On President Bush: Being Nothing.

The following is from an article written by Carol V. Hamilton. It is not short but it is interesting. Give it a read. I have broken it up into a couple of posts just so it is easier to manage.]

Being Nothing: George W. Bush as Presidential Simulacrum
========================================================


~Carol V. Hamilton~



Nobody likes to see dead people on their television
screens.
-- George W. Bush, April 13, 2004



I. Flat Personality for the Age of Simulation
---------------------------------------------

In Jerzy Kozinsky's 1970 novel _Being There_, a character named
Chance the Gardener, whose entire existence has been restricted to
watching television shows and tending a walled garden, is suddenly
thrust into the outside world. Here he acquires admirers who rename
him Chauncey Gardiner, mistake his ignorance for profundity, and take
his horticultural allusions for zenlike koans. His intellectual
limitations and personal inadequacies become social and political
virtues. At the end of the novel, the President's advisors gather to
consider a candidate to replace the current vice-president. One of
them suggests Chance. "Gardiner has no background," he declares. "And
so he's not and cannot be objectionable to everyone! He's personable,
well-spoken, and he comes across well on TV." Although _Being
There_ is over 30 years old, it is eerily pertinent to the current
political scene. Only in one respect was Kozinski's prophecy too
cautious. Writing during the reign of the uncharismatic,
unphotogenic, yet canny and intelligent President Nixon, Koskinski
was apparently unable to imagine Chance as a sitting president.

As a result of his immersion in television programs and limited
experience with the outside world, Chance is unable to distinguish
videotaped fictions from social reality. _Being There_ recognized the
capacity of images -- the spectacle -- to displace or colonize the
real, even in relation to the Vietnam War.

"What about the war?" the young woman sitting on Chance's left
said, leaning close to him.

"The war? Which war?" said Chance. "I've seen many wars on TV."

"Alas," the woman said, "in this country, when we dream of
reality, television wakes us. To millions, I suppose, the war is
just another TV program. But out there, at the front, real men
are giving their lives."

The war is just another TV program. Not so, of course, to the
soldiers themselves or to the civilians maimed and killed by American
missiles, but to the television audience. And although the vivid
television coverage of Vietnam stirred up anti-war opposition, the
coverage of the first Gulf War, with its greenish flickering images
and explosions of phosphorescence, famously resembled a video game
rather than a battlefield. In 1991, Jean Baudrillard published three
articles in the Parisian newspaper, ~Liberation~, questioning the
reality of the first Gulf War. "We prefer the exile of the virtual,"
he wrote in the first of these essays, "of which television is the
universal mirror, to the catastrophe of the real." Baudrillard's
argument was widely misunderstood and angrily condemned.

This article appropriates ideas from _Being There_ and Baudrillard's
Gulf War pieces in order to propose that George W. Bush is a
simulation, a virtual figure upgraded from a prototype like that of
Chance the Gardener. I am not interested in George W. Bush's
corporeal being but rather in his flatness and in the way that his
obvious deficiencies are "spun" by supposedly disinterested media
pundits. Bush's estrangement from the real -- evident in his
unfamiliarity with geography, history, ordinary English syntax and
semantics, and a fund of common knowledge -- stems from his own lack
of reality. George W. Bush does not exist.

Under the sign of postmodernism, the hermeneutics of depth have been
replaced by the play of surfaces, and the flat celebrity has
superseded the complicated historical figure. In his magisterial
_Postmodernism_, Fredric Jameson commented on the shift between the
deep subjectivity represented in the modernist novel and the
postmodern "death of the subject." "This new order," Jameson writes,
"no longer needs prophets or seers of the high modernist and
charismatic type, whether among its cultural producers, or its
politicians. Such figures no longer hold any charm or magic for the
subjects of a corporate, collectivized, post-individualistic age."
Accordingly, the cosmopolitan, dignified F.D.R. gives way to the
bland, folksy, often incoherent persona of GWB, with his faux-Texas
accent and gunfighter strut.

Like Bush, Kosinski's Chance possesses a very limited range of
references and a markedly restricted ability to articulate ideas.
When his new fame lands Chance on a talk show, he manages, after some
helpful prompting from the host, to utter a series of banalities
about the vicissitudes of growth in a garden. Afterwards, one of
Chance's admirers comments that the gardener "has the uncanny ability
of reducing complex matters to the simplest of human terms."
Chance is also complimented on his appearance by Lord Beauclerk,
chairman of the board of the BBC:

"I enormously enjoyed the bluntness of your statement on
television. Very cunning of you, very cunning indeed! One
doesn't want to work things out too finely, does one? I mean --
not for the videots."

Lord Beauclerk both mistakes Chance's banality for a strategic ploy
and assumes that television viewers are morons whose simple minds
require simple explanations.

When Bush stammers publicly about freedom, democracy, and the axis of
evil, American media commentators gloss his remarks positively.
Reporters and pundits chronically overestimate Bush in much the way
Chance's admirers do, discoursing about him as if he actually
possessed a political philosophy and an understanding of government
policies. They overlook, understate, or make excuses for his slipshod
syntax, reliance on cliches, and inability to answer either
theoretical or factual questions. They inevitably refer to him as if
he were a "real" person with a complex sensibility, rather than a
simulacrum entirely composed of sound bites and photo opportunities.

After the press conference of April 13, 2004, for example, one
television reporter acknowledged that Bush had spoken "clumsily" at
times, but speculated that the president's plain speech is part of
his appeal, that he uses the idioms of ordinary Americans. Other
commentators approved his evident "conviction" about the war in Iraq
-- referring to moments when Bush uttered the cliches about freedom
with apparent vehemence. On the April 13th, 2004, edition of
~Hardball~, Chris Matthews expressed his admiration for Bush's
refusal to acknowledge any responsibility or any mistakes -- a
bizarre encomium, considering the long and embarrassing moments when
Bush slouched down the side of the podium, grinning and stammering,
unable to think of any response, as if a computer virus had infected
his personal software.

On the following day, the ~New York Times~ lead editorial
characterized the president's performance as follows: "Mr. Bush was
grave and impressive while reading his opening remarks, but his
responses to questions were distressingly rambling and unfocused."
The use of "impressive" seems precisely calibrated to ward off the
blow of "distressingly." None of the commentators mentioned the
ingratiating smile that constantly played about the President's lips,
a nervous and inappropriate aspect of his demeanor, particularly
considering the serious content of the reporters' questions. No one
referred to the software glitch, and it was not shown again, let
alone played repeatedly -- unlike other moments televised in 2004,
such as Howard Dean's "scream" and Janet Jackson's bared breast.
After observing how media pundits shed the best possible light on
Bush, one has to wonder: are journalists and pundit colluding in his
legitimization, or are they, like Chance's many admirers, actually
taken in?

In _Being There_, Chance's ignorance of the "real" world causes him
to remain silent when he doesn't understand questions, remarks, and
behavior directed toward him. His strange passivity prompts other
characters to interpret him as they see fit. When EE, wife of the
elderly Mr. Rand, makes sexual overtures to Chance, for example, she
regards his lack of response as indifference to her particular
physical charms. When ambassadors at the United Nations meet Chance
at a dinner party, they quickly leap to wildly inflated assumptions
about his linguistic and cultural fluency. No one realizes that in
every situation, Chance is completely out of his depth.

Insider accounts suggest that Bush has adopted a similar strategy of
passive inscrutability. In Ron Suskind's _The Price of Loyalty_, Paul
O'Neill, Secretary of the Treasury from 2000-2002, becomes acquainted
with the inner workings of the Bush White House. O'Neill soon
observes, with increasing dismay, the President's uncommunicative
demeanor. After he presents his ideas and positions on the economy,
he pauses for a question or response: "Bush didn't ask anything. He
looked at O'Neill, not changing his expression, not letting on that
he had any reactions -- either positive or negative." Like
Chance, Bush is open to interpretation: "The President seemed to nod
in affirmation. O'Neill couldn't be sure." A White House veteran,
O'Neill was accustomed to the active participation of previous
presidents -- to their questions, analyses, thinking processes. In
subsequent meetings with Bush O'Neill notes the typical "flat,
inexpressive stare"[10] with which the president would listen to his
briefings. He concludes that no one on the staff knows what Bush is
thinking -- that "experienced, ambitious men and women atop vast
federal agencies [were] acting, in many cases, on little more than
hunches about what the President might think -- what he might have
suggested with a nod or a wink during some presentation of
options."[11] The climax of O'Neill's disillusionment with Bush is
described as follows:

O'Neill was watching Bush closely. He threw out a few general
phrases, a few nods, but there was virtually no engagement.
These cabinet secretaries had worked for over a month on
detailed reports. O'Neill had been made to understand by various
colleagues in the White House that the President should not be
expected to read reports. In his personal experience, the
President didn't even appear to have read the short memos that
he sent over.

That made it especially troubling that Bush did not ask any
questions. There are so many worth asking about each of these
areas, O'Neill thought as he sat quietly, dozens of queries
running through his head.

"This meeting was like many of the meetings I would go to over
the course of two years," he recalled. "The only way I can
describe it is that, well, the President is like a blind man in
a roomful of deaf people. There is no discernible
connection."[12]

While in public, Bush appears to interact amiably with the media, in
the center of government -- away from public observation -- he is
disconnected, like an unplugged machine. At a January 30, 2001,
meeting with the National Security Council, O'Neill remembers, "the
president said little. He just nodded, with that same flat,
unquestioning demeanor that O'Neill was familiar with."[13] Behind
closed doors, Bush no longer connects or exists. His principal
function has been lost. In this respect he is like an expensive,
hand-waxed automobile, gleaming in the darkness of a garage. The car
is intended for rapid motion and for public display. When its
owner-driver is at the dinner table, he has no need of the car. "The
celebrity displays personality," explains Michael Rogin. "He pleases
others; intimate before the mass audience, he plays at privacy in
public. Neither a repressed interior nor an intractable reality
exercise claims over the celebrity for he exists in the eye of the
beholder."[14] If Bush "plays at privacy" in public, he cannot act
"for real" in private, because he is now in a realm where substance
and depth, rather than sheer surface, are called upon.

 

II. Precursors of the Presidential Simulacrum
---------------------------------------------

President Reagan was soaring above the real.
-- Michael Rogin

As simulacrum-in-chief, George W. has political forebears as well as
literary and cinematic cousins. The political slippage from the real
to the hyperreal begins with Ronald Reagan. Unlike George W. Bush,
Reagan was real, but for Reagan, a postmodernist sans la lettre,
memory, history, and brute facticity were always already constructs.

The ongoing joke about Reagan -- made eventually by Reagan himself --
was that he relied upon cue cards to speak in public. Everyone
acknowledges that, unlike the current occupant of the White House,
Reagan read his cue cards and speeches fluently -- without fractured
syntax, stammering, or incoherence. In _Ronald Reagan, The Movie_
(1987), Michael Rogin demonstrated not only how Reagan frequently
confounded events from films with historical events but also what
that confusion signified: "Reagan's easy slippage between movies and
reality is synechdochic for a political culture increasingly
impervious to distinctions between fiction and history."[15]
Observing that the content of Reagan's March 16, 1986 speech about
the threat posed by Nicaragua, seemed questionable even to some of
his supporters, Rogin comments:

But even if the empirical truth value of Reagan's speech
was larger than zero, it was somehow beside the point, for
the speech inhabited a wholly different realm from the one
in which reporters tried to hold it to account. The
fractured reality principle could coexist alongside the
speech, for the two operated on different planes ...
President Reagan was soaring above the real. His maps,
pictures, and visionary worldview exhibited on the
television screen, replaced the world they claimed to
represent... As Reagan's words and pictures brought his
Nicaragua into American living rooms, the real Latin
American country disappeared; it was in danger of symbolic
and physical obliteration.[16]

Rogin's observations about Nicaragua are all too applicable to the
two wars on Iraq. Iraqi casualties were not reported, and certainly
not shown, so they seemed "unreal" to the American public.
Spokespeople for the army and their right-wing supporters even
objected to any specific information about dead American soldiers --
formal photographs of their faces, even shots of flag-draped coffins
-- as if the connection between war and death, if represented to any
degree, would demoralize American citizens and turn them against the
enterprise. It was crucial to administrative policy that the war be
linked only to a series of abstractions -- freedom, democracy,
counter-terrorism.

The actual death of Ronald Reagan was the occasion for another kind
of spectacle. During the grand state funeral, media commentators
lauded him in glowing terms, rarely so much as hinting at any
downside to his policies -- "trickle-down economics," expelling the
mentally ill onto the streets, the Iran-Contra affair, and an
inflated national deficit. Furthermore, Reagan was given credit for
superhuman, transhistorical feats, like single-handedly ending the
Cold War. Death both inflated and proliferated Reagan's image, which
for a week was inescapable in the American media. The funeral, like
one of Andy Warhol's deliberately tedious movies, went on
interminably. As FAIR complained in an email to its list of
supporters:

Journalists seemed determined to show that any criticisms of
Reagan could be turned upside down. As Dan Rather explained on
CBS's ~60 Minutes~ (6/6/04), "The literal-minded were forever
troubled by his tendency to sometimes confuse life with the
movies. But he understood, like very few leaders before or
since, the power of myth and storytelling. In his films and his
political life, Ronald Reagan stood at the intersection where
dreams and reality meet, and with a wink and a one-liner, always
held out hope for a happy ending."[17]

Michael Rogin, who had first exposed Reagan's chronic confusion
between film and reality on CBS's ~60 Minutes~ -- and at the
invitation of that network, when a reporter heard Rogin give a talk
on this subject at a scholarly conference -- thus becomes one of "the
literal-minded." Dan Rather proceeds to replace misinformation with
"dreams"; Reagan no longer blurs the boundary between truth and
fantasy but "stands at the intersection" of the two.

Even one of Reagan's most ardent admirers, Edmund Morris, has
acknowledged some of the late president's faults, such as his failure
to display affection to his children, absence of close friendships,
and inability to recognize people he had met repeatedly. Like George
W. Bush, Reagan periodically manifested an astonishing ignorance of
basic cultural information. Crucially, Reagan seemed to lack what
Morris calls "private empathy" with other people's troubles. Despite
this, Morris writes:

He could be movingly sincere when he was required to emote in
public. To question his identity with "the boys of Pointe du
Hoc" or the nameless dead of Bergen-Belsen would be to
misunderstand his essentially thespian nature. Actors are not
like you or me: their real world, where they really feel, is
onstage (italics added).[18]

Here, and elsewhere, Morris seems to suggest a kind of solipsism in
Ronald Reagan, an inability to comprehend the "reality" of other
minds and other sentient beings. To possess an "essentially thespian
nature" apparently means to express feelings only in public and
only for those who no longer exist or who have never existed.

In 1982, during Reagan's first term, Warner Brothers released Ridley
Scott's famous film ~Bladerunner~, a film in which human actors
played "replicants," artificially created lifeforms who are almost
indistinguishable from human beings -- the important difference being
their incapacity for emotional empathy. ~Bladerunner~ is based upon
Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep_,
and both take as their main character a bounty hunter whose job is to
"retire" the replicants, or "androids" as they are called in the
novel. However, the Nixon-era novel is quite different from --
darker, more pessimistic than -- the Reagan-era film. While actors
like Rutger Hauer make the film's replicants appealing and even
touching in death, the androids of the novel are gratuitously and
unimaginatively cruel, even to the few vestiges of organic life that
survive on Earth. One cuts the legs off a spider to see what will
happen. Another vengefully pushes a goat from a roof. The androids of
the novel lack the instantaneous empathic reaction that normal human
beings innately possess, and thus they fail the Voigt-Kampff Empathy
test, with its references to "boiled dog" and "babyhide"(real humans
react with revulsion). The androids are simulacra. As one of them,
Rachel Rosen, admits: "We are machines, stamped out like bottle caps.
It's an illusion that I -- I personally -- really exist; I'm just
representative of a type."[19] A human character senses of the
androids that that "a peculiar and malign _abstractness_ pervaded
their mental processes."[20] The bounty hunter Rick Deckard always
identifies androids by their coldness. "Her tone held cold reserve --
and that other cold, which he had encountered in so many
androids."[21]

If coldness, lack of empathy, and a bias in favor of abstraction are
characteristic of the android, then George W. Bush is clearly one of
them. His political speeches are composed entirely of undefined
abstractions like "freedom." While governor of Texas he inevitably
approved state executions, never exercising executive clemency.
Appeals for mercy were particularly ardent in the case of Karla Faye
Tucker, the convicted murderer who had undergone a conversion to
Christianity while incarcerated. Bush, who had claimed in a national
debate that Jesus was his favorite philosopher (no one asked him to
name his second favorite), refused even to meet with Tucker's many
advocates. Not only that, but according to no less a stalwart
conservative source than bowtied Tucker Carlson, Bush mocked her
imagined appeal to him: "'Please,' Bush whimpers, his lips pursed in
mock desperation, 'don't kill me'."[22] Like Reagan, Bush seems
solipsistic, unable to believe in the existence of other people. He
has shown this coldness even to members of his own family. According
to _The Perfect Wife_, Gerhart's biography of the First Lady, Bush
was "snarly" upon learning that his daughter Jenna would undergo an
emergency appendectomy, "like he was pissed at her."[23]

The notion of an American president as an android or simulacrum
appears in an earlier, less well-known Philip K. Dick novel, _The
Simulacra_. In this version of the future, Germany has become the
53rd member of the United States, time travel is possible for the
governing elite, and a venerable presidential figure known as Der
Alte (The Old One) periodically addresses the public on television.
There have been several presidential figures, each with a name and an
identity -- the current one is named Rudi Kalbfleish -- and all
fabricated by the Karp Cartel. At the end of one presidential
address, the Assistant Secretary of State takes charge:

Curtly, in his usual brisk tone, Garth McRae said, "Shut it
off."

The Kalbfleish simulacrum stopped. Its arms stuck out, rigid in
their final gesture, the withered face vacuous. The simulacrum
said nothing, and automatically the TV cameras also shut off,
one by one.[24]

In the world of Dick's 1964 novel, only a minority of citizens know
that der Alte is a simulacrum. By the end of the novel, the secret
has been revealed. The presidential simulacrum, the beloved First
Lady Nicole, and television, "that planet-wide instrument of
persuasion," are all intimately related.[25]

Now, 40 years later, as the July, 2004, cover of _Wired_ proclaims,
"Human Being 2.0: The Race to Make Androids That Walk, Talk, and Feel
Just Like the Rest of Us," can we be sure that Dick's prediction has
not already come to pass?

 

III. A Blank Page: The Culture of Celebrity
-------------------------------------------

Illiteracy is a kind of blindness.
-- Ruth Rendell

What is the origin of simulacra like the current President of the
United States? When I argue that Bush is not "real," I do not mean
that he was manufactured in a secret factory, owned by a corporation
like the Karp Cartel and controlled by a powerful conspiracy. But I
will speculate that in a post-literate, hyperreal world, those
accretions of historical time and psychological reflection that
produce subjectivity tend to disperse before they constitute a deep,
coherent self. The result can be a personality like that of Bush --
intellectually narrow, emotionally shallow, working with an abridged
vocabulary, like a novice in a foreign language class. He is a
commodity produced by contemporary American culture, with its bizarre
admixture of consumerism, television, worship of celebrities, and
glib Christian fundamentalism. Other cultures in other periods have
produced personalities limited in different ways -- the provincial
peasant, for example, who has never been more than a mile from his
birthplace. Unlike the peasant, the contemporary flat personality
knows that other countries, other cultures, other religions exist --
but in his solipsism they remain "unreal" to him, mere delusions to
which other people, themselves mere figments, display an irrational
attachment.

The star or politician on screen is the opposite of the introverted
reader in the book-lined study. With the exception of the occasional
compelling sports event or drama, watching television is a porous,
rather than engrossing experience -- hence the urge to channel-surf,
get up for a snack, make a phone call during a commercial. A good
book, by contrast, is sufficiently absorbing as to make interruptions
annoying. In the May 2004 issue of _Harper's_, Lewis Lapham pondered
the shift from reader to viewer: "As the habits of mind beholden to
the rule of images come to replace the systems of thought derived
from the meanings of words, the constant viewer learns to eliminate
the association of cause with effect." [26] Magical thinking and
incantations replace rational argument, thoughtful analysis, and
careful research. This may sound reactionary, but it is difficult --
as Noam Chomsky has complained -- to develop a complicated
political discourse on a show like ~Nightline~, interrupted not only
by commercials but also by the briefly encapsulated views of other
speakers. On television, acting and role-playing take the place of
the subjectivity both developed by and observed in the Bildungsroman
and the high modernist novel. Thus, "in deciding how to behave,
Chance chose the TV program of the young businessman who often dined
with the boss and the boss's daughter."[27]

Kosinski's Chance is unable to read or write. "I do not read any
newspapers," said Chance. "I watch TV." [28] In an October 17, 2003,
interview on Fox, George W. Bush volunteered that he did not read
newspapers. The emptiness of both George W. Bush and Chance the
Gardener is on display yet remains invisible to their admirers. This
emptiness in turn is a product of their illiteracy. Those who are
proposing Chance for the vice-presidency significantly praise him as
a "blank page," a man with no personal history.[29]

The relationship between reading, privacy, and subjectivity is the
subject of Sven Birkert's "The Time of Reading," first given as a
lecture on May 1, 1996, in the New York Public Library. Reading has
become archaic, he speculates, rather like walking in the age of the
automobile. We no longer seem to have time to read, not the kind of
time reading requires -- solitary, private, indefinite. Birkerts
postulates the emergence of a new kind of self, "no longer tightly
gathered around a core identity, no longer pledged to simple
membership in an organic human community, but rather fluid, capable
of metamorphosis -- of donning masks, assuming roles ... The self of
the future may indeed be a decentered entity."[30]

Such a self is already here, of course -- was here in Ronald Reagan
and is even more (or less) so in George W. Bush. One cannot imagine
either of them as an adolescent curled up with a book by Thoreau or
Jack Kerouac. For both of them the desirable persona to adopt was
that of the suntanned cowboy on his ranch, not the pale, bespectacled
nerd -- the Western outdoorsman, not the Eastern intellectual. Both
also, despite a lack of actual military experience, played at
Commander-in-Chief, tossing off salutes and, in Bush's case, dressing
up like an airman and landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier --
"donning masks, assuming roles."

"For every reader who dies today," Jonathan Franzen observes in an
essay entitled "The Reader in Exile," "a viewer is born." [31] In
order to devote himself to reading and writing. Franzen gives away
his television set. He confesses to possessing an old-fashioned
literary sensibility. "I understand my life in the context of
Raskolnikov and Quentin Compson," he writes, "not David Letterman or
Jerry Seinfeld."[32] With some skepticism, Franzen considers the
pessimistic arguments of cultural critics. Barry Sanders speculates
that, in Franzen's words, "without a literacy rooted in orality there
can be neither a self, as we understand it, nor self-
consciousness."[33] (Such an observation is applicable to Bush, who
seems constitutionally incapable of self-doubt or self-criticism.)
Franzen also writes about Sven Birkert's collected essays, _The
Gutenberg Elegies_, which he finds "alarmist" and unduly pessimistic,
despite his sympathy with many of Birkert's sentiments. "Novelists
want their work to be enjoyed," he points out, "not taken as
medicine."[34]

An even more pessimistic look at illiteracy, both its particular and
cumulative ill effects, appears in Ruth Rendell's 1977 novel _A
Judgment in Stone_, which opens with the sentence, "Eunice Parchman
killed the Coverdale family because she could not read or write."[35]
Parchman is a malevolent counterpart to Chance the Gardener; she
lacks his good looks, his benign disposition, and his artlessness.
Unlike Chance, she has grown up among many people, all of whom can
read, so her illiteracy induces profound shame and becomes "the root
cause of her misanthropy."[36] Rendell explains: "Isolating herself
was natural now, and she was not aware that it had begun by isolating
herself from print and books and handwriting. Illiteracy had dried up
her sympathy and atrophied her imagination."[37] In compensation,
Parchman possesses a keen memory, especially for visual images. Like
Chance she is fascinated by television and spends most of her free
time watching it. Both _Being There_ and _A Judgment in Stone_
represent the personality of the illiterate as lacking in depth and
complexity, a flat screen or blank page. Kosinski exploits the irony
of the situation, while Rendell explores its capacity for tragedy.
One could protest that both novelists overstate the deficiencies they
attribute to illiteracy, but it is important to recognize that they
situate their illiterate characters in the context of almost
universal functional literacy (both novels were written before the
advent of personal computers) and perpetual TV.

We live in a culture in which the ultimate validation or personal
achievement is to appear on television. Just as movies confer
potential immortality on actors, television seems to confer "reality"
on ordinary citizens. Chance looks forward to his first appearance on
a TV talk show. He "wanted to become an image, to dwell inside the
set."[38] Kosinski elaborates:

Television reflected only people's images; it also kept peeling
their images from their bodies until they were sucked into the
caverns of their viewers' eyes, forever beyond retrieval, to
disappear. Facing the cameras with their unsensing triple lenses
pointed at him like snouts, Chance became only an image for
millions of real people. They would never know how real he
was, since his thinking could not be televised. And to him, the
viewers existed only as projections of his own thought, as
images. He would never know how real they were, since he had
never met them and did not know what they thought.[39]

In this passage the circulation of images, the televised spectacle,
enhances the power of images to the detriment of the real and of real
human interaction. In a Freudian pun, thinking becomes mere
projection. In this triumph of solipsism, one can believe in one's
own reality but not in the reality of others. Nonetheless, Chance's
appearance on the talk show does not expose his ignorance; it only
enhances his reputation.

In the screenplay version of _Being There_, Chance's former caretaker
Louise, happens to witness his performance. Of all the millions of
viewers, she alone knows of Chance's intellectual limitations. She
is the only counterpart to the child in the fable who declares that
the emperor is naked. She exclaims to herself :

Gobbledegook! All the time he talked gobbledegook! An' it's
for sure a White man's world in America. Hell, I raised that boy
since he was the size of a puissant an' I'll say right now he
never learned to read an' write -- no sir! Had no brains at all,
was stuffed with rice puddin' between the ears! Short-changed by
the Lord and dumb as a jackass an' look at him now! Yes, sir --
all you gotta be is white in America an' you get whatever you
want! Just listen to that boy -- gobbledegook! [40]


One might speculate that a flat personality like that of Chance, or
of George W. Bush, is inherently more in accord with the flatness of
the television or computer screen and thus transmits smoothly and
consistently. By contrast, perhaps, a complex, three-dimensional
personality, full of contradictions, corners, and real history is
difficult to reduce to a flat surface. Not all politicians, however,
are inherently flat. John Kerry, for example, has posed a problem for
the sound-bite insights of television pundits. How could anyone be
both a decorated war hero and a longhaired protestor? A novel could
delicately delineate such a transformation (think of _Lord Jim_ or
_Crime and Punishment_) but television must flatten it into
"flip-flopping." The obviously literate Kerry, who speaks in complex
sentences and uses "big words," has been compensating for these
deficiencies by emphasizing his athleticism and military experience.
He advertises himself as "the real deal."

But in the hyperreal United States, where "reality TV" has usurped
reality itself, the problematic status of "the real" is precisely the
issue.


Notes:
------

Kosinski, Jerzy. _Being There_. New York: Grove Press, 1999,
p. 139.

Kosinksi, p. 107.

Baudrillard, Jean. _The Gulf War Did Not Take Place_.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995, p. 28.

Jameson, Fredrik. _Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism_. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1991, p. 306.

Kosinski, p. 106

Kosinski, p. 95.

_The New York Times_, 14 April 2004.

Suskind, Ron. _The Price of Loyalty_. New York: Simon and
Shuster, 2004, p. 58.

Suskin,d, p.59.

[10] Suskind, p. 117.

[11] Suskind, p. 98

[12] Suskind, pp. 148-49.

[13] Suskind, p. 73.

[14] Rogin, Michael Paul. _Ronald Reagan, The Movie, and Other
Episodes in Political Demonology_. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1987, p. 9.

[15] Rogin, p. 9.

[16] Rogin, p. xvi.

[17] www.fair.org/press-releases/reagan-myth-reality.html

[18] Morris, Edmund. "The Unknowable: Ronald Reagan's Amazing,
Mysterious Life." ~The New Yorker~, 28 June 2004, p. 48.

[19] Dick, Philip K. _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep_. New York:
Ballantine Books, 1982, p. 165.

[20] Dick, p. 137.

[21] Dick, p. 88.

[22] Wolcott, James. "The Bush Bunch." _Vanity Fair_, July 2004,
p. 82.

[23] Wolcott, 83.

[24] Dick, Philip K. _The Simulacra_. New York: Vintage, 2002, p. 32.
I have to add that I only came across this novel after writing an
almost final version of this article.

[25] Dick, _The Simulacra_, 88.

[26] Lapham, Lewis. "Buffalo Dances." _Harper's Magazine_, May 2004.

[27] Kosinksi, p. 39.

[28] Kosinski, p. 96.

[29] Koskinski, p. 127.

[30] Birkerts, Sven. "The Time of Reading."
http://www.bostonreview.net/BR21.3/Birkerts.html

[31] Franzen, Jonathan. _How to be Alone_. New York: Farrar, Straus,
and Giroux, 2002, p. 165.

[32] Franzen, p. 165.

[33] Franzen, p. 166.

[34] Franzen, p. 176.

[35] Rendell, Ruth. _A Judgment in Stone_. New York: Vintage, 2000,
p. 1

[36] Rendell, p. 38.

[37] Rendell, p. 42.

[38] Kosinksi, p. 61

[39] Kosinksi, p. 65.

[40] Kosinski, Jerzy. _Being There_ [screenplay].
www.geocities.com/Hollywood/8200/being.txt


--------------------

Carol Vanderveer Hamilton lives in Pittsburgh. Her article, "The Evil
of Banality: Moby-Dick versus the Extreme Machine" appears in the
Summer, 2004 issue of _The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies_. Her
book of poems, _Blindsight_, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon
University Press.

 

Interesting article with some very good observations.

George W. Bush's presidency reminds me of a movie called "Dave" starring Kevin Kline.

 

Wow. Boy would I hate to be president. Ideally, you bust your ass, barely sleep, make life and death decisions and if half the people dig what you do, you get either get eviscerated on talk radio from the right or deconstructed in scholarly print from the left.

That said, I suppose I'd rather be called a lying womanizer than a Replicant!

Oddly enough, considering the article's conclusion, throughout the read I was reminded of something I spotted in the NY Times a.m. Tuesday...Teresa Heinz Kerry, addressing a crowd of 5000 said "We need above all a president who is not fazed by complexity, a president who likes to read, a president who loves history." (emphasis mine) OUCH!

 

Peter Sellars' Swan Song

Peter Sellars' last movie was the film adaptation of Being There. It has been a few years since I have seen it, but Sellars is brilliant as I remember. It came out in 1980 and set the stage for the Reagan years perfectly. Reagan really had only a tenuous, fleeting grasp on reality. He literally confused fiction with fact, as when he told a foreign leader that he had personally liberated a concentration camp or when he made made up an inspiring, completely false story about the integration of the army during WWII. Somehow his "Sunny Disposition" and empty rhetoric made people feel "proud to be an American again."

Say what you will about presidential disasters like Reagan and Bush II, they do provide great fodder for witty intellectuals.

 

Very good read. Biased, of course, but a good read.

Of course, we know that Bush is a man that doesn't read newspapers, and we know that he isn't a particularly good speaker, at least from an intellectual point of view. However, do we really know that he doesn't 'know what he's doing'. What I mean is, does he actively know the consequences of his actions? Does he understand the effects of his policy? Does he actively push and advocate these results? Or is he just there to push when told to push? When he's being briefed by the CIA or military, does he actually make the decisions?

That's my question. I'm just worried. America's position in the eyes of the world has been steadily declining over the past couple years. If he gets reelected, I'm going to be very scared for our safety in the US. I'm already scared, personally. To have a good number of people hating your country, that's a scary thing.

I've told myself that I want to leave America if we continue down this path. But my Japanese friend tells me that I shouldn't run away; I should try to influence people and work hard to make a difference, to change my country. Sometimes it seems like an insurmountable task, really. There was an argument that liberals are too 'intellectual' for most American people, and are consequently shunned. I don't know what the validity of this statement is, but if this is the case, I'm scared for our country.

For those who aren't from America, I only wish that our nation wasn't doing many of the things we have been doing lately. I don't like the war, and I don't like our foreign policy. I also don't like that education, services and medical benefits are slashed and cut in the US.

If you're from outside the US, what do you think of our country today? What do you think of the American people? What can we do as a nation's people to fix things?

Sorry to hijack the thread, but these concerns have been brewing for a while in my head, and I wanted to let them out. Thanks for reading.

 

coincidences are funny...i was looking up "being there" on amazon.com just the other day and thinking along the same lines about gwb.

chauncy wasn't a hostile, spoiled frat fuck piece of human garbage, though. chauncy wasn't a snot-nosed cunt who got away with horrendous shit because of his connections. and bush, as much as a moron as he may be, is actually somewhat aware of the world around him. even if he is just viewing the world through his upper-class reality-blocking goggles, or being spoon-fed his information by his faux-xtian fascist barons-of-industry puppetmasters.

and i really like p.k. dick but "do androids dream of electric sheep" is a very poorly written novel. like other p.k. dick stuff: great concepts - but badly written. the plot holes in it make the goatse.cx anal cavity look like a tiny skin pore. i don't believe whatever changes were made in the movie have anything to do with the administration in power at the time or even the prevailing fucked up sensibilities of the coke ridden 80's. when you try and make that bridge (especially to the administration) you identify yourself as genuinely paranoid. dick's concepts of mercerism and empathy (among other things he wrote of in the book) are difficult to understand outright in text; they are near impossible to translate into movie form.

but there may actually some merit to that line of thought, if only (very, very, very, very) peripheral: ridley scott has a three disc dvd set of blade runner just waiting to be sent to the printing presses, but it has been delayed since 2001. from a new york times article in dec 2003:

[ QUOTE ]
"The avidly awaited, definitive version of Ridley Scott's science-fiction classic, "Blade Runner," won't be out on DVD anytime soon for stranger reasons.
When "Blade Runner" was being shot in the early 1980's, Bud Yorkin, a veteran television comedy producer, and Jerry Perenchio, now the C.E.O. of Univision, were the film's bond-completion guarantors. When the film went over budget, by contract they assumed ownership of the film. Paul Sammon wrote in his book "Future Noir: The Making of `Blade Runner' " that they hated the film, had bitter disputes with Mr. Scott and tried to take it away from him altogether.
The studio release, in 1982, contained superfluous narration and a tacked-on rosy ending. Mr. Scott removed both when he was allowed to make a "director's cut" in 1992, but it was, by his own account, a rush job.
Three years ago, Mr. Scott announced that he was working on a three-disc box set, which would offer all the versions of the film, including a new and polished director's cut with previously unseen footage and scads of bonus features. Then, at the end of 2001, Warner Brothers, which was planning to distribute the discs, pulled the plug. It did so, according to a producer who worked on the project, because Mr. Perenchio gave no sign that he would let them be released.
Mr. Perenchio, speaking through an assistant, had no comment on the situation. (Warner Brothers still sells the 1992 "director's cut," though the picture quality is mediocre.)"

[/ QUOTE ]

 

Re: Peter Sellars' Swan Song

(pssst! ramrod! it's sellErs!)

another sellers movie i gotta recommend is "the magic christian". i love all of sellers' stuff but lately i keep coming back to this one, for various reasons.

it's a semi-coherent movie that oozes pissed-off leftist sensibilities from every frame. it may be kinda hard to fully appreciate for many (including myself) because it specifically skewers english culture. however, the general atmosphere and the general ideas it was oozing are still relevant even today. expect good period music and lots of hilarity.

works even better if you're wrecked, too!

 

George Bush Kicks ass

Vote Bush Cheney 2004

 

It's thoughtful of your friends to say that. It's similar to how some anime/video game fans just up and move to Japan. I don't agree with them. I've seen movies of Japanese arcades (mainly pop 'n' music free-styles), and thought to myself "Wow, it would be fun just to hang out there.." For me, there really is no arcade around. There are a couple Chuck'e'Cheese wanna-bes whose main interest is batting cages.. I'm tired of only playing Virtua Fighter in arcades when I visit relatives in PA. It's one of my ambitions to set up an arcade around here, it would no doubt be successful.
What was I responding to again? Right, spread the east's culture. The west's technology has already infuluenced them enough.

-----

Oh, yes. I read that entire column. Using a dictionary 10 times along the way. I feel George Bush is a similar to a spokesman. He has the last name, and he's using it. To me, he isn't a leader. He isn't even my superior, he's just a guy helping his rich buddies.
For the war, I can't say the war against Iraq was a bad idea. In the end, Iraq will hopefully become our ally. Such as how Japan is today. However, The Cabinet and Bush's approach on the war is terrible. Why the heck are they sending the National Guard over... /versus/images/graemlins/confused.gif