A FRIEND of mine puts it this way. At least Erap was just a movie star and used English as a second (to put it kindly) language. You can expect him to erupt with words like "misunderestimate," "suiciders" and "hopefuller"; mistake "persecute" for "prosecute," " preserve" for "persevere" and an "opportunistic society" for "a society full of opportunity"; and dish out grammatical boners like "he and her" and "I will preserve executive powers for my predecessors."
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I agree with my friend entirely. But it's more than just malapropisms or inability to use the right words. You look at Bush's gaffes (one is tempted to say "giraffes" in the spirit of things)--and the ones I put out last Thursday and Friday are just a small sample from a very long list that dates back to only 2000--and you'll see that wrong words are the least of his worries. The far more alarming things are his massive confusion and even more massive ignorance about the state of the world. How he managed to pass history and social studies, quite apart from high school, is anybody's guess.
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I don't know how anybody can sleep nights knowing the future of the planet is in the hands of someone who says, "I know what I believe. I will continue to articulate what I believe and what I believe--I believe what I believe is right." Or who says, "You've also got to measure in order to begin to effect change that's just more--when there's more than talk, there's just actual--a paradigm shift." Or "What I am against is quotas. I am against hard quotas, quotas they basically delineate based upon whatever. However they delineate, quotas, I think vulcanize society. So I don't know how that fits into what everybody else is saying, their relative positions, but that's my position."
These are levels of unintelligibility that reveal a traffic jam in thought processes. It's not just a loss for words, it's a loss of thought. To say that the statements are tautological, or defining a thing by itself, is to edify them. There isn't an inchoate idea in them, or one struggling to be born amid the turmoil in the brain. It's just gibberish.
Well, Bush himself admits the problem in another Bushism he regaled an interviewer with on Air Force One in June this year: "I'm not very analytical. You know I don't spend a lot of time thinking about myself, about why I do things." Doubtless meant to suggest he is spontaneous, his unintended meaning better catches his true character, such as he has one.
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It's almost unthinkable for any president, least of all that of the United States, to ask a Brazilian leader: "Do you have blacks, too?" It's almost unthinkable for any president, least of all that of the United States, to keep referring to the UN Security Council as the "United Nations Senate" (he has done so repeatedly). It's almost unthinkable for any president, least of all that of the United States, to think of Yasser Arafat being holed up in Ramallah with German peace protesters, to refer to the Gulf countries as Gulf Coast countries, and to toast a century and a half of US-Japan partnership. Not even Erap makes those mistakes.
You suspect that Bush finds it the easiest thing in the world to embark on reckless adventurism because he really believes the UN is an extension of the American legislature, Latin American populations are predominantly white, the slaves from Africa contributed to American progress because of their love for freedom, the Middle East is somewhere out there, probably in Africa, suicide bombers are primitive cavemen who have no beliefs, the French have no word for entrepreneur and need to be educated, other cultures are inferior to the American one.
Indeed, you suspect that he finds it the easiest thing in the world to go to war because he finds it enough to offer blithe consolation to the kin of the dead. Yet another Bushism: "There's only one person who hugs the mothers and the widows, the wives and the kids upon the death of their loved one. Others hug but having committed the troops, I've got an additional responsibility to hug and that's me and I know what it's like." (Washington, D.C., Dec. 11, 2002) If that's how he values American life, think of how he values the lives of other people.
This was the fellow we greeted with much fanfare the other day, whose path we literally cleared of human flotsam and debris, whose presence we took to be a favor granted to us, whose utterances we clung on to like pearls of wisdom. We have a saying that a man who takes a fool seriously is an even bigger fool. But how call a whole nation that does so?
