ARTBASE (1)
BIO
Joy Garnett is a painter based in New York. She appropriates news images from the Internet and re-invents them as paintings. Her subject is the apocalyptic-sublime landscape, as well as the digital image itself as cultural artifact in an increasingly technologized world. Her image research has resulted in online documentation projects, most notably The Bomb Project.
Notable past exhibitions include her recent solo shows at Winkleman Gallery, New York and at the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC; group exhibitions organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, P.S.1/MoMA Contemporary Art Center, Artists Space, White Columns (New York), Kettle's Yard, Cambridge (UK), and De Witte Zaal, Ghent (Belgium). She shows with aeroplastics contemporary, Brussels, Belgium.
extended network >
homepage:
http://joygarnett.com
The Bomb Project
http://www.thebombproject.org
First Pulse Projects
http://firstpulseprojects.net
NEWSgrist - where spin is art
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/
Notable past exhibitions include her recent solo shows at Winkleman Gallery, New York and at the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC; group exhibitions organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, P.S.1/MoMA Contemporary Art Center, Artists Space, White Columns (New York), Kettle's Yard, Cambridge (UK), and De Witte Zaal, Ghent (Belgium). She shows with aeroplastics contemporary, Brussels, Belgium.
extended network >
homepage:
http://joygarnett.com
The Bomb Project
http://www.thebombproject.org
First Pulse Projects
http://firstpulseprojects.net
NEWSgrist - where spin is art
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/
recent NEWSgrist posts (now blogging at Typepad)
Tuesday, June 15, 2004
Buy Bye Bush
Join artists and friends in saying Bye-Bye Bush and help elect Democratic
candidates at the federal, state, and local levels at an art auction to
benefit DemocraticVictory2004...
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/06/buy_bye_bush.html
Monday, June 14, 2004
iPod to iRaq
The posters are evolving....
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/06/ipod_to_iraq_by.html
Monday, June 14, 2004
Larry Fink: Forbidden Pictures
The Forbidden Pictures
A Political Tableau
Larry Fink
June 17-September 4
Opening reception: June 16, 6-8 P.M
"It was time. The election was stolen, robbed by middlemen on top; folks
who thought the past was the future because they owned the present. The
leader was a twice entitled frat boy with charisma informed by homily and
stubborn gotcha comfort...."
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/06/larry_fink_forb.html
Buy Bye Bush
Join artists and friends in saying Bye-Bye Bush and help elect Democratic
candidates at the federal, state, and local levels at an art auction to
benefit DemocraticVictory2004...
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/06/buy_bye_bush.html
Monday, June 14, 2004
iPod to iRaq
The posters are evolving....
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/06/ipod_to_iraq_by.html
Monday, June 14, 2004
Larry Fink: Forbidden Pictures
The Forbidden Pictures
A Political Tableau
Larry Fink
June 17-September 4
Opening reception: June 16, 6-8 P.M
"It was time. The election was stolen, robbed by middlemen on top; folks
who thought the past was the future because they owned the present. The
leader was a twice entitled frat boy with charisma informed by homily and
stubborn gotcha comfort...."
http://newsgrist.typepad.com/underbelly/2004/06/larry_fink_forb.html
Re: Re: conference next week on IP, fair use, etc.
If anyone has any well-formulated questions about fair use, public domain,
etc., that I might keep in mind during the conference, please post them or
send them to me, I will try to incorporate them and possible answers in my
notes.
In the meantime, here's an overview on the conf. site that might help:
The First Round Panelists Respond to Moderators In Advance of the
Conference:
Panel 1: Hopes and Horror Stories
Panel 2: The MIT Experiment: Does it Work for Everyone?
Panel 3: Institutional Perspectives on the Fair Use Dilemma
Panel 4: Future Solutions in Action
Panel 5: In the Meantime, What Should a Scholar Do?
http://www.knowledgehostage.org/position.htm
best,
Joy
etc., that I might keep in mind during the conference, please post them or
send them to me, I will try to incorporate them and possible answers in my
notes.
In the meantime, here's an overview on the conf. site that might help:
The First Round Panelists Respond to Moderators In Advance of the
Conference:
Panel 1: Hopes and Horror Stories
Panel 2: The MIT Experiment: Does it Work for Everyone?
Panel 3: Institutional Perspectives on the Fair Use Dilemma
Panel 4: Future Solutions in Action
Panel 5: In the Meantime, What Should a Scholar Do?
http://www.knowledgehostage.org/position.htm
best,
Joy
Re: Re: conference next week on IP, fair use, etc.
thanks Ellen -- I missed that article completely. I intend to take copious
notes and write something up.
best,
Joy
On Mon, 14 Jun 2004, Ellen Pearlman wrote:
> There is an article in today's NY Times "Permissions on Digital Media Drives Scholars to Lawbooks" that is very interesting on the issues involved. Please do post a summary after you go to the conference.
> http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/14/business/media/14fair.html
> EP
> joy garnett wrote:
>
>>
>> hey, I'll be attending this one-day conference next Friday, June 18th
>> in
>> Philly:
>>
>> Knowledge Held Hostage? Scholarly versus Corporate Rights in the
>> Digital Age
>> http://www.knowledgehostage.org/
>>
>> if anyone on the list plans to be there, gimme a shout beforehand. In
>> any
>> case I'll try to get together a report to post...
>>
>> JG
> +
> -> post: list@rhizome.org
> -> questions: info@rhizome.org
> -> subscribe/unsubscribe: http://rhizome.org/preferences/subscribe.rhiz
> -> give: http://rhizome.org/support
> -> visit: on Fridays the Rhizome.org web site is open to non-members
> +
> Subscribers to Rhizome are subject to the terms set out in the
> Membership Agreement available online at http://rhizome.org/info/29.php
>
>
notes and write something up.
best,
Joy
On Mon, 14 Jun 2004, Ellen Pearlman wrote:
> There is an article in today's NY Times "Permissions on Digital Media Drives Scholars to Lawbooks" that is very interesting on the issues involved. Please do post a summary after you go to the conference.
> http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/14/business/media/14fair.html
> EP
> joy garnett wrote:
>
>>
>> hey, I'll be attending this one-day conference next Friday, June 18th
>> in
>> Philly:
>>
>> Knowledge Held Hostage? Scholarly versus Corporate Rights in the
>> Digital Age
>> http://www.knowledgehostage.org/
>>
>> if anyone on the list plans to be there, gimme a shout beforehand. In
>> any
>> case I'll try to get together a report to post...
>>
>> JG
> +
> -> post: list@rhizome.org
> -> questions: info@rhizome.org
> -> subscribe/unsubscribe: http://rhizome.org/preferences/subscribe.rhiz
> -> give: http://rhizome.org/support
> -> visit: on Fridays the Rhizome.org web site is open to non-members
> +
> Subscribers to Rhizome are subject to the terms set out in the
> Membership Agreement available online at http://rhizome.org/info/29.php
>
>
conference next week on IP, fair use, etc.
hey, I'll be attending this one-day conference next Friday, June 18th in
Philly:
Knowledge Held Hostage? Scholarly versus Corporate Rights in the Digital Age
http://www.knowledgehostage.org/
if anyone on the list plans to be there, gimme a shout beforehand. In any
case I'll try to get together a report to post...
JG
Philly:
Knowledge Held Hostage? Scholarly versus Corporate Rights in the Digital Age
http://www.knowledgehostage.org/
if anyone on the list plans to be there, gimme a shout beforehand. In any
case I'll try to get together a report to post...
JG
Re: reality check?
On 6/12/04 4:35 AM, "Jim Andrews" <jim@vispo.com> wrote:
> Living in Canada, we see a lot of media from the USA. The mainstream USA
> media is currently absolutely saturated with celebration of the
> 'achievement' of Ronald Reagan. I haven't seen any comment on this.
Yeah, it's freaking eery. But here's one comment in today's Times ("Arts &
Leisure"?!) I thought worth reading.
best,
j
////////////////
FRANK RICH
First Reagan, Now His Stunt Double
NYTimes
Published: June 13, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/arts/13RICH.html
BOY, if life were only like this," says Woody Allen in "Annie Hall" after
he brings out the actual Marshall McLuhan to silence a pontificating
McLuhan expert with whom he's trapped on a movie line. Well, last weekend
life was like that.
George W. Bush was all suited up in Normandy to repeat Ronald Reagan's
1984 blockbuster elegy to "the boys of Pointe du Hoc" (screenplay by Peggy
Noonan). It was not the first time that the current president had taken a
page from his fabled predecessor's script, but it may have been the most
humiliating. The D-Day-eve timing of Reagan's death had pushed the replay
of his original oration to center stage on TV, much as the real McLuhan is
yanked on screen in "Annie Hall." And as the McLuhan wannabe soon slinks
away in that movie, so Mr. Bush's would-be Reaganesque speech atomized
into white noise, to the limited extent that it was broadcast at all.
ome would argue that no politician in his right mind would even invite
comparisons to the Great Communicator. In the aftermath of Reagan's death,
his fans and foes alike remain agog at his performance chops. Kennedy may
have brought the Rat Pack to the White House, but no one has ever arrived
there with Reagan's particular gifts as an entertainer. They were a
product of training, not accident. He had first performed as a child in
church skits put on by his mother. Later came the legendary path through
baseball announcing, 52 feature films, "General Electric Theater" and the
conservative speaking circuit, where he honed what became known as the
Speech. Not even other Hollywood-spawned politicians, whether George
Murphy before him or Arnold Schwarzenegger after, can match this rsum. To
see the difference between an acting professional and an aspiring amateur,
just look at the one recent president who had show business on the brain,
Bill Clinton. Though Mr. Clinton's act may be better than any Reagan
successor, he nonetheless lacks the master's disciplined ability to hit
his mark, not to mention his timing, ready wit and brevity.
Mr. Clinton went so far as to incongruously appropriate Reagan ideology
("The era of big government is over") for political expediency. But no one
has more strenuously tried to emulate the 40th president in both style and
substance than George W. Bush. Reagan's body was barely cold when Ed
Gillespie, the Republican chairman, said: "The parallels are there. I
don't know how you miss them." Yes, the parallels are there hammered in
by Mr. Bush's packagers so we can never miss them. But Karl Rove and
company may have overplayed their hand. The orgiastic celebration of
Reagan's presidency over the past week, an upbeat Hollywood epic that has
glided past Iran-contra, Bitburg and the retreat from Lebanon with
impressive ease, has brought into clear focus the size of the gap between
the two men. To say that difference in stature is merely a function of an
actor's practiced skill at performance is both to understate the character
of Ronald Reagan and to impugn the art of acting.
The White House's efforts to follow the Reagan playbook have been nothing
if not relentless. As Michael Deaver's crew famously would have Reagan cut
ribbons in front of nursing homes even as he cut funds for their
construction, so Mr. Bush can be found communing with nature each time his
administration takes a whack at the environment. To pass himself off as a
practiced hand at proletarian manual labor, Mr. Bush clears brush on
camera at his ranch in Crawford just as Mr. Reagan did in Santa Barbara.
In Washington, the Bush speechwriters strain to equate an "axis of evil"
with the "evil empire."
Even his personality is presented to the public as a clone of Reagan's.
Mr. Bush is always characterized by his associates as a "big picture" guy
who leaves any detail that can't be fit on a 3-by-5 card to his aides. As
Donald Rumsfeld says in Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack": "This president
has a lot of the same quality that Ronald Reagan did where he'd look out,
way out to the horizon and plant a standard out there and then point
toward it."
To some who admire both men, the analogy is plausible. Mr. Bush's
certitude about his war on terrorism matches Reagan's unyielding
anti-communism. Both presidents made a religion out of big tax cuts,
talked of curbing government even as they increased spending and then
serenely ignored the daunting deficits that ensued.
Those who dislike both men see less salutary parallels. Both presidents
tried every stunt imaginable to create the illusion that their wartime
service had not been confined to the home front. Both pandered to the
religious right by impeding urgently needed federal medical research that
would have saved lives (Reagan with AIDS, Mr. Bush with stem cells). Where
Bush and Reagan boosters see both men as refreshingly disdainful of
intellectuals, critics see a smug lack of curiosity in any ideas but their
own. The ur-text of today's profuse Bushisms can be found in such
Reaganisms as his remarks upon returning from a trip to South America:
"Well, I learned a lot. . . . You'd be surprised. They're all individual
countries." Both presidents inspired "Tonight Show" gags about their
endless vacations.
But whether one likes either president or not, the difference between them
remains far greater than any similarities, and that difference has more
ramifications during a hot war than a cold one. Reagan may have been an
actor, but in Garry Wills's famous phrase, he played "the heartwarming
role of himself." Though he never studied with Lee Strasberg, he practiced
the method; his performance was based, however loosely, on the emotional
memory of a difficult youth as the son of an itinerant, sometimes
unemployed alcoholic. That Reagan triumphed over this background during
the Depression, developing the considerable ambition needed to work his
way through college and eventually to Warner Brothers, informed the
sentimental optimism that both defined (and limited) his vision of America
as a place where perseverance could pay off for anyone. It was indeed the
heartwarming role of himself (with the New Deal backdrop of his own
biography eventually stripped out).
Yet there was more to Reagan's role than its Horatio Alger success story.
Reagan may have stayed in Culver City during the war, but as a teenage
riverfront lifeguard in Illinois, he rescued 77 people, demonstrating
early on the physical courage that would see him through an assassination
attempt. And for all Reagan's absorption in show business, he was always
engaged in politics (to the point of alienating his first wife, Jane
Wyman, who found his preoccupation a bore). As president of the Screen
Actors Guild in the late 40's, he was at the center of fierce labor and
blacklisting battles.
Nor was he wholly isolated from the America beyond Hollywood. A contract
player who became "Errol Flynn of the B's," he wasn't a big enough star to
merit all the perquisites of top show-biz royalty. As his movie career
dwindled in the early 50's, he was briefly reduced to serving (at age 42)
as the baggy-pants M.C. to a cheesy, showgirl-laden revue at the Last
Frontier casino on the Vegas strip. Once he was reborn as a G.E.
spokesman, he spent years meeting workers in the company factories that he
repeatedly toured when off camera.
Whether you liked or loathed the performance that Mr. Reagan would give as
president, it derived from this earlier immersion in the real world. The
script he used in the White House was often romanticized and fictional; he
invented or embroidered anecdotes (including that ugly demonization of a
"welfare queen") and preached family values he didn't practice with his
own often-estranged children. But even the fiction was adapted from
experience. While he had arrived in politics in middle-age with the aid of
a kitchen cabinet of wealthy financial backers, there had been decades
when he lived in an America broader than that of Justin Dart and Alfred
Bloomingdale.
Mr. Bush's aw-shucks persona, by contrast, has been manufactured from
scratch. He has rarely, if ever, ventured out of the cocoon of privilege.
He "lost a lot of other people's money in the oil business," said Ron
Reagan Jr. in 2000. "What is his accomplishment? That he's no longer an
obnoxious drunk?" While the young Ronald Reagan used his imagination to
improvise play-by-play radio accounts of baseball games based on sparse
telegraphic accounts, Mr. Bush made a killing on a baseball team with the
help of cronies and sweetheart deals. He has no history of engagement with
either issues or people beyond big oil or the Andover-Yale-Harvard orbit
until he belatedly went into the family business of politics.
He does the down-home accent well, and he dresses the part. In the new
issue of The Atlantic, a linguist hypothesizes to James Fallows that Mr.
Bush, a smoother speaker in his Texas political career than now, may have
"deliberately made himself sound as clipped and tough as John Wayne" since
then "as a way of showing deep-down Nascar-type manliness." It's as if
he's eradicating his patrician one-term father to adopt the two-term
Gipper as his dad instead. But unlike Reagan, Mr. Bush is so inured to the
prerogatives of his life of soft landings that his attempts to affect a
jus' folks geniality are invariably betrayed by nastiness whenever someone
threatens to keep him from getting his own way. It's impossible to imagine
Reagan countenancing the impugning of the patriotism of war heroes like
John McCain and Max Cleland as the Bush machine has done in the heat of
close campaigns.
Last weekend in Normandy, the president sat for an interview in which Tom
Brokaw challenged his efforts to pull off a bigger flimflam than
impersonating Ronald Reagan the conflation of the Iraq war with World War
II. "You referred to the `ruthless and treacherous surprise attack on
America' that we went through during our time," Mr. Brokaw said. "But that
wasn't Iraq who did that, that was al Qaeda." With the gravesites of the
World War II dead behind him, the president retreated to his familiar
script ("Iraq is a part of the war on terror"). Even if you think the
lines make sense, the irritated man delivering them did not sound like
someone who had ever experienced pain of the life-and-death intensity that
comes with war. The problem is not merely that Mr. Bush lacks Reagan's
lilting vocal delivery. As any professional actor can tell you, no
performance, however sonorous, can be credible if it doesn't contain at
least a kernel of emotional truth.
> Living in Canada, we see a lot of media from the USA. The mainstream USA
> media is currently absolutely saturated with celebration of the
> 'achievement' of Ronald Reagan. I haven't seen any comment on this.
Yeah, it's freaking eery. But here's one comment in today's Times ("Arts &
Leisure"?!) I thought worth reading.
best,
j
////////////////
FRANK RICH
First Reagan, Now His Stunt Double
NYTimes
Published: June 13, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/13/arts/13RICH.html
BOY, if life were only like this," says Woody Allen in "Annie Hall" after
he brings out the actual Marshall McLuhan to silence a pontificating
McLuhan expert with whom he's trapped on a movie line. Well, last weekend
life was like that.
George W. Bush was all suited up in Normandy to repeat Ronald Reagan's
1984 blockbuster elegy to "the boys of Pointe du Hoc" (screenplay by Peggy
Noonan). It was not the first time that the current president had taken a
page from his fabled predecessor's script, but it may have been the most
humiliating. The D-Day-eve timing of Reagan's death had pushed the replay
of his original oration to center stage on TV, much as the real McLuhan is
yanked on screen in "Annie Hall." And as the McLuhan wannabe soon slinks
away in that movie, so Mr. Bush's would-be Reaganesque speech atomized
into white noise, to the limited extent that it was broadcast at all.
ome would argue that no politician in his right mind would even invite
comparisons to the Great Communicator. In the aftermath of Reagan's death,
his fans and foes alike remain agog at his performance chops. Kennedy may
have brought the Rat Pack to the White House, but no one has ever arrived
there with Reagan's particular gifts as an entertainer. They were a
product of training, not accident. He had first performed as a child in
church skits put on by his mother. Later came the legendary path through
baseball announcing, 52 feature films, "General Electric Theater" and the
conservative speaking circuit, where he honed what became known as the
Speech. Not even other Hollywood-spawned politicians, whether George
Murphy before him or Arnold Schwarzenegger after, can match this rsum. To
see the difference between an acting professional and an aspiring amateur,
just look at the one recent president who had show business on the brain,
Bill Clinton. Though Mr. Clinton's act may be better than any Reagan
successor, he nonetheless lacks the master's disciplined ability to hit
his mark, not to mention his timing, ready wit and brevity.
Mr. Clinton went so far as to incongruously appropriate Reagan ideology
("The era of big government is over") for political expediency. But no one
has more strenuously tried to emulate the 40th president in both style and
substance than George W. Bush. Reagan's body was barely cold when Ed
Gillespie, the Republican chairman, said: "The parallels are there. I
don't know how you miss them." Yes, the parallels are there hammered in
by Mr. Bush's packagers so we can never miss them. But Karl Rove and
company may have overplayed their hand. The orgiastic celebration of
Reagan's presidency over the past week, an upbeat Hollywood epic that has
glided past Iran-contra, Bitburg and the retreat from Lebanon with
impressive ease, has brought into clear focus the size of the gap between
the two men. To say that difference in stature is merely a function of an
actor's practiced skill at performance is both to understate the character
of Ronald Reagan and to impugn the art of acting.
The White House's efforts to follow the Reagan playbook have been nothing
if not relentless. As Michael Deaver's crew famously would have Reagan cut
ribbons in front of nursing homes even as he cut funds for their
construction, so Mr. Bush can be found communing with nature each time his
administration takes a whack at the environment. To pass himself off as a
practiced hand at proletarian manual labor, Mr. Bush clears brush on
camera at his ranch in Crawford just as Mr. Reagan did in Santa Barbara.
In Washington, the Bush speechwriters strain to equate an "axis of evil"
with the "evil empire."
Even his personality is presented to the public as a clone of Reagan's.
Mr. Bush is always characterized by his associates as a "big picture" guy
who leaves any detail that can't be fit on a 3-by-5 card to his aides. As
Donald Rumsfeld says in Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack": "This president
has a lot of the same quality that Ronald Reagan did where he'd look out,
way out to the horizon and plant a standard out there and then point
toward it."
To some who admire both men, the analogy is plausible. Mr. Bush's
certitude about his war on terrorism matches Reagan's unyielding
anti-communism. Both presidents made a religion out of big tax cuts,
talked of curbing government even as they increased spending and then
serenely ignored the daunting deficits that ensued.
Those who dislike both men see less salutary parallels. Both presidents
tried every stunt imaginable to create the illusion that their wartime
service had not been confined to the home front. Both pandered to the
religious right by impeding urgently needed federal medical research that
would have saved lives (Reagan with AIDS, Mr. Bush with stem cells). Where
Bush and Reagan boosters see both men as refreshingly disdainful of
intellectuals, critics see a smug lack of curiosity in any ideas but their
own. The ur-text of today's profuse Bushisms can be found in such
Reaganisms as his remarks upon returning from a trip to South America:
"Well, I learned a lot. . . . You'd be surprised. They're all individual
countries." Both presidents inspired "Tonight Show" gags about their
endless vacations.
But whether one likes either president or not, the difference between them
remains far greater than any similarities, and that difference has more
ramifications during a hot war than a cold one. Reagan may have been an
actor, but in Garry Wills's famous phrase, he played "the heartwarming
role of himself." Though he never studied with Lee Strasberg, he practiced
the method; his performance was based, however loosely, on the emotional
memory of a difficult youth as the son of an itinerant, sometimes
unemployed alcoholic. That Reagan triumphed over this background during
the Depression, developing the considerable ambition needed to work his
way through college and eventually to Warner Brothers, informed the
sentimental optimism that both defined (and limited) his vision of America
as a place where perseverance could pay off for anyone. It was indeed the
heartwarming role of himself (with the New Deal backdrop of his own
biography eventually stripped out).
Yet there was more to Reagan's role than its Horatio Alger success story.
Reagan may have stayed in Culver City during the war, but as a teenage
riverfront lifeguard in Illinois, he rescued 77 people, demonstrating
early on the physical courage that would see him through an assassination
attempt. And for all Reagan's absorption in show business, he was always
engaged in politics (to the point of alienating his first wife, Jane
Wyman, who found his preoccupation a bore). As president of the Screen
Actors Guild in the late 40's, he was at the center of fierce labor and
blacklisting battles.
Nor was he wholly isolated from the America beyond Hollywood. A contract
player who became "Errol Flynn of the B's," he wasn't a big enough star to
merit all the perquisites of top show-biz royalty. As his movie career
dwindled in the early 50's, he was briefly reduced to serving (at age 42)
as the baggy-pants M.C. to a cheesy, showgirl-laden revue at the Last
Frontier casino on the Vegas strip. Once he was reborn as a G.E.
spokesman, he spent years meeting workers in the company factories that he
repeatedly toured when off camera.
Whether you liked or loathed the performance that Mr. Reagan would give as
president, it derived from this earlier immersion in the real world. The
script he used in the White House was often romanticized and fictional; he
invented or embroidered anecdotes (including that ugly demonization of a
"welfare queen") and preached family values he didn't practice with his
own often-estranged children. But even the fiction was adapted from
experience. While he had arrived in politics in middle-age with the aid of
a kitchen cabinet of wealthy financial backers, there had been decades
when he lived in an America broader than that of Justin Dart and Alfred
Bloomingdale.
Mr. Bush's aw-shucks persona, by contrast, has been manufactured from
scratch. He has rarely, if ever, ventured out of the cocoon of privilege.
He "lost a lot of other people's money in the oil business," said Ron
Reagan Jr. in 2000. "What is his accomplishment? That he's no longer an
obnoxious drunk?" While the young Ronald Reagan used his imagination to
improvise play-by-play radio accounts of baseball games based on sparse
telegraphic accounts, Mr. Bush made a killing on a baseball team with the
help of cronies and sweetheart deals. He has no history of engagement with
either issues or people beyond big oil or the Andover-Yale-Harvard orbit
until he belatedly went into the family business of politics.
He does the down-home accent well, and he dresses the part. In the new
issue of The Atlantic, a linguist hypothesizes to James Fallows that Mr.
Bush, a smoother speaker in his Texas political career than now, may have
"deliberately made himself sound as clipped and tough as John Wayne" since
then "as a way of showing deep-down Nascar-type manliness." It's as if
he's eradicating his patrician one-term father to adopt the two-term
Gipper as his dad instead. But unlike Reagan, Mr. Bush is so inured to the
prerogatives of his life of soft landings that his attempts to affect a
jus' folks geniality are invariably betrayed by nastiness whenever someone
threatens to keep him from getting his own way. It's impossible to imagine
Reagan countenancing the impugning of the patriotism of war heroes like
John McCain and Max Cleland as the Bush machine has done in the heat of
close campaigns.
Last weekend in Normandy, the president sat for an interview in which Tom
Brokaw challenged his efforts to pull off a bigger flimflam than
impersonating Ronald Reagan the conflation of the Iraq war with World War
II. "You referred to the `ruthless and treacherous surprise attack on
America' that we went through during our time," Mr. Brokaw said. "But that
wasn't Iraq who did that, that was al Qaeda." With the gravesites of the
World War II dead behind him, the president retreated to his familiar
script ("Iraq is a part of the war on terror"). Even if you think the
lines make sense, the irritated man delivering them did not sound like
someone who had ever experienced pain of the life-and-death intensity that
comes with war. The problem is not merely that Mr. Bush lacks Reagan's
lilting vocal delivery. As any professional actor can tell you, no
performance, however sonorous, can be credible if it doesn't contain at
least a kernel of emotional truth.