Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [200]
This was George W. Bush in his Teddy Roosevelt mode, waving the big stick and laying down the law to the nation’s enemies. But it was a gross mistake, for he had willfully ignored the first half of Roosevelt’s favorite adage: “Speak softly.”
The earlier “crusade” remark had caused a stir in Europe and the Middle East but was soon forgotten at home. “Bring ’em on,” conversely, unleashed a torrent of negative comment all over the States. The graphic artists saw their opportunity. Dennis Draughon published a cartoon that showed the president at the podium saying, “Bring ’em on,” to an audience of coffins, each draped in the Stars and Stripes and captioned “U.S. casualties in Iraq.” Another had the C-17 transports filling up with coffins after his ill-chosen words.
Copyright © 2003 John Trever, Albuquerque Journal. Reprinted by permission.
The most historically resonant cartoon was John Trever’s in the Albuquerque Journal. He drew George W. Bush at the podium, declaiming, “Bring ’em on!” Beside him is the Stars and Stripes. But behind on the wall is a huge portrait of Theodore Roosevelt, labeled “Speak softly and carry a big stick.” Covering his eyes with his hand, TR grimaces, with a look of disbelief and pain at this pointless and incompetent gaffe.
But why should an American president, “the most powerful man in the world,” need to “speak softly”? Almost a century earlier, Theodore Roosevelt had explained to a large crowd in Minnesota what the mysterious adage meant:
A good many of you are probably acquainted with the old proverb “Speak softly and carry a big stick—you will go far.” If a man continually blusters, if he lacks civility, a big stick will not save him from trouble; but neither will speaking softly avail, if back of the softness there does not lie strength, power.
Great powers needed strong military forces—the big stick. But possessing this power allowed them safely to use soft (diplomatic and appropriate) words. During his presidency, Roosevelt had settled disputes by quiet diplomacy, secret and open threats of force, but never by all-out war. Bush reversed Roosevelt’s priorities, using force where words and threats might have sufficed.
The gulf between the two men is not just a matter of time and very different generations. TR reveled in words, matched his expression precisely to his aspirations and policies. He recognized that time, place, occasion, and audience all determined how he should express his message. President Bush, surrounded in the modern style by advisers, speech-writers, and policy wonks, is not in control of what he says.
WORDS MATTER, AND THEY HAVE WINGS. SHORTLY BEFORE HIS DEATH in 1975 Mikhail Bakhtin wrote in the final paragraph of his last essay that there are “immense boundless masses of forgotten contextual meanings” which at some future moment “are recalled and invigorated in renewed form—in a new context.” His final word on his life’s work was: “Nothing is absolutely dead: every meaning will have its homecoming.”22 In writing this book, I have been struck by the accuracy of his prediction: that words and ideas can be as fearsome and dangerous as zombies, unwelcome revenants. By a curious coincidence, in the same week of October 2003, words spoken by both the prime minister of Malaysia, Dr. Mahathir bin Mohammad, and by a senior U.S. general, William G. Boykin, deputy undersecretary for military intelligence, intensified antagonism between Islam and Christendom. What they said rather than what they did resounded around the world, and while neither man set out to antagonize, it was the inevitable consequence of the words they chose to use.
What did they say? In a long and wordy disquisition to the World Islamic Conference, Mahathir denounced Muslim passivity:
Some would have us believe that … our life is better than that of our detractors. Some believe that poverty is Islamic, sufferings and being oppressed are Islamic. This world is not for us. Ours are the joys of heaven in the afterlife. All that we have to do is to perform certain rituals, wear