i'm the president. i'm the decider.

[intertribal]

President H.W. Bush: "Now Junior, I mean Dubya here, he's the real Born-Again."

W. is a movie I think every American should see. It starts off and you're so amused by the "impersonations" by the actors of Bush and his cabinet that you think it's going to be an SNL skit, but what it becomes is cathartic experience.

First off, let me just confirm that Josh Brolin is one of my new favorite actors. Yes, all I've seen is this and No Country For Old Men, but, damn. He's a talented guy.

Does Bush come off as sympathetic? Yes, in a welcome-to-the-human-race kind of way (Perp: "You don't know what it's like." Goren: "What? To work so hard, and still be a nobody?" Perp: "Yes..." Goren: "Welcome to the human race."). Would Bush, as Stone I believe said, like this depiction of him? No. It's fair, and it's sympathetic, but it's not gentle. I seriously doubt any of his supporters would like this movie. Other people who come off similarly include Colin Powell, the rest of the Bush clan, and Laura Bush. Plenty of people come off as unsympathetic - Condoleeza Rice was a particularly grating sycophant, Rumsfeld and Cheney are brutal strategists who disappear when the "WMDs" in Iraq are similarly nowhere to be found, and Karl Rove is a peculiar Gollum-like creature who skulks in the shadows of the war room with binders filled with statistics who lives so vicariously through W. that at one point he calls George H. W. Bush "Poppy".  But part of W.'s problem is that he is surrounded by people trying to put words in his mouth - Rove and Cheney in particular are the most egregious of the bunch - and he must every now and then remind these underlings that he is the President, he's leading the campaign, it starts and ends with him.  As it turns out this is because he suffers from a chronic fear of not being in control of his own life, not living up to the Bush name, not being Texan enough, not "earning his spurs", as his father puts it.  

What this movie drives home is something I very much agree with: that politicians are just people, just normal people with the same psychoses and neuroses the rest of us have - they've just got the power to act on their insanity. W.'s problem is essentially that he lives in fear of disappointing his father, who prefers his brother Jeb - when W. becomes governor of Texas but Jeb loses the same race in Florida, Bush Sr. mopes about how hard it is for feet-on-the-ground, head-screwed-on-straight Jeb, and W. says, "Why do you always have to be feel bad for Jeb? Why can't you feel good for me?" When Bush Sr. loses the presidential race in 1992 and breaks down crying, saying he thought the war would be enough, W. is flustered and infuriated - he shouts that this would never have happened if his father had charged onto Baghdad like W. told him to. While pacing outside as his mother consoles his father, W. tells Laura that he will never let that happen to him. And indeed: during the campaign for war in Iraq, he asks Ari Fleischer if the latter told the press that "I hate assholes who try to kill my dad".

At a disastrous press conference, Bush struggles to pick his worst mistake.

We have no idea, of course, if these conversations took place, but they may very well have. The thing is, I've realized recently that part of the reason I want to work in government is because I want to be there for the wank. People in government are crazy, snarky, bitter, tired people, and this movie captured that excellently. My favorite scene in the whole movie is probably when W. is leading his cabinet - in their suits and their middle-aged bodies - on this trek through some kind of military training ground that is essentially prairie. They're constantly batting at flies and trying not to groan because W. in his safari suit is so enthusiastic about this, laying out his vision for the war in Iraq and dismissing Colin Powell as a worrywart, cracking jokes that the rest of them are obligated to chuckle at. They seem to have lost the trail, but W. assures them the vehicles are just up ahead, another half a mile, "just follow me!" and they all head off into the wilderness.

A lot of people think that politicians are a different class of people. They're either super-intelligent hyper-Americans, revered as Gods, or soulless, evil robots (or soulless, evil puppets who can't tie their own shoelaces). This girl in my thesis class said the other day, "People in the State Department are all the same. They just re-program the new people that come in." And a lot of people follow this idea that Capitol Hill is all anonymous suits and ties, "yesmen", cronies working for Big Ideas. This is just bullshit, and that goes for both parties. Believe me. People in the State Department are most certainly not "all the same". I can tell stories. This is from my research:

"The fact that the USA tried to discredit Sukarno through attempting to make a pornographic movie about his romantic proclivities indicates the climate of the times."

"While some of Sukarno’s American critics considered his recent outburst egregious but not inconsistent with previous antics, the CIA detected a deeper significance. Agency analysts began to suspect that Sukarno was becoming mentally unhinged… One of Sukarno’s wives, his fourth, seemed to be the source of most of the problems; the CIA’s contacts reported that some of Sukarno’s associates were plotting to kill her."

"The undersecretary of state [Ball] discounted what he considered wishful thinking by Jones; the ambassador, whose retirement was at hand, seemed to be showing the strain of seven years at a difficult post. An extraordinary request by Jones a few days earlier that Johnson personally assure Sukarno that the CIA was not trying to assassinate him did not improve Ball’s estimate of the ambassador’s judgment."

I'm sorry, but this is stuff I find positively hilarious.  And it's all true, and it all had real consequences.  Politics is about a lot of things, but politicians are not sterile 'droids.  They're not all-bad or all-good, like so many people would like to believe.  They don't behave in a way a realist political scientist would describe to be "rational".  But then again, who does.  People are not perfect calculators of gain/loss margins. 

W. and his reverend pray after he announces that he has heard the call:
"God wants me to run for president."
The reverend's doubt-filled reaction: "... truly?" 

Comments

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

well, people 'seeming the same' isn't just stereotypes, either, in the case of people involved in careers like politics (or journalism, or...)--it's part image, which is to say that it's part censorship.

"In general, people don't like to be turned into objects or objectified, and journalists least of all. They feel under fire, singled out. But the further you get in the analysis of a given milieu, the more likely you are to let individuals off the hook (which doesn't mean justifying everything that happens). And the more you understand how things work, the more you come to understand that the people involved are manipulated as much as they manipulate. They manipulate even more effectively the more they are themselves manipulated and the more unconscious they are of this."

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Well, the thing is I don't get how even the "image" makes government people look the same. Like, what, they all wear suits? They don't even always wear suits. It can't possibly be in personality, because they are not the same in personality at all - so the only thing I can think of is suits.

It is in a sense something that the government wants to instill, the image of a united front, but most departments of the government don't want everyone to look the same these days. It's not good for recruiting.

I don't get how the thing about journalists relates.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

I meant the image that government people work to present to people, like on television. Not their private lives (usually), not their family issues, but the rhetoric and parties and the framing of authority and importance...the suits are just one small part of all that. Admittedly, they don't all work individually to present that image--things like 'framing' are partly the responsibility of news media, and various other societal things that relate to how the average American views political figures, but still. But any time people get lumped into a group, they tend to be homogenized, stereotyped. It's the nature of the thing. What's impt. for political figures I think is how they're framed, the image they present and are expected to present.

The thing about journalists is just that they censor themselves, their individual thoughts and feelings on the matter, to be a professional news-person, to maintain a career, to keep the news being done the way it 'should' be done. I was saying that a similar thing seems true of politicians, necessarily.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

I think the news media are a huge, huge part of that. And textbooks. And press conferences, which is like joint government-news media. Government people actually present themselves very little, and in my internship the overwhelming emphasis was on the difference between the Americans who were presenting themselves.

And not just the news media, but the Hollywood media. And of course some government is responsible for this too, but it's not fair to blame government personnel.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

true, outside of political campaigns.

it's not about blaming anyone, not even journalists.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Well yeah, political campaigns, but civil servants don't put those on. And anyway I guess I feel like so many people pay so much attention to the projected image that it's forgotten that at the root - actually making the decision - are actual people. And I guess I'm more interested in the drive behind the actual decision. The image and the frame isn't making the decision. At least in this movie, it wasn't, although I could imagine situations where politicians made decisions based on trying to maintain a certain image. I tend to find that a more boring and superficial explanation for political decisions, but there are boring and superficial politicians.

I guess I think it's harmful to think of politicians as cartoonish villains/heroes, in the long run. Because it hurts the possibility of cooperation.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

Well, they're making some of the decision, and the voters are putting them in office...no, you're right, the voters don't decide shit. The frame is part of society, for me, it's part of what people care about, what they think, and the politicians aren't just motivated by trying to maintain a certain image but are themselves a part of that same society, with those same thoughts. It's complex and intertwined.

That I think is true. I think most stereotypes are harmful in the long run...