Everyone must write at least once about Bush's losing struggle with English
Crayons ready? It's the G.W. Bush Liberry
His malaprops will be chiseled in marble walls
- Jaime O'Neill
Sunday, August 8, 2004
In anticipation of the day when George W. Bush is no longer in office, it is perhaps appropriate to give some thought to the prospect of a George W. Bush Presidential Library. The concept may seem oxymoronic to some. After all, how do we go about building a library for a man who appears so proud of his alienation from printed matter? He boasts of not reading newspapers, and there is little to be found in any of his public statements to suggest a familiarity with any book whatsoever. The thought of our current president reading, say, Shakespeare, defies imagining. It is difficult to think of him reading Danielle Steele, or John Grisham, let alone the Bard of Avon.
But if the Bush presidency has been about anything, it's been about breaking free of the fetters of the traditional past. It was the Bush presidency, after all, that did away with the fussy old notion about the U.S. not engaging in unilateral acts of first-strike aggression against sovereign nations. It was George Bush, after all, who redefined a "conservative" as someone who believed in enormous deficits. And it was the Bush administration that accelerated the separation of language from action by constantly saying one thing while meaning another; i.e. "Clear Skies" initiatives, and "No Child Left Behind."
Given all that, it may turn out that the George W. Bush Presidential Library (or, perhaps, "Liberry") will be equally surprising in the ways it breaks with tradition, and with meaning.
