Truth - Al Franken [24]
It’s a cliché to say that the Bush administration’s use of language is Orwellian. After all, the “Healthy Forest Initiative” won’t make forests healthy. Much to the contrary. It will make them gone. And the pro–air pollution Clear Skies Initiative is designed to clear the skies of birds. And then there’s the slogan of Bush’s newly created Ministry of Truth: “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.” All of those things can be justly described as Orwellian. I mean, who’s he kidding?
But Newspeak isn’t the only thing Orwellian about this presidency. In Orwell’s dystopian classic 1984, the totalitarian state of Oceania is kept in a state of permanent war by Big Brother, who is the oldest of four sons of a former president. Big Brother’s younger brother Younger Brother is really named Jeb, and is much smarter than Big Brother. Eerie, right? Anyway. Back to the permanent war. It doesn’t matter who the enemy is or whether the enemy is actually threatening Oceania; the important thing is to keep the population thinking that it is under attack from an external threat. And just like in 1984, where the enemy is switched from Eurasia to Eastasia, Bush switched our enemy from al Qaeda to Iraq. Bush’s War on Terror is a war against whomever Bush wants to be at war with.
It wasn’t enough just to scare people. Terror Management Theory suggests that, when frightened, the public yearns for a resolute, infallible leader. Had I been a Republican, my suggestion would have been former New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean, who had chaired the 9/11 Commission so masterfully. Knowing that Tom Kean was in charge would certainly have given me psychic relief from the specter of my own mortality. But the Bush administration insisted that the role of fearless leader be played by President Bush himself. I know. I can’t explain it either. But that’s the choice they made. And I guess it worked.
From the beginning of the Bush campaign, George Bush was portrayed as a steadfast leader who would never flip or flop. Flip-flops like his rejection and then embrace of a Department of Homeland Security; his rejection, then embrace, then rejection of steel tariffs; his embrace, then rejection of mandatory caps on carbon dioxide emissions—these were conveniently erased from the historical record by Ken Mehlman and his stooges at the Ministry of Truth.
No, George W. Bush had to be re-created as a man who had never changed his mind, never made a mistake, and never once swerved from the path of sure-footed certainty.
This approach faced its greatest test during Bush’s April 13, 2004, press conference, when a handsome young TIME magazine correspondent, one John Dickerson, asked a question that seemed at the time to catch Bush totally off guard:
DICKERSON: After 9/11, what would your biggest mistake be, would you say, and what lessons have you learned from it?
BUSH: Hmmm—(pause)—wish you would have given me this written question ahead of time, so I could plan for it. (Laughter.) Uh—(really long pause)—John—(short pause)—I’m sure historians will look back and say, gosh, he could have done it better this way, or that way—(short pause)—Uh—(extraordinarily long pause)—You know, I just, uh—(pause that would normally be considered long, but in this context seemed reasonably brief)—I’m sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but—(mercifully short pause)—it hadn’t yet. I, uh—(long pause, followed by a rambling defense of how he handled Afghanistan and Iraq).
To observers like myself, the President’s fumfering answer seemed colossally dumb. It seemed to reinforce all the flaws that I believed would lead to his sure electoral defeat: his inability to accept responsibility, the yammering inarticulateness that frankly was an embarrassment to our once-proud nation, and the smug laziness betrayed by the fact that he hadn’t prepared for a question that any seasoned politician should have expected.
As it