The effort has been under way for some time now to rehabilitate George W. Bush’s image.

Granted, I don’t read a lot of the websites that argue Bush wasn’t all that bad, but I think it takes some pretty fierce suspension of disbelief to consider him anything other than a dreadfully lousy president.

Of course, that will be for history to judge and it’s hard to come to any conclusion when we’re still living with the effects of his presidency. But any president who gets us into two simultaneous wars, one of which is now the longest in the nation’s history; who manages at the same time to get most of the rest of the world irritated with us; who totally botches the handling of one of the worst natural disasters in U.S. history; who manages to provide huge tax cuts for the wealthy just before the bottom drops out of the economy; and who can’t even get elected without the intervention of a rightist Supreme Court probably isn’t going to be remembered as the second coming of Abe Lincoln.

Still, it’s going to take generations for historians to reach any kind of consensus on Bush’s presidency. It’s only now, more than two decades later, that people are finally in the early stages of re-evaluating Ronald Reagan’s presidency. And so much of the right wing in this country is so invested in mythologizing Reagan, who did a tremendous amount of harm to the way politics is conducted in America, that it takes a brave man to point out that the emperor had no clothes – or at least that his clothes were often as not made from the skin of society’s poorest members.

Even many years after the fact, though, history is a fungible thing. It’s a century and a half since the Civil War started, but if you want to get history geeks – or even people from different regions of the country – really worked up, float your favorite theory about what caused it, stand back and watch anyone who disagrees with you start foaming at the mouth. One of the reasons this country has never recovered from the Civil War in some ways is that we can’t even agree on why it happened.

Of course, it doesn’t help that people are pretty ignorant about history. And part of the problem there is that it hasn’t been really been taught in our schools in generations. Starting when I was a schoolboy (yeah, during the aforementioned Civil War), history was subsumed in the broader category of “social studies.” It’s a part of that, but only a part. And that was before history became a sort of political football. Many of the worst people in this country see putting a spin on history as a way of pushing their own partisan political agendas of the present day.

It’s been amazing to me, for example, that some people in places as varied as Texas and Alaska have actually talked about seceding from the union. The Civil War might have had many different causes, but one thing’s for certain: It was fought, at least in part, to show the Confederacy that they couldn’t just walk out of the Union. A lot of people died horrible deaths, and many were maimed for life, to make sure that anybody who didn’t favor the way the federal government did things couldn’t just take their ball and go home. There are many subtleties in American history, but that ain’t one of them.

It’s also amusing to hear the Tea Party blowhards gas on about the Constitution and why this or that provision is in there and what the Founding Fathers were thinking when they wrote it. Hell, guys with serious history and law degrees can’t agree on that, but some guy whose education consists of making it halfway through plumbing-and-heating school before flunking out presents himself as an expert on American governance and can actually find people to take him seriously.

And no, that’s not snobbery. The fact is, the past is a foreign country, with its own language and customs, and anybody who really knows those isn’t around to tell us about them. All we can do is guess at what the forces of history were at any given time. If you study how to do that, you can make an educated guess, but at the end of the day it’s still a guess.

That mightily bothers some people. If you don’t give it much thought, you’ll assume that history is what it is, that it just isn’t that hard to determine what happened. Well, think again. It’s a little extreme to go with the old saying that history is a fiction agreed upon, but history is the story of people, and people sometimes do illogical things, or logical things that run afoul of the law of unintended consequences. Whatever your position on gun control, for example, you have to figure that when the Founding Fathers wrote the second amendment they weren’t imagining machine guns in the hands of junior high kids. I’m thinking they would’ve taken steps to prevent that, but I could be wrong.

So it’ll be interesting to find out what the historians finally say about George W. Bush. I’m kind of sorry I won’t be around to see that (or at best, I’ll be around but I’ll be too busy drooling and looking for my ear trumpet). I just hope that when the verdict comes in, my eventual descendants won’t be paying for the considerable number of mistakes he made.