by Mark Crispin Miller
05.25.02

there was the widespread view that Bush had changed completely—9/11 calling forth a strength of character that took the whole world by surprise. We didn't know he had it in him, according to this view, which has a very strong appeal, as we have seen from countless famous tales of modest fellas—Bilbo Baggins, Claudius the Emperor, Michael Corleone—rising to the grand occasion. In the eyes of those who thought he had been fundamentally transformed, Bush was one such glorious contender.

"You never can tell what a terrible calamity will do to people. Some fall apart. Some dither. Some panic. Some get very focused and clear-minded, and some find out what the purpose of their life really is," wrote Margaret Wente of the Toronto Globe and Mail in late September. "That's George Bush. He's found his focus and his purpose, and has transformed himself into a leader."

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.

However, his new authoritativeness was not entirely in the eyes of those beholders; for Bush, when speaking out against the terrorist attack, did do a better job than usual—and yet that air of confidence did not mean that the president had "changed" in any way. In fact, as this book demonstrates, the theme of punishment has almost always had a certain sharpening effect on Bush's manner. It's when he's had to fake ideals that he does not believe in, feign emotions that he cannot feel, that he has been most prone to gaffes. But when the blast of war blows in his ears, Bush shows the certainty of one who likes to go on the attack, hang tough, say "no."

Television, Form, and Substance

hus Bush's sudden rise had everything to do with television; for now that he was saying mostly what he felt, the medium was his new best friend. If the president had tried to come across through print alone, the repetitiousness and flatness of his language would have doomed him. Nor would he have excelled on radio, with his stiff-lipped delivery and tinny voice. (There even Richard Nixon had him beat.) But with its tendency to foreground mere demeanor, television now did Bush the giant favor of so playing up the way he looked and sounded that—especially at so tense a time—you couldn't hear what he was saying.

Such televisual success day after day was something that the president had not enjoyed before the terrorist attack. Formerly, when he had tried to come off as experienced ("a reformer with results") and/or "compassionate," the medium would mercilessly undercut the pose, making him seem comically divided: a nasty piece of work behind the mask of kindliness, an amateur for all his pose of fitness. But now that he was speaking from his wrathful heart, the medium showed us someone who appeared as thoroughly united in himself.

There was, of course, some stagecraft used to help him hammer home his angry point. Day after day he advertised his focus and determination and resolve by telling us repeatedly about his focus and determination and resolve—and his appearance strongly reconfirmed that winning verbal message, his gaze and stance and gestures seeming just as focused and determined as he kept on telling us he was. With no laughable discrepancies between his bearing and his words, the president appeared resolved indeed.

Demagoguery Versus Leadership

nd so the candidate who had always stammered so amusingly about "compassion" now finally found his voice, because he had a war to fight, and one that made him—for the first time ever—very popular. And yet that did not mean that Bush was—for the first time ever—making sense. After 9/11 he continued to sound much the same as he had always sounded.

"I understand this is a unconventional war. It's a different kind of war. It's not the kind of war that we're used to in America.

The Greatest Generation was used to storming beachheads. Baby boomers such as myself was used to getting caught in a quagmire of Vietnam, where politics made decisions more than—more than the military sometimes. Generation X was able to watch technology right in front of their TV screens, you know, burrow into—into concrete bunkers in Iraq and blow them up.

This is a different kind of war that requires a different type of approach and a different type of mentality."

—10/11/01

What was most remarkable about that improv was its revelation of a mind with little in it but some televisual clichés. How is this new war "unconventional," "different," and "not the kind of war we're used to in America"? First: "The Greatest Generation was used to storming beachheads." Such is the Brokaw/Spielberg/Ambrose view of World War II, which you might get from surfing cable—a warped view, since most of those who fought did not storm beachheads, and those who did did not get used to it. Moving on to Vietnam, the president confused some trite discourse about that conflict with the grunt's experience of the war itself—as if "quagmire" had referred to the actual terrain in Southeat Asia, and not merely to the war's unwinnability. Likewise, the (rightist) notion that "politics made decisions more than … the military" was an effort to explain why we had lost that war, and not a reference to the kind of war we fought in Vietnam. It was a protracted jungle fight against indigenous guerillas—which, in fact, may not be all that different from the "war on terrorism" that we are now fighting in the Philippines, Colombia and probably elsewhere.

Bush then moved on to "Generation X"—as if his father's six-week Gulf War lasted long enough to have engaged a "generation." This time, Americans weren't storming any beachheads, there being few beaches in Iraq—and also no Americans, since all of them were following the action on CNN (or, as Bush put it, "right in front of their TV screens"). With everybody watching it on television, there were no US soldiers fighting in the war, or any troops at all, in fact, but just "technology" attacking "concrete bunkers," every one of them precisely "taken out" (and, of course, with no civilian casualties). Thus did Bush nostalgically re-celebrate the cool Atari spectacle that his dad and Dick Cheney had concocted for the US audience—a propaganda fantasy that he was now invoking to convey the war-experience of "Generation X."

And so, from those three wars—s "beachheads," "quagmire," "TV screens"— this war will be "different"— completely different. It will be "a unconventional war," "a different kind of war," it will "not [be] the kind of war that we're used to in America," and, furthermore, it will be "a different kind of war that requires a different type of approach and a different type of mentality." Bush having said it several times, it's only right to ask just how the "war on terrorism" will be "different." Other than repeating that it will be "different," the president did not come out and tell us how; nor did his eventual military budget clear the matter up, since it apparently included every high-tech weapon system that the Pentagon had ever wanted—not, you'd think, the sort of thing a military would require to fight "a different kind of war that requires a different type of approach and a different type of mentality."

By "different," what Bush obviously meant was that this war, unlike those prior, lesser wars, will never end. It was a point that he kept making, with a certain passionate insistence that seemed more and more gratuitous as time went on. However good or bad the latest military and/or diplomatic news, and whether the prime suspects were now said to be alive somewhere or maybe dead, the president would find a way to say—with focus and determination and resolve—"This will go on and on and on." Such is the terroristic subtext of the call-to-arms so frequently reiterated by the president and his lieutenants. Scripted, Bush would make it sound as if this will not last forever.

To all the men and women in our military, every sailor, every soldier, every airman, every Coast Guardsman, every Marine, I say this: Your mission is defined. Your objectives are clear. Your goal is just.

—10/7/01

Extemporizing, on the other hand, he and his fellow-warriors were not that clear—or rather, their intention was quite clear, although their language was obscure. Consider this reply by Donald Rumsfeld, who shortly after 9/11 was asked how we might know when we have won the "war on terrorism":

Now, what is victory? I say that victory is persuading the American people and the rest of the world that this is not a quick matter that's going to be over in a month or a year or even five years. It is something that we need to do so that we can continue to live in a world with powerful weapons and with people who are willing to use those powerful weapons.

And we can do that as a country.
And that would be a victory, in my view.

—9/12/01

He said it with his usual craggy fervor and ostensible lucidity, as if he knew what he was saying; and there was no follow-up, which bolstered the impression that it might have been a reasonable answer. And yet what Rumsfeld said was this: that "victory" in this war will mean convincing everybody in the world that we may have to fight forever, so that we can keep living in a world where we might have to fight forever. We will have won when we have made the people, here and elsewhere, understand that we can never win. Thus victory will be ours not when we have won some territory, or destroyed some army, or negotiated peace, but only when we have converted all the world to an apocalyptic faith—an aim that sounds uncannily familiar.

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This excerpt was adapted from the preface to W.W. Norton's just-released paperback edition of The Bush Dyslexicon.