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Dunce recapNYU professor Mark Crispin Miller wants you to consider just what all those presidential flubs reveal about the state of our democracy, in the new book "The Bush Dyslexicon."By JOSHUA TANZER Our esteemed president has, of course, already established himself as a verbal bumbler of Danquaylean proportions, with inanities and incomprehensibilities like: "I know how hard it is to put food on your family" and "Will the highways on the Internet become more few?" So feel free to page through and snicker — at least at first glance.
But much of what's in this book — with 181 pages of quotes and commentary between its thoughtful introduction and conclusion — is less laughable than simply pathetic. Delve deeper into the president's quotes and you can only conclude that he doesn't just trip over his tongue — often he really has no idea what he's saying. Using the words "resignate" or "holding us hostile" once might be a goof; twice in one sentence is a sign that the whole Bush fortune wasn't enough to buy little George a clue. This is why, when you listen to Bush speak, you can hear him audibly struggle to spit out the exact words he's been given to say, for fear that he'll say something idiotic if his brain becomes engaged. And this is the point of "The Bush Dyslexicon" — a title chosen not just as a cute turn of phrase at the president's expense but also as a serious appraisal of his mental condition. Miller believes that Bush ranges somewhere between learning-impaired and gleefully dumb, and thinks that's a sign of the end times for American politics.
Some of the most revealing Bushisms in the book are, in fact, not the incoherent ones but those that show the man's limited way of thinking. For example, it's not enough just to advocate national school testing — Bush, the poster-boy for the gentleman's C, doesn't seem to understand that education has any purpose beyond test preparation. "You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test," he notes, revealingly. So "The Bush Dyslexicon" is really a serious book masquerading as a fun book. It reminds me of the pamphlets of the colonial era — not just an analysis but an exhortation, urging us to believe that there's still a political alternative. We are at a critical point in our history in two key respects, Miller believes. First, a candidate lacking any qualification — especially the key qualification of actually being elected — has been hustled into the presidency by big-money donors and an intellectually corrupt Supreme Court majority. American democracy has not seen such a low point in more than a century. And second, anti-intellectualism is finally winning over the American mind once and for all. This last point is, fundamentally, why Miller has written this book. MIller has become one of the country's leading analysts of the mass media, and he sees the so-called election of 2000 as a defining media event. It's the symbol of a corporatized entertainment state in which it doesn't matter that the president can't speak a proper sentence because in the mass media there's nothing to be said anyway. The news itself is full of trivialities about celebrities, sexy Washington interns and promotions for the parent companies' other products; meanwhile, an election can simply be bestowed on the candidate of big money and the media pronounce him more presidential-looking every day. So this is where the battle line is drawn: it's up to us to be aware of the evisceration of the media and to spread the word ourselves. To Miller, never forgetting the circumstances of Bush's inheritance of the throne and the emptiness of the political and cultural complex that put him there is a start toward reawakening the American mind. OFFOFFOFF.COM • A GUIDE TO ALTERNATIVE NEW YORK Reader comments on The Bush Dyslexicon: Post a comment on "The Bush Dyslexicon" | |||||||||
