The first thing you need to know about Mark Crispin
Miller’s “The Bush Dyslexicon, Observations of a National Disorder,”
is that this is not a funny book. You may laugh,
but you’ll be fighting not to cry.
Miller doesn’t use George W. Bush’s invaluable
gaffes as material. Rather, the author examines the president’s words
and pits them against their context, arguing
that insight into Bush’s psyche can be gleaned via the occasionally outrageous,
often vague but not entirely incomprehensible
Bush Dyslexicon, where the president’s verbal missteps reveal more than
a squandered education.
Delving into Bush’s public remarks, Miller discovers
the calculating scion of a Connecticut Yankee, allowed through his
powerful scion-type connections to, not only
assume the most powerful office in the word, but to dupe the American
public into believing he’s a cowboy.
The book doesn’t dispute the fact that the president
has a problem with the English language, but Miller is the likely
the first author on record to note that Mr. Bush
can speak deftly when he means it.
"This is an impressive crowd, the haves, and
the have-mores. Some people call you the elite. I call you my base."
(LAUGHTER) —Al Smith Memorial
Dinner in New York, 10/19/00
Conversely, Miller notes that Bush stumbles when he either has no interest in issue:
Perfectly at ease with media concentration, and
therefore quite untroubled by the prospect of a few huge corporations
ruling all the culture industries, on-line and
off-, Bush was typically unable to use simple English in attempting to
feign
deep concern at such a threat to free _expression:
"Will the highways on the Internet become more
few?"
—Concord, N.H., 1/29/00; Slate
Or is just lying:
“I’m trying to protect my invest— my contributors
from unscrupulous practices.”
—Houston Chronicle, 7/18/98
The Governor was explaining why he had resisted having the names of his campaign donors posted on-line.
It’s an interesting observation and Miller presents
plenty of material to test his theory with.
Take the following excerpt from a debate with
Al Gore on campaign finance corruption.
BUSH: Well, I would support an effort to ban
corporate soft money and labor union soft money, so long as there
was dues checkoff. I've campaigned on this
ever since the primaries. I believe there needs to be instant disclosure
on the Internet as to who's giving to whom.
I think we need to fully enforce the law. I mean, I think we need to have
an Attorney General that says if laws are
broken we'll enforce the law, be strict about— be firm about it.
GORE: Look, Gov. Bush, you have attacked my
character and credibility. And I am not going to respond in kind. I think
we
ought to focus on the problems, and not attack
each other. And one of the serious problems— hear me well— is that our
system of government is being undermined by
too much influence coming from special- interest money. We have to get
a
handle on it. And, like John McCain, I have
learned from experience. And it's not a new position for me. Twenty-four
years ago,
I supported full public financing of all federal
elections. And anybody who thinks I'm just saying it'll be the first bill
I send to
the Congress, I want you to know—
BUSH: All right, let me just say one thing—!
GORE: — I care passionately about this, and I will fight until it becomes law.
BUSH: I want people to hear what he just said!
He is for full public financing of Congressional elections!
I'm absolutely, adamantly opposed to that!
I don't want the government financing Congressional elections—!
—Presidential debate, 10/3/00
The Governor’s outrage was understandable, since
full public financing of federal elections would eliminate the vast electoral
advantage of the rich, and finally cleanse our
airways of the heavy fog of propaganda that benights our politics throughout
every campaign season. (Such radical reform would
irk the broadcasters no less than it would hobble certain politicians,
since it’s the media machine itself that takes
in all that money—a pay-off that explains why the National Association
of
Broadcasters is the top lobbyist against campaign
finance reform.)
Note how candidate Governor Bush mangles his assertion
that he would support a ban on soft money. According to Miller’s
theory, one could predict President Bush would
fight like the devil against campaign finance reform limiting soft money.
(Which, of course, he did.)
More telling is Bush’s completely intelligible
rail against Gore’s support for full public financing of federal elections.
Not only are three syllable words utilized and
pronounced correctly, but the plural and singular phrases escape
punishment – a rarity even during a scripted
event.
While it’s a fun game (and useful tool), Miller
wrote this book as a warning. Bush’s handlers, with great complicity from
the media, have managed to repackage his grammatical
shortcomings and subsequent self-depreciating humor as “folksiness;”
a manipulation, Miller gibes, we “misunderestimate”
at our own peril.
Even if our president were the cheery cretin that
such satire makes him out to be, it wouldn't make our plight a comic one,
for he has a highly seasoned, wholly ruthless,
and for that matter, deeply humorless cabal of rightist pols and operatives
around him - and that's no joke. In any case,
our president is not an imbecile but an operator just as canny as he is
hard-hearted - which is to say that he's extraordinarily
shrewd. To smirk at his alleged stupidity is, therefore, not just
to miss the point, but to do this unelected president
a giant favor since, as Shakespeare's Prince Hal reminds us - and as
Bush himself has often said - it suits a politician
to have everybody thinking he's a dunce, especially if he wants to do
things his way. The satire that sells him short,
therefore, can only work to his advantage, by blinding us to his team's
big-time plans and causing us to overlook his
own prodigious skill at propaganda.
A Professor of Media Studies at NYU and director
of PROMO, the Project on Media Ownership, Miller’s previous
books have focused on America’s media crises.
The Bush Dyslexicon is no different.
The first edition of The Bush Dyslexicon was published
four months before the September 11th attacks and correctly indicts
the news media for letting Bush’s lies slide,
while simultaneously allowing his allegations about Al Gore to go unchallenged.
The media transformation of Bush from “Bozo to
Churchill” prompted a new chapter in 2002, where Miller observes how,
as predicted, the public’s perception of Bush
as your less-than-average Joe, played right into his hands.
The president's new admirers could not see that
they had been the partial authors of his seeming metamorphosis, their panic
driving them to see an FDR where there was only
Dubya. Bush made the collective fancy that much easier, moreover, by
simply doing better than expected. Compared to
any skilled and charismatic orator, he did a largely mediocre job—his
posture wooden, and his sentences monotonously
uninflected, so that his words seemed to originate in some place other
than his mind. However, it had long been his
good fortune not to be compared with betters, but only to himself—and this
traumatic time was no exception. Because he'd
started out so uninspiring—looking freaked, depending on his cue cards,
promising to nab the guilty "folks"—he came across
like Superman just by delivering his lines without a glitch, and by
seeming surer than he'd seemed. Thus did the
president, to some extent, appear to do exceptionally well by virtue of
how much his terrified beholders had "misunderestimated"
him.