Ah, you’re saying, why is Helena wittering on about the Golden Dunce’s Cap when there have been so many other important things going on? Well okay, be patient, I’ll get to them. I actually do have a life as well as this strange thing, a blogging presence.
It was so weird, yesterday, watching that painfully third-rate performance by Mr. Deer in the Headlights trying to sound as though he was, y’know, in command of all this information about that country halfway ’round the world that has suddenly turned out to be so, well, pesky and just downright confusin’, if you know what I mean.
The Prez did not start out well. A grammatical error in the first sentence; a mis-speak in the second. Then he got a bit of a grip. For a while. Though it all sounded very canned and noticeably stilted. In the Q&A, his main instructions to himself seem to have been to filibuster (=to waste time saying nothing). So he got into these lengthy and very confused riffs on this ‘n’ that, floundering around and repeating things he’d already said in the main presentation.
(Did you gather I didn’t think he did well at all? Also, though, I thought several of the press corps’s questions were decided softballs; and only journo even attempted to ask a ‘follow-up’ question after getting the non-answer that nearly all of them got.)
What stayed with me, though, in addition to his notable non-answers on all the things that really matter, was the broad conceptual design of his presentation. The U.S. had to “stay the course” in Iraq, he was telling us, mainly because it was “civilization” itself that was under attack there. Oh, he never actually said “Judeo-Christian civilization”, though you sense he’d have loved to. He did mention that it was “Christians” and “Jews” who were getting targeted by the fores of civilization– conveniently leaving out that it is non-extremist Muslims who have borne the main brunt of the extremists’ anger so far. At one point, he did, thank God, spell out that it was not all Muslims who were “the enemy”, but only that usual “small fringe”, or whatever.
But it was his whole use of the discourse of defending “civilization” that really struck me. Particularly because after hearing the Bushathon I went back to the book I’ve recently started reading Sven Lindqvist’s Exterminate all the Brutes, which is a reflection on the massive genocides that leaders and members of all European nations engaged in in Africa in the 19th century, and the relationship between those genocides and the literary portrayals of the doings of whitefolks in the continent at the time. (Well, that’s one of the things the book is “about”.)
But one of the things Lindqvist refers to again and again, as he details many, many of the terrible campaigns waged by various different European powers against the people of Africa, was the degree to which they used the discourse of spreading “civilization” to justify what they were doing. “Civilization” and its handmaiden, the opening up of national economies to domination by European interests, that is.
Plus ca change plus c’est la meme chose, eh?
I must say, though, that if Bush is the best representative that the forces of “civilization’ can generate, then give me its opposite, any day. Civilization! A men who probably hasn’t read a serious book, or even a newspaper, in decades! Civilization! A man who gives no sign he knows anything about world history, the many ancient and well-developed cultures of the world– or even, the culture of his own country!
Ah well, let’s hope his polls figures will continue heading south until he is forced to do so, as well. These three letters, all published in the US armed forces’ daily paper Stars and Stripes, indicate that his support amongst the vast and politically significant network of American military families may well be eroding. (Thanks to Yankeedoodle for that link.)
One of the most horrible things about him–and there are so many to choose from that starting the sentence that way has become banal rather than attention-getting–is the effect he’s had of lowering the level of public discourse in the country. We would be better off with Rush Limbaugh as president–he’s more knowledgeable about public policy and can at least string words together in the form of a sentence.
When we initially started hearing from Bush in the Republican primaries in 2000, I (and many other people, I’m sure) was astounded by his lack of even basic speaking skills, let alone the ability to improvise answers to questions. But we got used to it through a continuous process of painful innoculation, and now we’re in a state where you could take some bozo in off the street and he could formulate both A) clearer foreign policy than the “President” did in his “press conference” and B) more useful questions than the “press” asked. The 9/11 commission is important, yes–but as important as the reports, many of them from left-wing and independent journalists, yes–of the probable massacre of civilians in Fallujah? Instead of doing war reporting, these so-called journalists are obsessing over whether or not Bush should say he’s sorry about 9/11! It’s quite incredible. They remind me of Olive Oyl’s father in Popeye. who keeps whimpering “You own me an apology.” Well, you’re not going to get one from this Popeye, so lets move on to things that actually matter, shall we?
I’ve been thinking recently of how the media portrays Muslims / Iraqis. Take this paragraph, buried in a WaPo article about an ambush on a convoy:
Just before dawn Wednesday, however, AC-130 Spectre gunships launched a devastating punitive raid over a six-block area around the spot where the convoy was attacked, firing dozens of artillery shells that shook the city and lit up the sky. Marine officials said the area was virtually destroyed and that no further insurgent activity had been seen there.
Am I nuts, or does this sound like Jenin? Or a version of “exterminate all the brutes”?
No, Vivion, you’re not nuts. I read that same para and my stomach turned. “Exterminate the brutes” it is.
Doubtless, spin management re the Fallujah deaths, should it ever be needed (see Jacob’s comment re the US press corps) will be enthusiastically offered by Peres and the other spinmeisters of Jenin.