. Reagan and your father. Here’s something I’ve always wanted to know: At the end of the film, as the deputy sheriff was tossing the homeless kids’ presents and Christmas tree out on the curb because they were $150 behind in their rent, were there any tears in the room? Did anyone feel responsible? Or did you all just think, “Nice camerawork, Kev!“?

Well, that was the late eighties. You’d just given up your hard drinking; after being sober for a few years, you were trying to “find yourself’ with Dad’s help—an oil venture here, a baseball team there. It’s been clear to me for some time that you never had any intention of being President yourself. We all stumble into jobs we don’t want at one time or another—who hasn’t done that?

For you, though, it must be different. After all, it’s not just that you don’t want to be there: now that you’re there, you’re surrounded by the same gang of geezers who used to ran the world with Pops. All those men roaming around the White House—Dick, Rummy, Colin—not a single one is a pal of yours! It’s all the old farts Poppy used to have over to the house for a good cigar and vodka as they dreamed up plans to carpet bomb the civilians of Panama.

But you’re one of us—a Boomer, a C student, a partier! What the hell are you doing with that crowd? They’re eating you alive and spitting you out like a bad pork rind.

They probably didn’t tell you that the tax cut they drew up for you to sign was a swindle to take money from the middle class and give it to the super-rich. I know you don’t need the extra money; you’re already set for life, thanks to Grandpappy Prescott Bush and his smart trading with the Nazis before and during World War II. (During the late 1930s and through the 1940s, Prescott Bush, George I’s father and Ws grandfather, was one of seven directors in the Union Banking Corporation, owned by Nazi industrialists. After filtering their money through a Dutch bank, they hid an estimated $3 million in Bush’s bank. As a principal player, it’s unlikely that Bush would have been unaware of the Nazi connection. The government eventually seized the assets and the bank dissolved in 1951, after which Prescott Bush—and his father, Sam Bush—received $1.5 million.)

But all those dudes who gave you a record-breaking $190 million to run your campaign (two-thirds of which came from just over seven hundred individuals!), they want it all back and more. They’re going to hound you like dogs in heat, making sure you do exactly as they say. Your predecessor may have been renting out the Lincoln bedroom to Barbra Streisand, but that ain’t nothin’: before you know it, your pal, Acting President Cheney, will be turning over the keys of the West Wing to the chairmen of AT&T,