Posted on 06/21/2002 7:45:01 PM PDT by gcruse
Bush is no intellectual, but at least he is trying
By Zoe Heller
There's always been a fundamental ambivalence in Bush's attitude towards book-learning. On the one hand, he manifests the swaggering anti-intellectualism of the good ole boy. "There's book wisdom and there's practical wisdom," he will boast - making it clear that only the latter is of interest to a manly man such as himself.
Speaking of his alma mater, Yale, and his fellow Yalie William Buckley, he will observe facetiously: "He wrote a book there and I read one." This is the frat boy revelling in his own limitations - Ha-dee ha ha. I got an F on my term paper; now bring on another keg.
But this isn't the whole story. Bush - or at least his handlers - have signalled some clear ambitions to overcoming his reputation as a dunce. In a recent book about the 2000 presidential campaign, the journalist Frank Bruni notes that Bush is, in fact, "a steady consumer of books".
According to Bruni, he favours best-selling, non-fiction door-stops: biography, history, politics. Last summer he read a biography of John Adams. By Christmas, he was deep into Edmund Morris's Theodore Rex. Shortly after September 11, he was seen toting about Jay Winik's April 1865: The Month That Saved America. On a recent trip to Moscow, he branched out into literature, when Condoleezza Rice gave him a copy of Crime and Punishment.
And last Friday, just before the President delivered the commencement address at Ohio State University, the White House press corps was told that the President would be basing his public service theme on "ideas anchored in great religious teachings and the thinking of the ancient Greeks and Romans and in the principles of the founding fathers".
John Bridgeland, the director of the USA Freedom Corps, went on to tell reporters that the President had "derived" his thoughts on duty, charity, human fulfilment and so on, from Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith, Aristotle, Pope John Paul II, Cicero, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, William Wordsworth and "the world's major religions".
This list of sources elicited a certain amount of snickering from the press corps. One reporter questioned whether Mr Bush had actually read any de Tocqueville. Mr Bridgeland tartly assured him that he had. "The President and I have actually discussed Nichomachean Ethics together," he volunteered. "Yesterday he [the President] was talking in the Oval Office about how Lincoln had completed or addressed the concern that the founding fathers had when - Madison, in particular - when he rejected Patrick Henry's request to include a declaration of rights in addition, because of the concern that future generations would not remember that there are duties associated with protecting the country we love so much. He made that very case yesterday in the Oval Office."
Clearly, none of the journalists present found this vignette of intellectual cut and thrust in the Oval Office very convincing. As soon as the press conference was over, they all rushed back to their desks to write satirical squibs for the next day's papers on the subject of Bush, the Philosopher President.
"W. has come a long, long way," Maureen Dowd noted in her New York Times column. "His main cultural reference point used to be Cats. What is going on?"
This sort of mockery is understandable up to a point. Bush has done almost nothing to encourage our faith in his mind. Lest we forget, this is a man who once proposed The Very Hungry Caterpillar as his favourite book of all time. This is a man who became incensed and accused an American reporter of trying to act "intercontinental" when the fellow in question dared to speak French to the French president at a press conference. This is a man who recently asked Brazil's President Cardoso: "Do you have blacks, too?"
Even so, there is something distinctly queasy-making about the kind of snootiness and condescension that Bush inspires among reporters. It reminds me of the anxious, breathlessly competitive spirit in which a certain kind of undergraduate used to sit around playing "I've Never Read" when I was at college. ("I've Never Read" was a game in which participants confessed which canonical works of literature they had never read; the winner was the person who came up with the most surprising or outrageous omission.)
"I've never read Keats's letters to Fanny Burney!" someone would trill and everyone would chortle in amazement. "I've never read To the Lighthouse!" someone else would offer, prompting further amazement and hilarity. "I've never read Macbeth," one poor girl would finally pipe up and the room would fall silent. "Reeally?" everyone would murmur with downcast eyes.
One of the unforeseen effects of the Bush presidency, it seems, has been an explosion of largely unearned intellectual superiority among third-rate, chippy journos. Unwittingly, the President has provided dim hacks across the world with unprecedented feelings of empowerment.
These reporters might not do so well on a pop quiz about the Nichomachean Ethics themselves, but every last one of them feels qualified to take a pop at the straw target that is dimbo Dubya. The kind of reporters who are still crouching in wait for the President to say "uninalienable" are pretty low-rent figures, if truth be told. Anyone genuinely smart concluded some time ago that spotting presidential solecisms was shooting fish in a barrel and applied themselves to something more challenging.
Yes, it does seem unlikely that Bush has ever cuddled up with Emily Dickinson's poems or George Eliot's novels - much less deduced public policy tips from them - but perhaps we ought not to punish the public relations fiction quite so harshly.
Literacy rates are not so fabulous that Americans can afford to dismiss even phoney intellectual aspirations. Even if he's faking it, Bush's enthusiasm for Aristotle sends out a more laudable message than his drawling philistinism.
It is a shame that he read Crime and Punishment at 50. I guess better do it at 50, than never.
I am totally confused. Is Mr Bridgeland trying to imply that Tocqueville wrote Nicomachean Ethics?
Rock On!!!!
Anyone know if this is true? I suspect not - it sounds too much like the "quote" attributed to Dan Quayle before he ventured south of the border, something to the effect of:
"Gee, since I'm headed to Latin America I had better practice my Latin so that I can speak to the natives."
In other words, it's something the cartoonish W who lives only in liberal's heads (and Gary Trudeau comics) would say.
By any chance don't you mean Kiste? Whatever language kiester or keister is supposed to be it's not German
Actually she's not bad looking.
So why is it still being posted?
Zoe sounds a bit third-rate, chippy herself, not to mention having “feelings of empowerment”, leading her to no doubt seek “unearned intellectual superiority”:
Literacy rates are not so fabulous that Americans can afford to dismiss even phoney intellectual aspirations. Even if he's faking it, Bush's enthusiasm for Aristotle sends out a more laudable message than his drawling philistinism.
What a “phoney”.
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