- Saint George -- Rallying around a wartime president
is one thing. But why does Dubya remain entirely untouchable even as we
question his lieutenants -- and his increasingly disturbing
policies?
-
-
- To get the willies from George W. Bush, to distrust the
man, to have your stomach roll a bit when you hear him speak, is to feel
like the most churlish and sullen of adolescents. He's the unappealing
uncle -- with his cold eye on you -- whose house you're stuck at this
holiday
season. While you're trying to shut out his existence, everybody else is
sucking up to him.
-
- If you knew it was just pretend, just a holiday bit --
everybody being phony and polite -- you could handle it; the problem is
in thinking that all this affability, this undisaffected appreciation for
the guy, is honest feeling on everyone else's part. What if 85 percent
of the American people actually, deep in their hearts, approve of him --
dig him? What does that say about you and where you fit in?
-
- Certainly the wash of Bush boosterism is broad enough
- and backed by a militant core - for most cautious citizens not to want
to tangle with it. Criticism is as bottled up as perhaps it's ever been
about an American president (Bush is more sacrosanct three months after
September 11 than FDR was three months after Pearl Harbor).
-
- His natural antagonists are treading carefully,
proceeding
gingerly, going out of the way to praise him -- even while trying to
criticize
him. For instance, Frank Rich's scraping bow to "George W. Bush's
nuanced and so far effective prosecution of the war" on the Times
op-ed page as he criticized John Ashcroft's sweeping new legal approach
to the war, as though Bush and Ashcroft were separate parts of
government.
-
- To question George W. Bush, or doubt him, or take him
on, is not only to put yourself on the wrong side of the war effort --
a winning one -- but, it seems more and more, to run against the grain
of a new, tidal, transforming, tonal shift. Buck Bush and you buck the
era, buddy.
-
- He may still seem like a cipher -- that inexpressiveness
of his must trouble even his greatest admirers -- but it is hard not to
face the fact that he occupies an amazing amount of psychic space. And
he gets larger and larger. The less expressive he is, or the simpler that
expression becomes -- the aggrieved man; Osama has offended him -- the
larger he gets.
-
- The space he occupies is far greater than just policy
or politics (Clinton, for instance, may never have transcended either).
He's casting a new kind of Stepford spell, which nobody wants to try to
break. He's rising to Republican-archetype stature -- as potentially large
as Reagan and Eisenhower. If you took on Reagan, you were taking on
optimism;
if you took on Eisenhower, you were taking on prosperity, serenity even.
If you take on Bush, you take on . . . well, we don't exactly know what
yet. He's large and ever-expanding, but still a muddle.
-
- Reagan and Eisenhower were immediate, palpable. In each
case, there was the smile. The message was clear: Lie back, feel good,
be well, don't worry. Bush, however, seems much the opposite. Not least
of all, he has no smile -- or the smile is so furtive and twitching and
scary that it's clearly sending a different message. Instead of that
special
sort of Republican father-figure embrace, there's a remoteness, an absence,
something strict and ungenerous (war has given us the flip side of his
boyish inattention).
-
- Who is he?
-
- What is he feeling, or trying to tell us he's feeling?
What does he want us to feel? What's the message?
-
- So far his message is limited to vigilance. Evil is what
we're up against -- we must do what we must do.
-
- Vigilance is a good mode for Bush. It doesn't require
a smile. Nor does it require much of an explanation. In this mode, you
don't have to begin to contemplate the equivocal nature of different sorts
of threats, or the relative costs of defending against each variety of
threat, or even the failures of vigilance that might have exposed us to
attack. You are either with us or against us. (He embodies the threat.
He doesn't even have to specify what might happen to a recalcitrant Saddam:
"He'll find out.") Implacability, determination, total grit,
and homeland security are the coin of the realm. It doesn't take a genius
to be vigilant, only a righteous man. The world is a dangerous, but not
a complicated, place.
-
- His affect is unrelieved grimness.
-
- Grimness is not a standard, or popular, affect in the
political bag of tricks. The usual political tactic is to try to relieve
grimness, to suggest reasons for optimism. There are, however, various
reasons why grimness works for Bush -- why it's an effective melding of
man and countenance.
-
- You have, behind the grimness, the moral force of the
5,000 or 4,000 or 3,000 who have died. If you are not naturally a
sentimentalist
-- as, for instance, Giuliani turns out to be -- then grimness is a good
fallback. Bush is a certain type at a funeral. Whereas Clinton would have
gone for the inspirational, Bush is the stone-faced Protestant (which plays
nationally -- Rudy may be too Catholic in his mourning to play in the South
and West). His bereftness is rigid, hard, stoic. This gives weight to his
lightweightness. He's a playground bully cleaned up for church. Indeed,
when he shifts out of his grim character, he returns to his fecklessness
(inappropriate body language, weird discomfort, verbal tics).
-
- There are other advantages to grimness: It cuts off petty
squabbles, underlying antagonisms, and cleverer points of view. Grimness,
in its suggestion of a dire situation, of even a hopeless one, makes it
pretty difficult to take issue. What's more, grim is kind of noble. He's
Churchill Lite (very Lite).
-
- He's found a groove.
-
- What is said is that he has stepped up to the role. The
circumstances have made him. Adversity has transformed him.
-
- Where before he was coming undone in all but the most
scripted public settings -- he wasn't just verbally maladroit but
emotionally
way off the mark -- the need for constant vigilance in an age of unrelieved
grimness flatters his limited emotional and verbal range. He's at ease
in this posture. He is good at being resolute, unwavering -- indeed, the
less he says, the better. The world is a bad place -- no surprise that
good and evil are at it again. It is a comfortable, even natural, role
for a reformed alcoholic and born-again man.
-
- As he grows into his new role, the policy manifestations
of vigilance and grimness become clearer: mass detentions, interrogation
sweeps, suspension of due process, military tribunals.
-
- The mounting discomfort with all this dire reaction,
or overreaction, has not rubbed off on the president.
-
- It is a striking triumph of affect. It's not fear --
you can feel that abate. It's deeper than that: We are changed people
accepting
the world's changed conditions. Life is different now. Fuck 'em.
-
- There is, possibly, no more advantageous condition for
a politician than a changed world. The opportunity here is that you, the
politician, can come to represent the change. This is "before and
after" stuff. There's no going back. The new reality is yours to
fashion.
-
- The world is as it is -- deal with it.
-
- This will require -- constant vigilance requires --
broader
controls, stricter authority, Rummy, Cheney, and this Reich-sounding
homeland
business.
-
- What's more, it forces a personality mutation. We are
all suddenly nice. We are all solid citizens. We are all cowed. We are
all for unity now -- disharmony itself is a sin. And unity is necessarily
something that embraces all symbols of unity, including the president.
The norm may have never been so strong.
-
- This could be big. This could be the culture
shift.
-
- It's possible that Bush -- the strong, implacable,
unremitting
Bush, canonized in public opinion -- can accomplish the kind of vast,
ungenerous,
white-bread, retro, wagons-circled, near-Orwellian agenda the Republicans
have been dreaming about for years.
-
- The trick here for the Bush people is to stifle not the
objections -- let the lefties and the Europeans object -- but the jokes.
He is, with the slightest deconstruction, quite a comic-book figure. The
line between courageous sentinel and big dork is a relatively thin
one.
-
- The worst thing for the Republican agenda would be for
George W. to go back to being the butt boy of late-night television.
-
- Surely it must be disconcerting that the son is at
exactly
the same place the father was: enormous popularity at the end of a nearly
casualty-less war. The thing is, a warrior type tends to look ludicrous
when the war is over -- especially these modern air wars, which are over
as fast as they have started. It's hard to straddle being a strict,
button-down
war guy and an expansive, let-the-good-times-roll peace guy.
-
- Plus, war leaves you with recession. War, which gets
you big-time approval numbers, sucks when it comes to consumer confidence.
Or worse, the formula could be a BUSH + WAR = RECESSION. Both father and
son, in their crabbedness, their old-shoeness, their lack of big-picture
grandness, may be recessionary personalities.
-
- Let's assume this is what the best minds at the White
House are thinking, too: We are where the old man was, so how do we not
go where he went? It would sound overly cynical (even to me) to say that
the secret lies in creating a permanent state of vigilance and grimness.
Or to claim that Bush might even have his own agenda for pursuing this
new generational, saga-like, phase-after-phase war.
-
- And yet it doesn't have to be cynical. This belief in
a general state of perpetual peril -- of evil and goodness in a
never-ending
dust-up -- can be heartfelt. Not only because it works so well for him
but because the dystopian view fits him and a lot of Republicans -- they
loved that Cold War, after all. The Bush grimace comes from the
heart.
-
- We are going deeper into bad times, in a hostile world,
under rigid laws. It will get grimmer yet, until somebody starts making
fun of this stiff. Fortunately, we're a nation with a lot of sniggering
adolescents.
-
- __________________
-
-
- michael@burnrate.com
From New York Magazine
December 10, 2001
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