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Bush Reading Camus? How Absurd!
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| Renegade |
Not really relevent to anything, but I thought at least Lira would get a kick out of it. Would have loved to have been there for the discussion between Bush and Snow on "the origins of existentialism":
| quote: | By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: August 16, 2006
WASHINGTON
Strangely enough, we find two famous men reading Albert Camus’s “The Stranger” this summer.
One is Jean Girard, the villainous gay French race car driver hilariously played by Sacha Baron Cohen (a k a Ali G and Borat) — the sinuous rival to Will Ferrell’s stocky Ricky Bobby in “Talladega Nights.”
Girard, a jazz-loving, white-silk-scarf-wearing, America-disdaining Formula Un driver sponsored by Perrier, is so smooth he can sip macchiato from a china cup, smoke Gitanes and read “L’Etranger” behind the wheel and still lead the Nascar pack.
Frenchie contemptuously informs “cowboy” Bobby that America merely gave the world George Bush, Cheerios and the ThighMaster while France invented democracy, existentialism and the ménage à trois.
The other guy kindling to Camus is none other than the aforementioned George Bush, who read “The Stranger” in English on his Crawford vacation and, Tony Snow told me, “liked it.” Name-dropping existentialists is good for picking up girls, as Woody Allen’s schlemiels found, or getting through the clove-cigarette fog of Humanities 101. But it does seem odd that W., who once mocked NBC’s David Gregory as “intercontinental” for posing a question in French to the French president in France, would choose Camus over Grisham.
Camus is not beach reading — or brush reading. How on earth did this book make it into the hands of our proudly anti-intellectual president?
“I don’t know how ‘L’Etranger’ made it onto his list,” Mr. Snow said. “I must confess, I read ‘L’Etranger’ 25 years ago.” The rest of W.’s reading list was presidentially correct: two books on Lincoln and the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Polio: An American Story,” by David Oshinsky. (Not a word by Merleau-Ponty.)
Debunking the theory that W. had a sports section or Mad magazine’s “Spy vs. Spy” tucked inside the 1946 classic of angst, Mr. Snow noted that he and the president had “a brief conversation on the origins of French existentialism, Camus and Sartre.” Pressed for more details by an astonished columnist having trouble envisioning Waco as the Left Bank, the press secretary laughed. “Confidential conversation,” he said, extending the administration’s lack of transparency to literature.
He brushed off suggestions that the supremely unself-reflective W. was going through a Carteresque malaise-in-the-gorge moment: “He doesn’t feel like an existentialist trapped in Algeria during the unpleasantness.”
It takes a while to adjust to the idea of W., who has created chaos trying to impose moral order on the globe, perusing Camus, who wrote about the eternal frustration of moral order in human affairs. What does W., the archenemy of absurdity as a view of life, kindle to in C., the apostle of absurdity as a view of life? What can W., the born-again monogamist, spark to in C., the amorous atheist? In some ways, Mr. Bush is supremely not a Camus man. Camus hated the blindness caused by ideology, and Mr. Bush wallows in it. Camus celebrated lucidity while the president keeps seeing only what he wants to see.
Mr. Bush’s life has been premised on his confidence that he will always be insulated from the consequences and the cruelties of existence, unlike Meursault. W. or his people always work to change fate, whether it’s an election or the Middle East.
If you think about it long enough, though, it begins to make a sort of wacky sense.
“The Stranger” is about the emotionally detached Meursault, who makes a lot of bad decisions and pre-emptively kills an Arab in the sand. Get it? Camus’s protagonist moves through an opaque, obscure and violent world that is indifferent to his beliefs and desires. Get it?
If there was ever a moment when this president could regard the unanticipated consequences of his actions, behold the world littered with the very opposite of what he intended for it and appreciate the gritty stoicism of the philosophy of absurdism, this is it. Iraq in civil war. Al Qaeda metastasizing and plotting. Hezbollah, Iran and Syria knitting closer, celebrating a “victory” in standing up to Israel, the U.S. and Britain, and mocking W.’s plan for a “new Middle East.” The North Koreans luxuriating in their nuclear capability. Chávez becoming the new Castro on a global scale.
Maybe next the president should pick up Camus’s other classic, “The Myth of Sisyphus.” Was there ever a national enterprise more Sisyphean than the war in Iraq?
If there was ever a confirmation of Camus’s sense of the absurdity of life, it’s that the president is reading him. |
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/08/1.../16dowd.html?hp
"Five US soldiers died in Iraq today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know. I had a telegram from the DoD: 'Five soldiers passed away. Funeral tomorrow. Yours sincerely.' That doesn't mean anything. It may have been yesterday."
Obligatory Daily Show take:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTfZYQ1SyMc |
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| sensorium |
| I bet he didn't read it all. I'm willing to say he didn't even finish the first part. |
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| pkcRAISTLIN |
| yeah, that was my thought. that article alone is too complicated for him ;) |
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| Lira |
| quote: | | If there was ever a confirmation of Camus’s sense of the absurdity of life, it’s that the president is reading him. |
:stongue: :stongue: :stongue:
I think the most relevant question here is whether Bush saw himself as Meursault. I mean, they both don't seem to use their heads that much (except for Meursault after being arrested), and both killed Arabs for no necessary reason... I bet 2 dollars George W. Bush will change his name to George M. Bush if he understood the book :D
Anyway, the fact that president Bush talking about Meursault and having "a brief conversation on the origins of French existentialism, Camus and Sartre." is quite funny (I wonder how brief it was :p), but I'd be afraid if someone told me he read this:
| quote: | Americans and Their Myths
by JOHN-PAUL [sic] SARTRE
[from the October 18, 1947 issue]
EVERYTHING has been said about the United States. But a person who has once crossed the Atlantic can no longer be satisfied with even the most penetrating books; not that he does not believe what they say, but that his agreement remains abstract.
When a friend tries to explain our character and unravel our motives, when he relates all our acts to principles, prejudices, beliefs, and a conception of the world which he &rinks to find in us, we listen uneasily, unable either to deny what he says or entirely accept it. Perhaps the interpretation is true, but what is the truth that is being interpreted? We miss the intimate warmth, the life, the way one is always unpredictable to oneself and also tiresomely familiar, the decision to -get along with oneself, the perpetual deliberations and perpetual inventions about what one is, and the vow to be "that" and nothing else--in short, the liberty. Similarly, when a careful arrangement of those melting-pot notions--puritanism, realism, optimism, and so on--which we have been told are the keys to the American character is presented to us in Europe, we experience a certain intellectual satisfaction and think that, in effect, it must be so. But when we walk about New York, on Third Avenue, or Sixth Avenue, or Tenth Avenue, at that evening hour which, for Da Vinci, lends softness to the faces of men, we see the most pathetic visages in the world, uncertain, searching, intent, full of astonished good faith, with appealing eyes, and we know that the most beautiful generalizations are of very little service: they permit us to understand the system but not the people.
The system is a great external apparatus, an implacable machine which one might call the objective spirit of the United States and which over there they call Americanism-a huge complex of myths, values, recipes, slogans, figures, and rites. But one must not think that it has been deposited in the head of each American just as the God of Descartes deposited the first notions in the mind of man; one must not think that it is "refracted" into brains and hearts and at each instant determines affections or thoughts that exactly express it. Actually, it is something outside of the people, something presented to them; the most adroit propaganda does nothing else but present it to &cm continuously. It is not in them, they are in it; they struggle against it or they accept it, they stifle in it or go beyond it, they submit to it or reinvent it, they give themselves up to it or make furious efforts to escape from it; in any case it remains outside them, transcendent, because they are men and it is a thing.
There are the great myths, the myths of happiness, of progress, of liberty, of triumphant maternity; there is realism and optimism--and then there are the Americans, who, nothing at first, grow up among these colossal statues and find their way as best they can among them. There is this myth of happiness: black-magic slogans warn you to be happy at once; films that "end well" show a life of rosy ease to the exhausted crowds; the language is charged with optimistic and unrestrained expressions-"have a good time," "life is fun," and the like. But there are also these people, who, though conventionally happy, suffer from an obscure malaise to which no name can be given, who are tragic through fear of being so, through that total absence of the tragic in them and around them.
There is this collectivity which prides itself on being the least "historical" in the world, on never complicating its problems with inherited customs and acquired rights, on facing as a virgin a virgin future in which every thing is possible-and there are these blind gropings of bewildered people who seek to lean on a tradition, on a folklore. There are the films that write American history for the masses and, unable to offer them a Kentucky Jeanne d'Arc or a Kansas Charlemagne, exalt them with the history of the jazz singer, Al Jolson, or the composer, Gershwin. Along with the Monroe doctrine, isolationism, scorn for Europe, there is the sentimental attachment of each American for his country of origin, the inferiority complex of the intellectuals before the culture of the old Continent, of the critics who say, "How can you admire our novelists, you who have Flaubert?" of the painters who say, "I shall never be able to paint as long as I stay in the United States"; and there is the obscure, slow effort of an entire nation to seize universal history and assimilate it as its patrimony.
There is the myth of equality--and there is the myth of segregation, with those big beach-front hotels that post signs reading "Jews and dogs not allowed," and those lakes in Connecticut where Jews may not bathe, and that racial tchin, in which the lowest degree is assigned to the Slavs, the highest to the Dutch immigrants of 1680. There is the myth of liberty--and the dictatorship of public opinion; the myth of economic liberalism--and the big companies extending over the whole country which, in the final analysis, belong to no one and in which the employees, from top to bottom, are like functionaries in a state industry. There is respect for science and industry, positivism, an insane love of "gadgets''--and there is the somber humor of the New Yorker, which pokes bitter fun at the mechanical civilization of America and the hundred million Americans who satisfy their craving for the marvelous by reading every day in the "comics" the incredible adventures of Superman, or Wonderman, or Mandrake the Magician.
There are the thousand taboos which proscribe love outside of marriage--and there is the litter of used contraceptives in the back yards of coeducational colleges; there are all those men and women who drink before making love in order to transgress in drunkenness and not remember. There are the neat, coquettish houses, the pure-white apartments with radio, armchair, pipe, and stand--little paradises; and there are the tenants of those apartments who, after dinner, leave their chairs, radios, wives, pipes, and children, and go to the bar across the street to get drunk alone.
Perhaps nowhere else will you find such a discrepancy between people and myth, between life and the representation of life. An American said to me at Berne: "The trouble is that we are all eaten by the fear of being less American than our neighbor." I accept this explanation: it shows that Americanism is not merely a myth that clever propaganda stuffs into people's head but something every American continually reinvents in his gropings. It is at one and the same time a great external reality rising up at the entrance to the port of New York across from the Statue of Liberty, and the daily product of anxious liberties. The anguish of the American confronted with Americanism is an ambivalent anguish; as if he were asking, "Am I American enough?" and at the same time, "How can I escape from Americanism?" In America a man's simultaneous answers to these two questions make him what he is, and each man must find his own answers.
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE is the leading French existentiaIist. His exposition of his philosophy has recently been published in this country under the title "Existentialism." He is also the author of a play, "No Exit," which was produced on Broadway last year, and of "The Age of Reason," a novel. |
Imagine the ideas Bush would have :p |
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| Psionic |
| I guess it's one of only a few books Bush can read where the thousands of lives lost in the Middle East over the last few years due to his administration still mean nothing to him. |
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| TranceGiant |
| Weird, I started "The Stranger" this week, too :nervous: |
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| Renegade |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lira
I think the most relevant question here is whether Bush saw himself as Meursault. I mean, they both don't seem to use their heads that much (except for Meursault after being arrested), and both killed Arabs for no necessary reason... |
Haha, yeah there are some pretty close parallels there now that I think about it. Even towards the end - after his existential awakening - Meursault says:
"I'd been right, I was still right, I was always right. I'd lived in a certain way and I could have just as well lived a different way. I'd done this and I hadn't done that. I hadn't done one thing whereas I had done another. So what?"
I can easily imagine Bush looking back on his presidency - especially his decision to send US forces to Iraq - and rationalising things in exactly the same way. I don't see Bush as quite the existential anti-hero that Meursault is, but they're certainly quite similar characters in a lot of ways. |
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