Originally posted as part of the February 2009 issue.
Watch for Toppling Icons
Around the time when Oliver Stone announced the coming release of his new biopic W and Slate.com’s Jacob Weisberg began promoting his seventh book of “Bushisms” (including a box calendar), we began to wonder why people are still reveling in the Bush blunders. He was our president, so the joke’s kind of on us, right?
Moreover, this was amidst an especially intense election season. There were more pressing issues at hand and new meat to grill. It seemed strange that there was still a market focused on poking fun at George W. Bush. One explanation is that with the ebb of Republican popularity and with national politics on everyone’s minds, the market demand was fueled by a final hunger for cathartic schadenfreude. However, Simon and Schuster published the first book of Weisberg’s series in 2001, when Bush still enjoyed high approval ratings. Bushisms sold well enough domestically to justify writing six more of its kind in the years to follow. Aside from seeking universal entertainment in an ideologically divided America, we celebrate the peculiarities of our leaders, even when we support them.
It’s the kind of comedy that writes itself, watching politicians play characters penned for them in satire: Bush the swaggering cowboy, Putin the Russian James Bond villain, Sarkozy the manic Frenchman, Berlusconi the Italian philanderer. What’s so hard to resist about following the headlines for the next quotation, the next picture of a shirtless Putin stalking the Russian hinterlands with a hunting rifle (you know what we mean), is that these dispatches from the absurd sate all of our dramatic urges. Making light of our leaders puts a much-needed distance between the people themselves and the power of their actions; it makes them human. Of course, when George W. Bush is giving you comedic gold every other week, it’s hard not to disassociate the person from the office, quite the opposite in fact. What marvelous mechanism within him produces such unforgettable utterances as “In my sentences I go where no man has gone before,” is an “unknown unknown,” but the process by which we find endless irony in the malapropisms of our former president and the behavior of other prominent world leaders involves us in history: it’s an exciting world and we want to be part of it.
Comment [1]
Is that the extent of the public’s liberty? We get to crack jokes about our leaders? And that is how we get to feel involved in the political process? How? Oh how did we get lulled to sleep in 40 short years? In France there have been recent protests involving hundreds of thousands of people over the government giving bailout money to companies who have laid off employees, people crying out that the government should bail out the people, the workers, those who are attempting to provide for their families rather than those who are attempting to write larger numbers down on a spreadsheet. Sure, we complain about it here; we joke about how our leaders are a bunch of crooks. We expect it. We sit back and watch CNN like it’s Talk Soup. “Drawing humor from the political situation reminds these people that they are not above the law, that in the great theatre of accidental comedy, they are not above us.” It is this very thought that has allowed the Bush administration to act completely above the law without being held accountable. When political oppression and assaults on liberty are met with jokes alone, they do not shirk down in fear of humiliation, they smile coyly at the complete meaninglessness of what voices of dissent have become.