I Am Not the Decider Anymore

'Junior' with Bunny, ancestor of Rummy

Eliot Weinberger, writer, essayist and translator of Borges and Octavio Paz, has written a wonderfully cunning and irreverent, yet truthful review of our 43rd President’s memoir Decision Points in the London Review of Books.

Weinberger compares the real-life wanderings of Bush to Michel Foucault in the first paragraph and later keeps up the thread by employing Foucault’s words to critique Bush:

Decision Points holds the same relation to George W. Bush as a line of fashion accessories or a perfume does to the movie star that bears its name; he no doubt served in some advisory capacity. The words themselves have been assembled by Chris Michel (the young speechwriter and devoted acolyte who went to Yale with Bush’s daughter Barbara); a freelance editor, Sean Desmond; the staff at Crown Publishing (who reportedly paid $7 million for the book); a team of a dozen researchers; and scores of ‘trusted friends’. Foucault: ‘What difference does it make who is speaking?’ ‘The mark of the writer is … nothing more than the singularity of his absence.’

What’s also wonderful is that Weinberger looks at the whole enterprise, including the language employed. He cites passages and finds 500 pages of “anaesthetised declarative sentences” reminiscent of Tao Lin (check the letters at the bottom for Weinberger’s own note on mixing Tan Lin with Tao and a tidbit on Bush taking a Margaret Mead class at Yale).

But, of course, the survey of the maddening and ignoble words of Bush and his actions are most treasured:

In the book, as in his life, Bush the postmodernist is a simulacrum: a Connecticut blueblood who pretended to be a Texas cowboy, though he couldn’t ride a horse and lived on a ‘ranch’ with no cattle. He was, and is, happiest when surrounded by professionals in the three areas in which he was a notable failure: athletics, the military and business. He is like a sports fan who dresses up in the team jersey to watch the game. References to his ‘military service’ recur frequently throughout the book, as though it were actually more than a few months spent avoiding it. He was the only modern American president to appear in public in a military uniform – even Eisenhower never wore his while president – like a ribboned despot from a banana republic.

Weinberger ends the review by comparing Bush to some of the current Republicans in office and finds Bush a “reasonable” man. Eight years of a bullying administration have come and gone, but seemingly we’ve seen nothing yet.