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The Bush in the
bubble
By Tom Engelhardt
I once visited the "map room" of Philip
II, King of Spain, and ruler of the (more or less
known) world in the second half of the 16th
century. Wandering this large chamber filled with
maps from Philip's time in his grim, crusader
palace-monastery, El Escorial, I found myself
trying to imagine how he might have conceived of
the New World his soldiers had claimed for him.
Somewhere, thousands of miles beyond his sight,
beyond what could possibly be imaginable in a 16th
century Spanish castle, untold numbers of the
Indian inhabitants of his New World realms were
dying the grimmest of deaths - and this, not so
long after Catholic thinkers had been arguing over
whether such beings even had souls capable of
conversion from heathenism. Mine was, of course,
an impossible exercise, but the rulership of that
one man, of that one mind locked within those
stone walls and his limited universe, must even
then have been an exercise in fiction, no matter
that the results were painfully real.
Perhaps in a way all rulership has to be a
kind of fiction. The difference is that Philip's
equivalent today, the head of the globe's "lone
superpower", is at the center of a vast machine
for the creation of fiction, a kind of
ever-growing assembly line for its production. I
suppose the truth is that the human ego - whether
that of the man who "runs" America (and desires to
run much of the [known] world) or the chief
executive officer of any globe-spanning
transnational corporation - only has so much
expandability. Even a single megalomanic ego, an
ego stretched to the limits, would have no way of
taking in, no less governing, such a world. Not
really. Perhaps this is why, increasingly, the
president of the United States has himself become
a kind of fiction.
Though we elect a
single being to govern us, who, in a never-ending
political campaign, pretends to hold certain
beliefs and policies sacrosanct, and though a man
named George W Bush now inhabits the White House,
sleeps in a bed there, watches TV there,
entertains foreign dignitaries or Republican
funders there, and does myriad other things,
including traveling the globe and nervously
driving a 1956 vintage Volga beside Vladimir Putin
for the cameras in Moscow, "he" and "his" acts and
policies are, in fact, a curious creation.
Of course, we read in the paper or hear on
TV every day that the president does endless
newsworthy things. Just the other day, for
instance, there was a little note at the bottom of
the front page of my hometown paper announcing
that "Bush Gives a Lecture to Putin". The piece
inside, "Bush Tells Putin Not to Interfere With
Democracy in Former Soviet Republics" by Times
White House reporter Elisabeth Bumiller, began:
"President Bush used the 60th anniversary of Nazi
Germany's defeat to warn President Vladimir V
Putin of Russia on Saturday that 'no good purpose
is served by stirring up fears and exploiting old
rivalries' in the former Soviet republics on his
borders." Just as Bumiller's piece the day before
had begun: "President Bush stepped into the middle
of an escalating feud between Russia and the
Baltic nations on Friday night as he arrived here
in the capital of Latvia at the start of a
five-day trip to Europe." Just as, in fact, a
thousand other pieces in papers or on radio and TV
news programs would begin almost any day of the
year.
The president "does" this or that.
It is, I suspect, a strangely comforting thought.
Only the other night, I spent a couple of minutes
listening to two experts discuss "the president's"
strategy in his meetings with Putin on Charlie
Rose. Would he rebuke the Russian president in
their private meeting - and do so in a serious way
- for his undemocratic rule? Would he follow the
State Department "points" prepared for him, or
would he just say a word or two about democracy
and move on? And either way, would the meeting
between the two men be a "success" as both their
PR staffs promptly rushed to announce? And yet
George Bush's "rebuke" of Putin was, as we all
also know, written by someone else. Essentially,
while George spends his life enacting his
presidency, he just about never speaks his own,
unadulterated words. To shape them, after all, he
has Karl Rove, a bevy of pollsters, and a staff of
advisers, speechwriters, spinners, and quipsters
hired to do the job.
It was, for instance,
then-speechwriter David Frum who took credit for
one of the president's signature phrases, that
"axis of evil" line in his 2002 State of the Union
speech. ("States like these, and their terrorist
allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to
threaten the peace of the world. By seeking
weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a
grave and growing danger. They could provide these
arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match
their hatred. They could attack our allies or
attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of
these cases, the price of indifference would be
catastrophic.") Or rather, it seems that Frum's
wife claimed credit for him; then Frum claimed
that he had only come up with the line "axis of
hate", amended to "axis of evil" possibly by
then-White House chief speechwriter Michael
Gerson. Later yet, Frum suddenly recalled that the
president himself had scratched out "hate" and
scribbled in "evil", which was probably a polite
lie. If he actually did so, that would be strange
indeed. After all, just about nothing the
president says is really "his".
In fact,
the president is surrounded by a vast coterie of
handlers, speech writers, advisers, gag writers,
freelancers, pollsters, public relations experts,
spinmeisters, strategists, footmen, front men,
guards, and valets of every sort, along with, as
we all know, Rove, who more or less created his
world - and continues to have a large hand in
creating him for the world. Whatever Bush himself
may be, he is significantly an actor whose role of
a lifetime is ... to play a sometimes shifting
collage of traits, policies, and beliefs called
George Bush. He is firm before Evil. He rebukes
Putin and lectures or hectors the world. He exudes
optimism under pressure. He chops wood on his
ranch in front of the cameras, being a westerner;
or, being a warrior, he dons a specially created
military jacket with "commander in chief" stitched
across his heart in front of thousands of troops
roaring "hoo-ah"; or, being a regular guy, he hits
his lines just folksy enough at a rally for his
followers to know that he is indeed the real man
they believe he is, the sort of character any of
them might like to sit down and have a beer with;
or, as commander-in-chief of a victorious war, he
lands dramatically on the deck of an aircraft
carrier all togged out as a flier against a banner
saying "Mission Accomplished"; or ... well, you
can fill in most of this.
If some of this
wasn't "him", he probably couldn't do it so well.
And in none of this is he a simple alien in
presidential history. Such a fictional universe
has been a long time in coming, but the Bush
people have pushed it to a post-September 11
extreme. The president notoriously lives and
campaigns in a bubble world where everything -
from his informal words to the make-up of any
crowd at any rally or "town meeting" - is smoothed
and polished, vetted and reformatted for ... well,
certainly political advantage and comfort and
ease, but that doesn't quite cover the matter,
does it?
As with his life and domestic travels,
so in the president's international travels,
he and his entourage - including, as in a previous
European trip, American escort vehicles as
well as the president's official car (known to insiders
as "the beast"), 200 secret service agents,
15 sniffer dogs, a Black Hawk helicopter,
snipers, five cooks, 50 White House "aides", and
the vast press corps that reports on "him" - move
inside an enormous bubble, a kind of dream world.
All around him the central cities of the planet
he's passing through are swept clear of life in
order to create a Potemkin Earth just for his
pleasure and safety. For Bush & Co, all life
is increasingly lived inside that bubble,
carefully wiped clean of any traces of
recalcitrant, unpredictable, roiling humanity, of
anything that might throw the dream world into
question. In a sense, George's world has been well
stocked with James Guckert clones. (Guckert is, of
course, the "journalist" who, using the alias Jeff
Gannon, regularly attended presidential news
conferences and lobbed softball questions the
president's way.) And George himself, whoever he
may be (or may once have been), is a kind of
Gannon, when you think about it. A character. A
creation.
I'm not normally much on
post-modern tropes, but this figure we think of,
and the media insistently reports on, as an
individual (even while we're all fascinated by
endless tales about ways in which everything
around him is managed) is a kind of composite
being, a recombinant man, who travels the planet
and lives "his" life not just in a bubble of
delusion but as a kind of bubble of delusion. He's
a shape-shifting, fictional "individual" imposed
on and meant to harness the vastness and
complexity of reality. It's a phenomenon so
strange that there are, in a sense, no words to
describe it.
Laura softens the
president's image, reinvents herself
A small incident involving the president's
wife brought this home to me recently. On the night
of April 30 - as no one in the world cannot know
by now - Laura Bush "interrupted" her husband,
took the mike in front of a crowd of reporters and
celebs at a dim and dreary annual Washington
event, the White House Correspondents' Association
dinner ("crab hush puppies, steak, asparagus, warm
chocolate cake with vanilla ice cream and
berries"), and in a well-scripted and rehearsed
routine roasted her husband, his family, Dick and
Lynne Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and assorted others.
"She" was promptly hailed for her sense of humor,
her timing, her ribald jokes, and her political
savvy, or as the ubiquitous Elisabeth Bumiller put
it: "[T]he popular first lady accomplished two
things. She brought down a very tough house, and
she humanized her husband, whose sagging poll
numbers are no match for her own." (No match, in
fact, by nearly 40 percentage points.) Bumiller
added that "her zingers showed how much the White
House relies on her to soften her husband's rough
edges at critical moments, much as she did with
her extensive travels and fund-raising in the 2004
campaign". (Indeed, Laura is a monster fundraiser.
Just a couple of days earlier, between West coast
drop-ins on Jay Leno and a center for reformed
gang-bangers, she scarfed up US$400,000 for the
Party with an hour's stay at an "intimate" little
Republican National Committee do.)
The
press raves on her brief comic performance came
pouring in, repetitively so. She had undergone a
"metamorphosis", claimed James Gordon Meek of the
New York Daily News. Via her comedy routine and by
"entertaining more frequently and ha[ving] hired a
new chief of staff, new social secretary and new
press secretary, she has emerged," wrote Robin
Abcarian of the Los Angeles Times, "as a more
svelte, more fashionable incarnation of herself."
She was in the process of undergoing "an extreme
makeover", commented William Douglas of Knight
Ridder; while "super-pundit" John McLaughlin was
quoted in the New York Post as calling her routine
"the best material he'd heard at the dinner in 30
years, and predicted it will help soften her
husband's image".
In some ways, "her"
carefully choreographed performance, previously
rehearsed in the "White House Theater", was
certainly an expression of White House dismay over
the course of second-term events and the
weakening, if not unraveling, of presidential
support in the opinion polls. The second team was
essentially being called in - and a team it
distinctly was. If the immediate media consensus
was that Laura had "softened" and "humanized"
George, in almost every article her press
secretary Susan Whitson was also quoted thusly on
her boss' sense of humor: "This was the first
opportunity that she's had to show the press corps
and the rest of the world that side of her."
That side of her. Her zingers. And
Democrats chimed in: "Mrs. Bush 'was just
brilliant - the whole thing,' said Senator Charles
Schumer." Her brilliance. Her performance was even
assessed in the press by her "peers". "She paced
herself. She didn't rush any of her jokes. She let
'em land," commented Cedric the Entertainer, the
professional comic who was to follow her on the
night's program; and of all the enthusiastic
comments about the first lady and her night of
success, only Cedric's seemed on the mark. It was,
after all, her performance, and she had done it
well.
It was, in fact, such a "success"
that in the Rose Garden the next day George and
Laura repeated the act, "In the best traditions of
George Burns and Gracie Allen, they traded quips
during a ceremony Monday honoring historic
preservation efforts," wrote Ken Herman of Cox
News Service. The president even referred to his
wife as "Laura 'Leno' Bush."
New York
Times columnist Frank Rich has already written
with his usual eloquence on the subject of this
"pageant of obsequiousness and TV Land glitz" and
on the way the "Washington press corps' eagerness
to facilitate and serve as dress extras in what
amounts to an administration promotional video can
now be seen as a metaphor for just how much the
legitimate press has been co-opted by all manner
of fakery in the Bush years. Yes, Mrs Bush was
funny, but the mere sight of her 'interrupting'
her husband in an obviously scripted routine
prompted a ballroom full of reporters to leap to
their feet and erupt in a roar of sycophancy like
partisan hacks at a political convention. The same
throng's morning-after rave reviews acknowledged
that the entire exercise was at some level PR but
nonetheless bought into the artifice." Or as
Margaret Carlson wrote sardonically for Bloomberg
news service: "The reporters you saw in the East
Room at last Thursday's press conference, preening
for the cameras with multipart questions, were the
same ones aching to be in on the joke Saturday
night."
But beyond the skilled fakery that
passes for reality (at which Bush administration
handlers are so able), there are stranger depths
here. So let's take a moment to consider Laura
Bush's performance.
As a start, the "first
lady's" portrait of the president and his men was
a composite one - in this case, a collage of
images that would be commonplace not among his
supporters but among his critics: he mangles the
language ("I'm introverted, he's extroverted, I
can pronounce nuclear ... "); by temperament, he's
a destroyer of the environment, or just a
destroyer plain and simple ("George's answer to
any problem at the ranch is to cut it down with a
chainsaw - which I think is why he and Cheney and
Rumsfeld get along so well"); he's a fake rancher
and fake westerner ("George didn't know much about
ranches when we bought the place. Andover and Yale
don't have a real strong ranching program. But I'm
proud of George. He's learned a lot about ranching
since that first year when he tried to milk the
horse. What's worse, it was a male horse."); his
family is a mafia-like dynastic clan ("People
often wonder what my mother-in-law's really like.
People think she's a sweet, grandmotherly, Aunt
Bea type. She's actually more like, mmm, Don
Corleone."); and so on.
In this - playing
against type - lurks a theory of presidential
humor that goes thusly: "Since public perceptions
cannot be denied, playing to them shows that the
speaker doesn't lack self-confidence." As it
happens, though it was Laura Bush's lips that were
moving, it's not her theory, or George's either.
It was laid out way back in 1987 in an interview
with Los Angeles Times reporter Donnie Radcliffe
("Writer Helps Politicians Beef Up Images With a
Few Choice Words", September 13, 1987) and it
belongs to a man Washington insiders have known
for a quarter of a century but whom, until this
second, almost no one outside the Beltway has paid
much attention to.
His name is Landon
Parvin and he wrote Laura's words, just as he
wrote Nancy Reagan's smash "second hand clothes"
routine for the Gridiron dinner in 1982, which was
also meant to play against type and "humanize" her
("Second-hand clothes, I give my second-hand
clothes to museum collections and traveling shows.
I never wear a frock more than just once: Calvin
Klein, Adolfo, Ralph Lauren and Bill Blass, Ronald
Reagan's Mama's going strictly first class"); just
as he wrote the speech that contained her
husband's not-at-all-funny partial mea culpa for
the Iran-Contra scandal. ("People close to the
president give Parvin a large share of the credit
for bringing Reagan as close as he has come to
acknowledging error on the Iran-contra arms
sales," reported Radcliffe. The key lines in
Parvin's speech: "A few months ago I told the
American people that I did not trade arms for
hostages, my heart and my best intentions still
tell me that is true, but the facts and evidence
tell me it is not.")
In fact, over the
years he's written speeches, gags, and comedy
routines for politicos ranging from Clinton pal
Vernon Jordan and former National Democratic
chairman Robert Strauss to former secretary of
state James Baker, Barbara Bush, and George H W
Bush. For the present president, he produces "four
speeches ... every year, including the Gridiron
Club bash and White House Correspondents'
Association Dinner taken over by the First Lady on
Saturday".
Parvin's had a perfect career
for a man destined to put words in other people's
mouths. He was, briefly, a Hollywood gag-writer,
then a PR man for Hill & Knowlton's Washington
office, a columnist, an official White House
speechwriter, an executive assistant to the
American ambassador in London, a freelance
speechwriter for the corporate and political high
and mighty, and, on the side, a comedy writer for
all and sundry in need of "humanizing". He's been
a word wrangler for as long as anyone can
remember, and his list of customers, the people
whose lips moved convincingly as they spoke his
words, is nothing short of a composite portrait of
power from 1980 to the present, the years in which
the Republicans took full control of Washington.
Though he claims to hate Hollywood, he
brought the TV sitcom's mildly corrosive forms of
humor to the town with him - the self-deprecating
joke and the basic putdown - to which, with Laura
Bush, he finally added a third crucial element of
TV comedy success, the dirty joke. It had been a
staple of the sitcom for a couple of decades but
previously a public no-no in the capital. In fact,
his version of this for Laura - the horse
masturbation joke - would have made the
"family-friendly" right go nuts, had the moving
lips been those of a Democratic first lady. (She
would have been labeled the inside-the-Beltway
Janet Jackson.)
Parvin may be a pro's pro
when it comes to wielding the basic vocabulary of
television comedy in Washington, but it hasn't
always worked for him. He bombed last year in a
Radio and Television Correspondents' Association
dinner routine he wrote for Bush on the theme of
the missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
However, if those "zingers" on April 30th were
anyone's they were Parvin's; if "Laura" was
"brilliant," thank Parvin; if "she" softened the
president's image and humanized him, give Parvin a
lot of the credit; if she slayed them, the
missiles were his. If the Friars Club, famed for
its roasts, offered her an honorary membership,
"which permits her to enjoy the middling cuisine
at the East Side clubhouse or just hang out at the
bar," trading quips with her "fellow comics," she
better take Parvin with her.
But here's
the perhaps-less-than-surprising thing: In her
part of the political world, Laura Bush seems
almost as much a composite creation as her
husband. Her hair is at present the property of
Toka Salon owner Nuri Yurt of Georgetown, who is
now said to be "managing the first lady's
softer-looking coif"; her jewelry, "the handiwork
of Georgetown jewelry designer Ann Hand", who
created the necklace and earring set she wore for
the roast "from different sizes of Swarovski
crystals", and so on through her look. As Abcarian
of the LA Times wrote of a recent trip she took to
California: "At every stop, she looked impeccable,
not a hair out of place. (Although she does her
own makeup, she travels with a hair stylist from a
Washington salon.) She wore expensive, tailored
pantsuits the entire trip, usually with a
Hermes-style scarf around her shoulders. And she
is indeed much slimmer than she was at the
beginning of the first term."
The events
at the various classrooms and small discussion
groups she was scheduled to drop-in on (as with
those reformed gang members in Los Angeles) were
"choreographed for cameras and reporters". And
yet, Abcarian reports with a note of surprise,
there were "rare, unscripted moments that revealed
something of her old-fashioned sensibility". But
on Leno's show, at the media dinner, in
classrooms, or fund-raising for the Republican
National Committee (as the President's "most
effective campaign surrogate"), she mostly
remained "on message", even as the message was
constantly being re-scripted around her, sometimes
with her help.
Laura Bush is then a
fiction. She may even be, in part, Laura Bush's
fiction. There's no way for an outsider to know.
In fact, I have no idea what George and Laura Bush
are actually like. She may in private be brilliant
and hilarious just as her supporters recently
claimed, or she may be the eerily disconnected
creature Tony Kushner caught in his article "Only
We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy". At
this point, for all we know, the Bushes may not
themselves know who they are. In private, they may
be dopes or canny operators, superficial or
thoughtful, but what they certainly are is actors
in a drama too large for any individual to really
take in, one being imperfectly scripted and
stage-managed by teams of others - and, of course,
by history, by the press of reality and of the
past. Atop an oversized imperial bureaucracy, a
vast military machine, a sprawling party
structure, global corporate interests galore, and
who knows what else (including all of us), even
the president turns out to be a
midget.
Perhaps the return of the great man
theory of history in recent years as part of our
fierce domestic culture wars (along with so many
Founding Father best-selling biographies), and the
insistence of the right on the historical primacy
of the individual, is actually a response to the
strange anonymity of our over-populated,
over-heated present, of a presidency that has a
distinctly puppet-like quality to it. And perhaps
the urge to vote for George Bush, whether he is
for or against "nation-building" or anything else,
reflects that same desire to go for the
"humanized" being.
Ancestral fictions
We know that presidents have long been
actors and that they have not always written their
own speeches. After all, James Madison and
Alexander Hamilton played crucial roles in
drafting George Washington's Farewell Address in
1796; while Abraham Lincoln was, as Garry Wills
tells us in his superb book, Lincoln at
Gettysburg, "an actor, an expert raconteur and
mimic, and one who spent hours reading speeches
out of Shakespeare to any willing (and some
unwilling) audiences". Having been invited to
deliver "a few appropriate remarks" at the
dedication of that cemetery in Gettysburg, Abe
wrote those ever memorable 272 words himself
(though not in a moment and not evidently on the
back of an envelop). He did not, however, always
write his own speeches. Wills, for instance, gives
us stirring examples of how he edited passages
from secretary of state William Seward's suggested
conclusion to his inaugural address. This is
undoubtedly the preeminent example of presidential
editing (possibly of any editing) of which an
example is:
Seward: "The mystic chords
which, proceeding from so many battle-fields and
so many patriot graves, pass through all the
hearts and all the hearths in this broad continent
of ours, will yet harmonize in their ancient music
when breathed upon by the guardian angels of the
nation."
Lincoln's revision: "The mystic
chords of memory, stretching from every
battlefield and patriot grave, to every living
heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land,
will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again
touched, as surely as they will be, by the better
angels of our nature."
The first official
speechwriter to inhabit the White House, Judson
Welliver, only arrived on March 4, 1921 to serve
as "literary clerk" to President Warren Harding.
But over the years, the number of pages of
presidential speeches written by others has
soared, more than doubling, for instance, between
the Eisenhower White House of the 1950s and the
Bill Clinton White House of the 1990s. According
to the American presidency website, "The
contemporary White House is, in fact, a high-speed
prose factory."
That "literary clerk" soon
enough began to multiply and presidents came ever
more commonly to speak other people's words, even
ones with which they would forever be identified.
The authorship of John F Kennedy's most famous
line in his inaugural address - "Ask not what your
country can do for you - ask what you can do for
your country" - remains, for instance, in
question. (Of course, Kennedy was a man who
published a ghostwritten book under his own name -
and won the Pulitzer Prize for it!) Richard Nixon
reputedly relied heavily on speechwriters and yet
he also insisted on writing some of his most
important speeches himself, while Gerald Ford had
a "comedy advisor" named Don Penny.
But
the Republican revolution and the arrival of
Ronald Reagan in the White House clearly marked a
change in the nature of the presidency and of the
president. While Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter
had all been uncomfortable with (and on)
television - that crucial medium of the modern
presidency - Reagan was a professional actor who
had made his career in overlapping worlds of
mass-produced fiction (including an early radio
job broadcasting baseball games that arrived over
the telegraph wires, and which he reported as if
he were on the spot).
What was most
striking about Reagan's much praised (and
criticized) actorly "ease" - even his ease of
error - was the level of effort, planning, and
outright strain that surrounded it. Layers of
publicists, handlers, pollsters, and managers
worked to script his every step and word. By his
second term he had five full-time speech writers
on hand, and that didn't even include freelancers
like Parvin or the joke writers who were already
becoming as much a part of Washington as they were
of Hollywood.
Reagan seemed never to move
from his bedroom (where he relaxed in a world of
fiction, watching old movies) without the media
frame that public relations could construct around
him. As the memoirs of those who surrounded him
attest, he was not just a passive but a largely
absent personality. It was not hard for him to
believe anything about himself; that, for
instance, he had been away at war during World War
II (when he had never strayed far from Hollywood)
or that he had photographed the liberation of a
Nazi death camp. As a man who had trouble keeping
track of his own story, his context had to be
constantly manufactured for him.
It became
a cliche of the Reagan-Bush years to note that
never had so many political handlers and "spin
doctors" been so concerned to control the
presidential image of the moment as presented in
the media. For the first time, in the 1980s, the
various spin-doctors and handlers - the Roves of
that moment - became, if not the story, then a
kind of parallel story framing the presidential
one. The men who were creating the fiction of the
Reagan presidency were also gaining a certain news
parity with the man who was president without
somehow destroying the idea of the President
himself.
The media began to offer regular
glimpses of the framework of control for the
stories they were reporting - with Reagan, for
instance, the marks carefully chalked out by aides
to indicate where the president should stand for
the perfect photo opportunity. Similarly, in
election coverage, "spin doctors" began to appear
on TV as experts to analyze the spin they had just
put on an event, while reporters for the first
time discussed with a certain enthusiasm the
process of being spun. In this period - thank you,
Landon Parvin - sitcom Hollywood entered the mix
and instead of the president being mocked by his
enemies, he began, disarmingly, to mock himself.
("It's true hard work never killed anybody," went
a typical Parvin-written Reagan line, "but I
figure, why take the chance?")
Though the
coverage of the presidential handlers and spin
doctors sometimes passed for expose, how the
public was being controlled was less emphasized
than how their leaders and attendant publicists
were in control, how firm was their grasp on the
technology of presentation. At the same time that
an ever more elaborate market-research and
publicity apparatus had to be mobilized to
organize and sanitize what was on screen, the
presidential story, with life sucked out of it,
had to be bolstered by ever more elaborate special
effects. Think, to jump a couple of decades, of
George Bush's Top-Gun landing on the USS Abraham
Lincoln. This was the way the deadness lying at
the heart of the screen could be given a look of
life.
And yet, even Ronald Reagan could,
from time to time, take the word-reins in his
hands as when, in 1983, he tacked several
paragraphs onto a speech calling for greater
defense spending against a renewed Soviet threat.
He challenged the nation and the "scientific
community" ("those who gave us nuclear weapons")
to undertake a vast research and development
effort to create an "impermeable" anti-missile
shield in space that would render nuclear weapons
"impotent and obsolete". Thus, our first
"fictional" president took actual control of
events just long enough to create the purest
fantasy of defense - his Strategic Defense
Initiative or Star Wars anti-missile system - into
which we have ever since poured fruitless
multi-billions of perfectly real dollars.
In the meantime, vice presidents had
gotten their own speechwriting staffs (as the
elder Bush did - including Parvin from time to
time - when he was Reagan's VP); and so, for the
first time, did presidential wives. The first lady
has emerged as a political factor - and political
fiction - only in our own time. According to
historian of first-ladydom Lewis Gould, "It was
not until Lady Bird Johnson - and her mission to
beautify America - came along that the first lady
had a structured work environment, with a chief of
staff, press secretary and policy advisors." Now,
it's more or less a necessity for any first lady
to have such a mission and a burgeoning staff of
handlers, advisors, speechwriters and the like to
go with it. "Betty Ford is identified with the
fight against breast cancer and her support of the
Equal Rights Amendment. Rosalynn Carter chose
mental health as her issue. Nancy Reagan will be
remembered for her anti-drug crusade and Barbara
Bush for literary efforts." Laura Bush is now
establishing herself as the first lady responsible
for helping young men out of gangs. It's all, of
course, a kind of serial fiction.
On
being "humanized"
"Speechwriters are to the
man in the Oval Office what screenwriters are to
characters in a film. They're the ones who write
the lines - in the appropriate voice, of course.
After all, it's important to stay true to
character or the words just won't sound right" -
so writes Catherine Donaldson-Evans for,
appropriately enough, Fox News. And though she
concludes that, in the end, the speech is the
president's, not his speechwriter's, in certain
ways it may belong to neither of them.
Once upon a presidential time, before
radio and television, presidents simply didn't
give that many speeches (or, for instance, annual
State of the Union addresses). Now any "president"
produces thousands of pages of words a year, far
more than a single literary clerk could have
written. Daily at any passing event, on formal
occasions with Congress, in regular radio talks,
at state dinners and roasts, at national and local
disasters and celebrations, on the never-ending
campaign trail and in news conferences, the
president opens his mouth and words simply pour
out - even from someone like George Bush who is
known for his relative inarticulateness. And then
the president cranks himself up, or is cranked up,
and "he" does things, all of which represent the
globe's "lone superpower".
This is, almost
by definition, inhuman activity. It bears little
relation to what any individual anywhere else
would do. Acting this way, the president could
easily seem like an animatronic device and so he
constantly needs to be "humanized" - at which
point Laura is wheeled in. All of this - replete
with Hollywood-style putdowns and special effects
- has become second nature to us, the audience. We
have all become used to our fictional political
world without, largely, having come to grips with
it - least of all has the media that supposedly
reports to us in an unvarnished way on how it all
works.
But if George and Laura Bush would
under any circumstances be fictions of a sort (as
well as living, breathing human beings), the
nature of this presidency has clearly been pushed
to inhumanly fictional extremes. This president,
for instance, hardly has an unscripted public
moment. If there is one, as the other day in
Georgia when he stayed out an hour late for an
unscripted dinner with the Georgian president and
his wife - a (possibly scripted) "spontaneous
moment" - there was much press discussion of this.
After all, he normally never meets an unexpected
person with something challenging or unexpected to
say or does something outside the bubble. He lives
in a strangely inhuman way inside that bubble,
even as it is constantly being maintained for
"him". His is an extreme form of fiction, one then
imposed on the world. It's an altogether uncanny,
not to say unnerving, phenomenon that is now the
essence of our lives.
Tom
Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's Tomdispatch.com ("a regular
antidote to the mainstream media"), is the
co-founder of the American Empire Project and the
author of The End of Victory Culture, a
history of American triumphalism in the Cold
War.
(Many, though not all, of the
articles on Laura Bush's April 30 performance and
the response to it were first gathered by Dan
Froomkin in two columns at his invaluable
Washington Post online column, White House
Briefing. And, as so often, thanks go to Nick
Turse for research help of all sorts.)
(Copyright 2005 Tom Engelhardt)
Published with permission of TomDispatch.com |
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