Bush and the Bard

As the Iraq War has lost its luster, George W. Bush image as commander-in-chief has been tarnished. Tacitly recognizing this, the White House has sought to burnish Bush’s bona fides as a born-again intellectual. To this end, eager aides, and even the president himself, have been going to great pains to advertise his reading list. An inventory of Mr. Bush’s recent intellectual adventures includes a little French philosophy (Camus’ The Stranger) and an English comic-tragedian by the name of William Shakespeare. It may be a tad late, but it seems the tough-talking Texan is brushing up on the Bard.

Why would a straight shooter like Mr. Bush bother with the master of nuance? At first I believed Bush would turn to Shakespeare’s lighter fare, comedies like: Much Ado About Nothing (a good title to explicate the fuss over Saddam’s non-existent WMD), The Taming of the Shrew (a guide to handling the new majority leader, Nancy Pelosi), and Falstaff (an excellent guide to understanding one’s predecessor, Bill Clinton).

I tried contacting the White House to ascertain which of Shakespeare’s play the president had on his reading list, but officials cited executive privilege, insisting that the revealing any specific titles could help “al-Qaeda types, academic eggheads, and political satirists.” Lest I were to find myself designated an enemy combatant I decided to drop my inquires forthwith and simply speculate as a private citizen which of the Bard’s tales the POTUS picked up.

Julius Caesar, filled as it with political intrigue, might seem an obvious choice for a humble executive looking for pointers on how to get along with fellow lawmakers. However, it contains the famous lines – “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in the stars but in ourselves” – a sentiment that Bush is unlikely to lend his ears to.

King Lear, on the other hand, illustrates a lesson Bush would likely be receptive to – namely, the folly of breaking in kingdom into three parts. If ever Bush needs a literary excuse for opposing Senator Joseph Biden’s plan to partition Iraq into a Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite realms he need look no further. Of course, Lear is a story about a leader who loses his kingdom and his wits because he wouldn’t listen to a fool’s advice.

Richard III might be more to Bush’s liking. It contains a rather Machiavellian character that, at least in public, appears as harmless as an inhabitant of Mayberry. The title characters favorite line is one of Shakespeare’s most memorable, “Let slip the dogs of war.” Now, if Bush talked like that I’m sure he could get his approval rating back over 40%.

Henry V. Now, here’s a sure fire storyline Bush is bound love. A rather callow hereditary heir morphs into a formidable wartime leader who leads his countrymen, against stiff odds, in a victorious campaign against the ever-perfidious French. For anyone who wants to see a statesman lead by example, the French eat crow, and happy ending this is the play to see. Too bad life rarely imitates art.

Othello is the play to see if one has to contend with a pernicious and duplicitous underling who plays on the vanity of his boss, offers bad advice, and spends most of his time hatching schemes in the shadows to extend his power. Thankfully, there’s little subterfuge or lack of sunshine surrounding Bush’s right-hand man, the honorable Dick Cheney. The vice-president, as they say, “is as honest as the day is long.”

Hamlet, of course, is not the kind of character Bush would want to emulate. He’s an Oedipal nut case: a man driven mad by the ghost of his father and an unusually attentive mother. Sure the elder Bush’s military accomplishments may hang over junior’s head like the sword of Damocles, but it pretty hard to imagine Barbara Bush as much of a son seducer. In this case at least, let’s hope that any Oedipal wreckage wrought from the bosom of the Bush Dynasty springs solely from the younger Bush’s desire to excise the demons pertaining to his father. After all, it’s one thing to mishandle a military adventure. But a president with a mother complex might tempt Mother Nature one too many times. We don’t need another Katrina on Bush’s watch.

Macbeth is another title that Bush’s is likely to have little use for. It concerns a usurper undone by paroxysms of guilt over the foul deed he committed to gain power. After all, Bush has nothing to feel guilty about; he became president fair and square as certified by Katherine Harris and the Supreme Court. Anyone who argues otherwise “Doth protest too much.”

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is another title that’s not likely to tickle Bush’s fancy. For one thing, it’s a sex comedy, which is taboo for the abstinence only crowd that make up Bush’s base. Second, the main protagonist is transformed from a man into a jackass. A feat that may worry some in the administration more than one thinks. After all, historians have a way of transfiguring the “great” leaders of our day. Just consider, for instance, what historians now say about the British leadership during the trench warfare of WWI: “The soldiers fought like lions, but they were led by donkeys.”

I’m delighted to hear Bush is seeking to broaden his intellectual and literary interests. Bush – who once boasted that, “I don’t do nuance” – doesn’t appear to have an ironic bone in his body. Reading Shakespeare, if nothing else, should inculcate in the president a greater sense that morality is not black and white, history is suffused with irony, and it’s possible to be both a tragic and a comic figure at the same time. Of course, there’s still time for Bush to prove the Bard is wrong, assuming that the storyline to Iraq turns out to be “All’s well that ends well.”