President Job: For George W. Bush, the Prince Hal analogy will no longer do.

He stood there Saturday afternoon at the lectern in the White House cabinet room, with another crushing announcement to make to the American people. For George W. Bush, this kind of scenario has become almost as familiar as breathing. Where once a nation wondered how he would react to bad news, it now seems that bad news and Bush are on intimate terms.

Last week, Matt Drudge ran side-by-side photos of Bush from 2000 and Bush from this year. The men in the pictures look at least 10 years apart in age. It wasn't just the gray; it was the transformation of the face, from the brightness of a man who seemed to spend a lot of time outdoors to the sunken severity of a man with the gravest of cares. In the later picture, the presence of joy on the face of one who has found much of it in life was absent. Suffering has replaced it.

Those who dislike this president will scoff at that idea. George W. Bush, suffering? He is too shallow to suffer. He will always be Frat Boy Bush to them, or Cowboy Bush, or any number of variations.

Not all the variations are so cartoonish. Some are more cultivated, even flattering. The most common and well-worn by now casts Bush as Prince Hal from Shakespeare's Henry IV, the playboy prince who shrugs off his birthright and duties to the kingdom, preferring to drink and carouse with the Elizabethan equivalents of frat boys and slackers. That is, until the moment of truth beckons him to rise to his obligations and meet the challenges of his father's world. "I shall hereafter…be more myself," he tells the king. And so he is.

This metaphor for George W. Bush -- the carefree son of a powerful father who spent most of his life shrugging off seriousness -- was given considerable play after September 11, and it made some sense. For many, Bush's impromptu talk at Ground Zero, or his speech before Congress on September 20, 2001, or any number of other episodes, qualified as his "Prince Hal moment." And the Prince Hal analogy had meaning for Bush critics as well; they could use it to measure his progress and assess whether he had really risen to the point where such a comparison was warranted. Needless to say, most of them still feel he hasn't.

But after the Columbia disaster, the Prince Hal analogy seems increasingly irrelevant, even small. Bush's presidential trials have moved far beyond mid-life crises or belated coming of age stories. His is a presidency filled almost entirely with darkness and foreboding. It's gotten to the point where his emergencies only pull him from one dark subject to another. When the news hit on September 11, he was still in the Clinton era, reading to schoolchildren; when the news came Saturday, he was working on Iraq.

The longer it proceeds along this course, the most fitting analogue for Bush's presidency may not be in Shakespeare but in a source closer to the president's heart: the Bible. On Saturday, he quoted from Isaiah: "Lift your eyes and look to the heavens. Who created all these? He who brings out the starry hosts one by one and calls them each by name. Because of His great power and mighty strength, not one of them is missing." The words were appropriate to the event, but Bush's experiences in the Oval Office seem less akin to Isaiah and closer to those of Job, one of the darkest and most mysterious figures in all of literature.

Job, the faithful servant of God, has property, prosperity, and a beautiful family. His is the story of a complete reversal of fortune at the hands of God, and his own efforts to understand his predicament. From a position of safety and comfort, he travels to the darkest depths of sorrow and despair: "I have no peace nor ease; I have no rest, for trouble comes!" And no matter how deeply he desires to understand what has happened, explanations are denied him. God's only response to Job's pleas is to remind him that he is mortal and cannot understand the ways of the almighty.

TO BE SURE, BUSH SHOWS NO SIGNS of despairing, and his faith appears to have only deepened in the crucible of his presidency. He has not had his wealth and possessions and children taken from him, as Job did; he has not been afflicted with diseases, as Job was. If Prince Hal has become too small for Bush, Job is probably still too large.

But then look again -- look at the sense of personal ease that Bush brought with him into the White House; look, too, at the ease most Americans felt just two years ago. Bush has not lost his self-confidence, but his demeanor is a far cry from the lightness he once carried. Gone too, is the easy optimism of Americans, replaced with a most unfamiliar question: "My God, what next?"

Over the last two years, our comfortable illusions of safety have come crashing down around us. Sitting in the White House as the sky has fallen is a man who was once as comfortable -- and many say, as cocky -- as prosperity could warrant. His life before the White House was something of a shrine to safety. Even when he took risks, like going into the oil business, he was buttressed by family fortune and connections. He was never going to be on the outside looking in. For many, his life of privilege was reason enough to vote against him (Al Gore's life of privilege didn't figure in their calculus). When he reached the White House, it seemed the culmination of a life in which everything had been handed to him.

Except for one thing: the presidency isn't a sinecure, and it isn't the place to be if one wants safety. Now, George W. Bush is as alone as any president of recent times. In Bob Woodward's Bush at War , Laura Bush tells of waking up in the middle of the night in the White House and knowing, without looking over, that her husband is awake beside her. This is the kind of confession, of course, that her husband would never make himself, but there it is. Most of us have some experience with jobs that keep us staring at the ceiling at 3 AM; but none of us has Bush's job.

Bush has become an eloquent, powerful conveyor of loss and the fragility that is at the core of life. People wondered if he had the intellect to be president; others wondered whether he had the character. He has proven to have both, but the hinge of his presidency is spirit. He has become deeply acquainted with sorrow, wearing it now in his face, weighing it in his words.

One of the great mysteries about loss is how it often acts to buttress faith, when one might expect it to do the opposite. Among the many mysteries at the heart of the Job story is Job's deepened faith in God at the end, after he has been so cruelly punished. Having gotten no satisfactory answer to his questions, only a reminder that God is immense and inscrutable, Job finds strange consolation in God's power:

I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be hindered. I have dealt with great things that I do not understand; Things too wonderful for me, Which I cannot know. I had heard of you by word of mouth, But now my eye has seen you.

Watching the man in the cabinet room last Saturday, one couldn't help but compare his steadiness, his almost eerie calm, to the shaken and uncertain president in the immediate hours after September 11. Somewhere between then and now, perhaps, George W. Bush found his own consolations.

"If You Wanna Git Bill Clinton...!!"
(To be sung to the Ozark Mountain Daredevils' "If You Wanna Get To Heaven...")

(Mudboy on harp...)

I never read it in the papers...I never saw it on the news...
I heard it on Rush Limbaugh...on AM radio...
If you hate the Waco Slaughter...
You gotta help MUD fer a spell!!
If you wanna git Bill Clinton...
We gotta RAISE A LOTTA HELL!!! Yeah...

I am...therefore, I FReep!!
Folks, I feel it in my soul...
Won'tcha meet me at the Cap'tol?!
Re-Impeach!! We'll reach our goal!!
If you wanna know a secret...
You got to promise not to tell!!
Right's gonna Re-Impeach Bill Clinton...
We're gonna put Slick in a cell!! HELL YEAH!!!

(MUD harpin' like the dickens!!!)

I never thought it'd be this easy...
I never thought it'd be this fun...
But we FReeped Truth on Rush Limbaugh...
Now, we got Slick on the run!!
If you fear FReedom's in danger...
You gotta help WHUP RATS' AlphaMale!!
Folks, WE're Gonna Git Bill Clinton...
We'll Dethrone Slick's Soul to HELL!!!

(MUD harpin' fer his dinner!!!)

Folks, we're gonna git Bill Clinton...
FReepers, gonna git Bill Clinton!!!
Gonna send Slick straight to Prison!!!
Folks, it's SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS!!!!

FReegards, all...MUD

"No man can know what power he can call rightly his unless he presses a little."
Robert Frost, notebook entry, 1913

1 Posted on 08/07/2000 21:11:04 PDT by Mudboy Slim ('Cuz Justice is worth fightin' fer!!)

Carrying the "Prince Hal" idea a little further, we have the reformed Hal becoming Henry V ...

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KING HENRY V, Act 4, Scene 3
Gloucester: Where is the King?
Bedford: The King himself is rode to view their battle.
Westmoreland: Of fighting men, they have full three-score thousand.
Exeter: There’s five to one; besides, they all are fresh.
Salisbury: God’s arm strike with us! ‘Tis a fearful odds.
Westmoreland: O that we now had here but one ten thousand of those men in England that do no work to-day!

King Henry V: What’s he that wishes so?
My cousin Westmoreland? No, my fair cousin:
If we are mark’d to die, we are enow
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men the greater share of honour.
God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.
By Jove, I am not covetous for gold;
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires;
But if it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive.
No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England:
God’s peace! I would not lose so great an honour,
As one man more, methinks, would share from me,
For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, throughout my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
And crowns for convoy put into his purse:
We would not die in that man’s company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is called the Feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbors,
And say, To-morrow is Saint Crispian:
Then he will strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say, These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.
Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names,
Familiar in their mouths as household words –-
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester -–
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d:
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother, be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap while any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day!

KING HENRY V, Act 3, Scene 1
King Henry: Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour'd rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O'erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill'd with the wild and wasteful ocean.
Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,
Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit
To his full height. On, on, you noblest English.
Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof!
Fathers that, like so many Alexanders,
Have in these parts from morn till even fought
And sheathed their swords for lack of argument:
Dishonour not your mothers; now attest
That those whom you call'd fathers did beget you.
Be copy now to men of grosser blood,
And teach them how to war. And you, good yeoman,
Whose limbs were made in England, show us here
The mettle of your pasture; let us swear
That you are worth your breeding; which I doubt not;
For there is none of you so mean and base,
That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game's afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry 'God for Harry, England, and Saint George!'

KING HENRY V, Act 3, Scene 3
King Henry: How yet resolves the governor of the town?
This is the latest parle we will admit;
Therefore to our best mercy give yourselves;
Or like to men proud of destruction
Defy us to our worst: for, as I am a soldier,
A name that in my thoughts becomes me best,
If I begin the battery once again,
I will not leave the half-achieved Harfleur
Till in her ashes she lie buried.
The gates of mercy shall be all shut up,
And the flesh'd soldier, rough and hard of heart,
In liberty of bloody hand shall range
With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass
Your fresh-fair virgins and your flowering infants.
What is it then to me, if impious war,
Array'd in flames like to the prince of fiends,
Do, with his smirch'd complexion, all fell feats
bEnlink'd to waste and desolation?
What is't to me, when you yourselves are cause,
If your pure maidens fall into the hand
Of hot and forcing violation?
What rein can hold licentious wickedness
When down the hill he holds his fierce career?
We may as bootless spend our vain command
Upon the enraged soldiers in their spoil
As send precepts to the leviathan
To come ashore. Therefore, you men of Harfleur,
Take pity of your town and of your people,
Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command;
Whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace
O'erblows the filthy and contagious clouds
Of heady murder, spoil and villany.
If not, why, in a moment look to see
The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand
Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;
Your fathers taken by the silver beards,
And their most reverend heads dash'd to the walls,
Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,
Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused
Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry
At Herod's bloody-hunting slaughtermen.
What say you? will you yield, and this avoid,
Or, guilty in defence, be thus destroy'd?

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