Share this story!            

POETIC LICENCE: The Bush Dyslexicon: observations on a US national disorder

Kaleem Omar

Nor would dyslexia explain Bush’s thorough ignorance of the system he now purports to lead or his unawareness of the world beyond the US. “The problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur,” Bush declared recently, blissfully oblivious of the fact that “entrepreneur” is a French word

According to American writer Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of media ecology at New York University, and the author of a brand new book titled “The Bush Dyslexicon”, George W. Bush “may be the most illiterate president in US history.” His is not the merely technical illiteracy of most Americans, who, irrespective of their class or education, routinely make grammatical mistakes so slight that only pedants mind them. Bush’s illiteracy goes much beyond that, into the deepest recesses of his Texan-cowboy soul, so to speak.

“George W. Bush,” says Miller, “is so illiterate as to turn completely incoherent when he speaks without a script or unless he thinks his every statement through so carefully beforehand that the effort empties out his face. His eyes go blank as he consults the TelePrompTer in his head, and he chews uneasily at the corners of his mouth, as if to keep his lips in motion for the coming job, much as a batter swings before the pitch.”

It comes as no surprise, then, that Bush is a keen baseball fan. He was once even co-owner of a baseball club, the Texas Rangers, based in Arlington, Texas. Back in 1989, when his father was president of the United States, Bush borrowed $ 500,000 from a bank, at which he was a director, and put up $106,000 of his own money to acquire a $ 606,000 stake in the club, which gave him a 1.8 per cent ownership.

The other owners, intriguingly, then did Bush an enormous favour by deciding to up the value of his stake to 12 per cent without him having to invest any more money. Bush, who would later emulate his father’s “no new taxes” mantra in politics, pushed hard for a state sales tax hike to help pay for the construction of a new baseball stadium for the Rangers club in Arlington.

To increase pressure for the tax hike, Bush and his fellow investors became one in a long line of baseball ownership teams to threaten to move the club out of town unless the public paid for a new stadium. The strategy worked, the sales tax was increased, and the owners profited substantially.

All that enabled the Rangers ownership team to sell the club later for three times the original price. But for Bush, the deal was even sweeter because his ownership stake had been increased from 1.8 per cent to 12 per cent. For an investment of only $ 606,000, Bush received a payoff worth $ 14.9 million, giving him a profit of a staggering 2,400 per cent on the deal. Not bad for an “illiterate”!

To revert to Miller’s book, however. He says of Bush’s speaking style: “The president meticulously sounds out every... single... word, as if asking for assistance in a foreign language. Without such hasty mental planning, Bush is liable to make statements that either don’t mean anything (‘I will have a foreign-handed foreign policy’) or require unscrambling (‘Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream’) or say the opposite of what he means (‘Well, I think if you say you’re going to do something and don’t do it, that’s trustworthiness’) or are just dead wrong (‘The legislature’s job is to write the law. It’s the executive branch’s job to interpret the law’).”

It is, of course, the job of the judiciary, not the executive branch, to interpret the law. It could be, though, that, in Bush’s mind, the three branches of government are one and the same thing. After all, this is the man who said, on December 19, 2000, a month before he was sworn in as president: “If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier — so long as I’m the dictator.”

But Miller’s book goes beyond a listing of Bushisms. “Our president’s illiteracy,” he writes, “is something of a miracle, as rich in its own way as the expository genius of the Founding Fathers. His incapacity does not reflect one problem in particular but several kinds of verbal defect. As Gail Sheehy has argued (in a piece published in Vanity Fair), the president may actually suffer from dyslexia. Surely, that condition may explain his tendency to transpose words and to blurt out the opposite of what he means.”

It may also explain Bush’s frequent malapropisms: “hostile” for “hostage”, “arbitrary” for “arbitration”, “preserve” for “persevere”, “cufflink” for “handcuff”, etc. However, dyslexia would not account for his incessant violation of the fundamental rules of grammar (“The question is, how many hands have I shaked?”), his syntactical accidents (“It’s not the way America is all about”), or his utter prepositional confusion.

Nor — far more important — would dyslexia explain Bush’s thorough ignorance of the system he now purports to lead or his unawareness of the world beyond the US’s borders. “The problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur,” Bush declared recently, blissfully oblivious of the fact that “entrepreneur” is a French word.

Speaking about Saddam Hussein at a Republican political rally in Manchester, New Haven on October 5, Bush said, “I was proud the other day when both Republicans and Democrats stood with me in the Rose Garden to announce their support for a clear statement of purpose: you disarm, or we will.”

One can imagine the Iraqi president pouncing gleefully on that statement and saying that he has decided not to disarm and is now awaiting word from Washington about just when the US proposes to disarm.

Arianna Huffington says: “The Bush Dyslexicon is a rousing call to arms. It’s the book Tom Paine would have written had he penned ‘Common Sense’ while channel-surfing his satellite dish.”

Home | Editorial

Share this story!