Role-Playing

The press is all fluttery that George Bush is acting presidential. Stung by criticism that avoiding questions, insisting on speaking nowhere but before pre-screened and friendly audiences, and isolating himself from all but the closest of associates, Bush broke his own precedences and answered apparently ad hoc questions. Great gumdrops! Has our country turned the corner out of darkness?

I'm past getting mad at the politicians on their side playing politics. If I was advising a president with an earned reputation of being disinterested in any opinions besides his own, incurious about the world, and afraid to appear anywhere anyone could express dissent or ask tough questions, I'd take the chance to trot the show pony out and hope he could do a couple of tricks without breaking an ankle. What really does Bush have to lose in taking a few off-the-cuff questions? The world will think he's a dope, clueless beyond his belief in his own rhetoric?

I haven't been posting here lately. What's new to say? The gobsmacking daily realization that barring a revelation of something truly criminal at the absolute level of the presidency we're stuck with this sub-mediocrity through 2008 depresses any glee at the continuing revelations of his incompetent and dishonest captaincy of the country. We're like parents who know their kid is a trouble-maker and who stare at the ringing phone and resent we can't pick it up because we're afraid it's the school principle calling to tell us the latest. We can't fix the kid and we don't want to hear what shit he's gotten into this time.

So when the president acts presidential, after mumbling and stumbling and cowering and hummina-hummining and growling and snarling and bitching and moaning, who cares if in reality everything is worse by a day from yesterday? We live in performative times. Even the tattooed and squirrel-haired glue-sniffer that is your son can take a shower and put on a suit, and for a couple of minutes you can think, maybe. Maybe.

Maybe he isn't a coward. Maybe he's not a divisive demagogue with a messianic complex. Maybe he isn't imcompetent, blindly stubborn, maybe he's not controlled by the willfully immoral who use his messianic complex to their own advantage. Maybe he isn't too stupid to string together three sentences. Probably not, but maybe, maybe. I'm all aflutter.