BushSpeak
BUSHSPEAK by PHILIP GOUREVITCH
New Yorker Issue of 2004-09-13
...
[George W. Bush, in a speech at Las Cruces, NM] just declared the past four years a success, and said that more and better was to come. What was the alternative? John Kerry? Bush spends a good deal of time on the stump deriding his rival, and the rest of the time he projects the attitude of a man who is running unopposed—which he could be forgiven for thinking if the election depended simply on who is the better campaigner.
Bush campaigns with the eager self-delight of a natural ham. There’s an appealing physicality about him. When he says he wants your vote, he does not just mouth the words but follows them through with his entire body, rising to his toes, tilting toward you yearningly. When he works his way along the edge of the stage, waving, shaking hands, he has the concentration of an athlete in the thrall of his game. He seems to hold nothing back. He reaches for the hands around him, tipping so far forward that it appears, in the frozen fraction of a second captured in photographs, that he has lost his balance. He twists, and stoops, and spins, and stops abruptly to wave, and the raised hand seems to lift the rest of him with it, up and forward. Bush is said to be charming, and polls show that Americans tend to find him more likable than his policies, but one does not even have to like him to admire how truly at home he appears in his body.
He has a repertoire of stock poses and expressions, as does any professional performer, but the freedom of his movements is striking. Flip through snapshots of him, and you’ll find any number that catch him in a bizarre or comical position. The mobility of his face leaves him open to lampooning, not least because of its simian modelling, which is underscored by his affectation of an equally simian gait—the dangle-armed swagger, like a knuckle-walker startled to find himself suddenly upright. But even when he looks foolish, or simply coarse, Bush is never less than an expressive presence.
The same can be said of his language. He is grossly underestimated as an orator by those who presume that good grammar, rigorous logic, and a solid command of the facts are the essential ingredients of political persuasion, and that the absence of these skills indicates a lack of intelligence. Although Bush is no intellectual, and proud of it, he is quick and clever, and, for all his notorious malapropisms, abuses of syntax, and manglings or reinventions of vocabulary, his intelligence is—if not especially literate—acutely verbal.
...
His speeches rely on the same stagger-stacking of phrases and refrains that characterizes popular songs and sermons. ... He is nothing if not insistent.
The best sendup of Bushspeak was published by the Washington Post cartoonist Tom Toles this spring. It was a drawing called “George W. Bush Press Conference Refrigerator Magnet Set,” and showed an icebox door arrayed with a patchwork of words and phrases: “I want to say / I mean / clearly / the situation was / a / tough week / tough / dangerous / because the / terror / terrorism / threat was / a nation / that was dangerous / because of / weapons / programs / activities / we’re still looking / but even / though / I was briefed / a lot / steadfast / and strong / about / historical / killer / terrorist / suiciders / who would / fly it into buildings / which was / a gathering threat / in / easy hindsight / that / empty words / would embolden / dangerous people / hidden in a turkey farm / where / I was tired of swatting flies / so / I want to be clear.”
...
Bush’s performance on the stump is more a rap than a speech, a sequence of talking points strung together by applause lines. In style and substance, his discourse is saturated in churchiness: he touts the rights of the unborn, pooh-poohs same-sex marriage, speaks of marshalling the “armies of compassion” and transforming America into a “culture of responsibility” and an “ownership society” by changing “one heart and soul, one conscience at a time.” But, for all his God talk, he is remarkably lacking in humility. No fault, no blame, no regret, no room for shame attends him as he goes about changing the world. Nor does he appear to entertain the possibility that the changes he is imposing could be anything but improvements. To hear him tell it, the economy is terrific, public education is thriving, health care is better than ever, terrorists are on the run, democracy is spreading throughout the Middle East, and everywhere America is living up to what he describes as its “calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom.” Because Bush does not appear able to recognize his own errors, much less admit them, he is incapable of self-correction. Indeed, he boasts tirelessly of his resolve and steadfastness, making a virtue of rigidity. Like it or lump it. [Emphasis added]
[When I despair of the dirty tone this campaign has established - on both sides - I was so glad to have read the following...]
Bush’s motorcade withdrew to Las Cruces’s tiny desert airfield at mid-morning; he was off to give the same performance at rallies in Farmington and Albuquerque before flying home to the White House for the night. Not far from Air Force One, on the tarmac, a Kerry-Edwards campaign plane waited for John Edwards, who was holding a rally at noon in the historic town square of Mesilla, just a few miles from where the Bush crowd was dispersing. The last time that Republican and Democratic rallies coincided in Mesilla, in August of 1871, sharp whiskey and sharp words resulted in brawls and gunplay that left nine men dead and as many as fifty wounded. The memory of that massacre provides a heartening reminder that there is a good deal of both hype and plain ignorance behind the claim, widely upheld among the political classes this year, that we are in the throes of the bitterest, most polarizing electoral contest in American history. Sure, as both the Bush and the Kerry camps keep saying, much is at stake. Sure, the race has become plenty ugly. But what makes it most discouraging is not the divisiveness but the falseness and the foolishness of so much of the debate—and, thus far, it is Bush, the self-styled heir to such great statesmen as Churchill and Truman, who has contributed most to lowering the tone.
Four years ago, Bush ran for President as a champion of compassion at home and humility abroad. After the September 11th attacks, he recast himself as a man of action, a warrior, whose basic message to the world is: They messed with the wrong guy. In a video clip shown at the Republican Convention, he said, “I think the best part of this job is to set in motion big changes of history—it’s unbelievably exciting to be in a position to do that.” He has done so by force of arms, and also by force of words. For Bush, rhetoric is reality, and he operates as if things were as he says they are. If reality does not conform, he remains undeterred, and on message—as with his insistence that even if he’d known that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he would have invaded and occupied the place anyway. Indeed, as his Presidency has progressed, and his policies have failed to create the circumstances he has proclaimed—whether in regard to the economy, education, prescription drugs, the hunt for Osama bin Laden, nation-building in Afghanistan, or war and occupation in Iraq—the gap between his grandiose, self-glorifying rhetoric and our anxious and unsettling reality has grown steadily wider.
...
It is not apparent that most Americans think of themselves as living in a nation at war, or that a sense of being engaged in a struggle to the death with an unseen but all-threatening enemy is the defining political experience of our time. But that has been the premise of the Bush presidency since the day when, as he insists on putting it, “everything changed,” and that was the dominant theme of the Bush Convention.
...
[In concluding the Republican Convention] out came all the kids and grandkids, and, love them or hate them, everybody watching seemed to agree that the Republicans had just had a hell of a successful Convention.
Of course, the same was said about the Democrats a month earlier. But Bush and his crew had pretty much wiped away Kerry’s advantage, even before they gathered in New York. They had fought him dirty, with the lying Swift Boat Veterans’ ads, and they’d fought him mean, caricaturing and taunting him, jabbing and lashing at him with sharp tongues. They’d ganged up and piled on, and they’d made no apologies. In fact, they’d enjoyed every minute of it.
“Some folks look at me and see a certain swagger, which in Texas is called walking,” Bush said at the Garden. “Now and then, I come across as a little too blunt—and for that we can all thank the white-haired lady sitting up there.” He indicated his mother. That was the joke in his speech, the self-deprecating part, but the President wasn’t kidding. Kicking ass is just his nature. And, while he had been effectively tied with or trailing his challenger all year, and still was behind on many issues and in many states, an early post-Convention poll showed him opening a national lead beyond the margin of error.
Even so, both candidates must now recognize that neither of them inspires any great enthusiasm in a majority of the electorate. Neither can expect to win on his merits. Rather, for each the best hope is to make the other one lose—and, for the moment at least, Bush had succeeded in turning a referendum on himself into a referendum on the other guy. [All emphasis added]
New Yorker Issue of 2004-09-13
...
[George W. Bush, in a speech at Las Cruces, NM] just declared the past four years a success, and said that more and better was to come. What was the alternative? John Kerry? Bush spends a good deal of time on the stump deriding his rival, and the rest of the time he projects the attitude of a man who is running unopposed—which he could be forgiven for thinking if the election depended simply on who is the better campaigner.
Bush campaigns with the eager self-delight of a natural ham. There’s an appealing physicality about him. When he says he wants your vote, he does not just mouth the words but follows them through with his entire body, rising to his toes, tilting toward you yearningly. When he works his way along the edge of the stage, waving, shaking hands, he has the concentration of an athlete in the thrall of his game. He seems to hold nothing back. He reaches for the hands around him, tipping so far forward that it appears, in the frozen fraction of a second captured in photographs, that he has lost his balance. He twists, and stoops, and spins, and stops abruptly to wave, and the raised hand seems to lift the rest of him with it, up and forward. Bush is said to be charming, and polls show that Americans tend to find him more likable than his policies, but one does not even have to like him to admire how truly at home he appears in his body.
He has a repertoire of stock poses and expressions, as does any professional performer, but the freedom of his movements is striking. Flip through snapshots of him, and you’ll find any number that catch him in a bizarre or comical position. The mobility of his face leaves him open to lampooning, not least because of its simian modelling, which is underscored by his affectation of an equally simian gait—the dangle-armed swagger, like a knuckle-walker startled to find himself suddenly upright. But even when he looks foolish, or simply coarse, Bush is never less than an expressive presence.
The same can be said of his language. He is grossly underestimated as an orator by those who presume that good grammar, rigorous logic, and a solid command of the facts are the essential ingredients of political persuasion, and that the absence of these skills indicates a lack of intelligence. Although Bush is no intellectual, and proud of it, he is quick and clever, and, for all his notorious malapropisms, abuses of syntax, and manglings or reinventions of vocabulary, his intelligence is—if not especially literate—acutely verbal.
...
His speeches rely on the same stagger-stacking of phrases and refrains that characterizes popular songs and sermons. ... He is nothing if not insistent.
The best sendup of Bushspeak was published by the Washington Post cartoonist Tom Toles this spring. It was a drawing called “George W. Bush Press Conference Refrigerator Magnet Set,” and showed an icebox door arrayed with a patchwork of words and phrases: “I want to say / I mean / clearly / the situation was / a / tough week / tough / dangerous / because the / terror / terrorism / threat was / a nation / that was dangerous / because of / weapons / programs / activities / we’re still looking / but even / though / I was briefed / a lot / steadfast / and strong / about / historical / killer / terrorist / suiciders / who would / fly it into buildings / which was / a gathering threat / in / easy hindsight / that / empty words / would embolden / dangerous people / hidden in a turkey farm / where / I was tired of swatting flies / so / I want to be clear.”
...
Bush’s performance on the stump is more a rap than a speech, a sequence of talking points strung together by applause lines. In style and substance, his discourse is saturated in churchiness: he touts the rights of the unborn, pooh-poohs same-sex marriage, speaks of marshalling the “armies of compassion” and transforming America into a “culture of responsibility” and an “ownership society” by changing “one heart and soul, one conscience at a time.” But, for all his God talk, he is remarkably lacking in humility. No fault, no blame, no regret, no room for shame attends him as he goes about changing the world. Nor does he appear to entertain the possibility that the changes he is imposing could be anything but improvements. To hear him tell it, the economy is terrific, public education is thriving, health care is better than ever, terrorists are on the run, democracy is spreading throughout the Middle East, and everywhere America is living up to what he describes as its “calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom.” Because Bush does not appear able to recognize his own errors, much less admit them, he is incapable of self-correction. Indeed, he boasts tirelessly of his resolve and steadfastness, making a virtue of rigidity. Like it or lump it. [Emphasis added]
[When I despair of the dirty tone this campaign has established - on both sides - I was so glad to have read the following...]
Bush’s motorcade withdrew to Las Cruces’s tiny desert airfield at mid-morning; he was off to give the same performance at rallies in Farmington and Albuquerque before flying home to the White House for the night. Not far from Air Force One, on the tarmac, a Kerry-Edwards campaign plane waited for John Edwards, who was holding a rally at noon in the historic town square of Mesilla, just a few miles from where the Bush crowd was dispersing. The last time that Republican and Democratic rallies coincided in Mesilla, in August of 1871, sharp whiskey and sharp words resulted in brawls and gunplay that left nine men dead and as many as fifty wounded. The memory of that massacre provides a heartening reminder that there is a good deal of both hype and plain ignorance behind the claim, widely upheld among the political classes this year, that we are in the throes of the bitterest, most polarizing electoral contest in American history. Sure, as both the Bush and the Kerry camps keep saying, much is at stake. Sure, the race has become plenty ugly. But what makes it most discouraging is not the divisiveness but the falseness and the foolishness of so much of the debate—and, thus far, it is Bush, the self-styled heir to such great statesmen as Churchill and Truman, who has contributed most to lowering the tone.
Four years ago, Bush ran for President as a champion of compassion at home and humility abroad. After the September 11th attacks, he recast himself as a man of action, a warrior, whose basic message to the world is: They messed with the wrong guy. In a video clip shown at the Republican Convention, he said, “I think the best part of this job is to set in motion big changes of history—it’s unbelievably exciting to be in a position to do that.” He has done so by force of arms, and also by force of words. For Bush, rhetoric is reality, and he operates as if things were as he says they are. If reality does not conform, he remains undeterred, and on message—as with his insistence that even if he’d known that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, he would have invaded and occupied the place anyway. Indeed, as his Presidency has progressed, and his policies have failed to create the circumstances he has proclaimed—whether in regard to the economy, education, prescription drugs, the hunt for Osama bin Laden, nation-building in Afghanistan, or war and occupation in Iraq—the gap between his grandiose, self-glorifying rhetoric and our anxious and unsettling reality has grown steadily wider.
...
It is not apparent that most Americans think of themselves as living in a nation at war, or that a sense of being engaged in a struggle to the death with an unseen but all-threatening enemy is the defining political experience of our time. But that has been the premise of the Bush presidency since the day when, as he insists on putting it, “everything changed,” and that was the dominant theme of the Bush Convention.
...
[In concluding the Republican Convention] out came all the kids and grandkids, and, love them or hate them, everybody watching seemed to agree that the Republicans had just had a hell of a successful Convention.
Of course, the same was said about the Democrats a month earlier. But Bush and his crew had pretty much wiped away Kerry’s advantage, even before they gathered in New York. They had fought him dirty, with the lying Swift Boat Veterans’ ads, and they’d fought him mean, caricaturing and taunting him, jabbing and lashing at him with sharp tongues. They’d ganged up and piled on, and they’d made no apologies. In fact, they’d enjoyed every minute of it.
“Some folks look at me and see a certain swagger, which in Texas is called walking,” Bush said at the Garden. “Now and then, I come across as a little too blunt—and for that we can all thank the white-haired lady sitting up there.” He indicated his mother. That was the joke in his speech, the self-deprecating part, but the President wasn’t kidding. Kicking ass is just his nature. And, while he had been effectively tied with or trailing his challenger all year, and still was behind on many issues and in many states, an early post-Convention poll showed him opening a national lead beyond the margin of error.
Even so, both candidates must now recognize that neither of them inspires any great enthusiasm in a majority of the electorate. Neither can expect to win on his merits. Rather, for each the best hope is to make the other one lose—and, for the moment at least, Bush had succeeded in turning a referendum on himself into a referendum on the other guy. [All emphasis added]
posted by John Bernat @ 2:21 PM
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