Being
Nothing: George W. Bush as Presidential Simulacrum
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Nobody
likes to see dead people on their television screens. (George W. Bush,
April 13, 2004)
I. Flat Personality
for the Age of Simulation 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."[1] 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 "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."[2] 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 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."[4] 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 "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."[6] 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 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."[7] 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 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, 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 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 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. Everyoneacknowledges 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 ... 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 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 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 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 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 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
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 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 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 "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 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 ofviewers, she alone
knows of Chance's intellectual limitations. She 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]
But in the hyperreal United States, where "reality TV" has usurpedreality itself, the problematic status of "the real" is precisely the issue.
[I] Kosinski, Jerzy. _Being There_. New York: Grove Press, 1999, p. 139. [2] Kosinksi, p. 107. [3] Baudrillard, Jean. _The Gulf War Did Not Take Place_. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995, p. 28. [4] Jameson, Fredrik. _Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism_. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1991, p. 306. [5] Kosinski, p. 106 [6] Kosinski, p. 95. [7] _The New York Times_, 14 April 2004. [8] Suskind,
Ron. _The Price of Loyalty_. New York: Simon and [9] 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, [36] Rendell, p. 38. [37] Rendell, p. 42. [38] Kosinksi, p. 61 [39] Kosinksi, p. 65. [40] Kosinski,
Jerzy. _Being There_ [screenplay].
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