Christopher comments on the post by The Existentialist Cowboy concerning the neocons...trying, like we all are, to make sense out of what has happened to us as a nation...
It's worth reprinting in its entirety
Referring to your phrase: “……..In American movies the villain is most often well-educated, suave, and well-spoken. The hero, by contrast, is simple, a hulk, if not a hunk. His many sentences of only two words are evidence of simplicity if not purity of spirit. American heroes are innocents abroad --and at home. If they should win over villains it's because of their noble hearts and motives --not because they are ever outsmarted anyone……….”. This paragraph touches on the question which puzzles most people outside the shores of America: Why did George Bush have such an extraordinary hold on the American people for so long, at least until relatively recently?
It's worth reprinting in its entirety
Referring to your phrase: “……..In American movies the villain is most often well-educated, suave, and well-spoken. The hero, by contrast, is simple, a hulk, if not a hunk. His many sentences of only two words are evidence of simplicity if not purity of spirit. American heroes are innocents abroad --and at home. If they should win over villains it's because of their noble hearts and motives --not because they are ever outsmarted anyone……….”. This paragraph touches on the question which puzzles most people outside the shores of America: Why did George Bush have such an extraordinary hold on the American people for so long, at least until relatively recently?
If I might take the liberty of quoting from a piece I wrote on my own site a year or so ago “………If you don’t know, and you’re a red-blooded, two-fisted, regular guy, think when you last saw Clint Eastwood in a Dirty Harry movie, or saw a James Bond movie. Didn’t you emerge from the theatre feeling omnipotent, invulnerable, that you could beat anyone up, that there wasn’t a crisis you couldn’t handle? Didn’t you feel wonderfully divorced from the milquetoast henpecked nonentity you ordinarily are, living in daily terror of your boss, crushed by the weight of your domestic responsibilities and enervated by mind-numbing boredom? How exciting, then, to be Dirty Harry or James Bond, if only for the short while it took you to drive home.
And when, on your TVs, you saw George Bush saying he wanted Bin Laden or Saddam dead or alive, and saying you are either for us or against us, and you saw George W landing, fighter-pilot-suited, on that aircraft carrier with the banner “Mission Accomplished”, did you not feel, in your identification with heroic George W, the same invulnerability and omnipotence as when you saw Dirty Harry or James Bond at the movies?
The lone cowboy riding into town to single-handedly rid it of the desperadoes terrorising its decent law-abiding citizens, is a powerful archetype that George Bush - strutting about in his jeans and cowboy hat, and uttering the terse tough simple words that he'll smoke Bin Laden out of his cave and that America will strike at evil-doers everywhere, words that cause a frisson in the gutty-wutzes of all the plain ordinary folks out there in the Great American Heartland - tapped into, and it paid off for him handsomely……….”The self-educated longshoreman, Eric Hoffer, remarked many times on the pervasive anti-intellectualism in American life, and this was long before the advent of George Bush, the quintessential anti-intellectual. Why this fear of intellectuals? A continuing visceral reaction to the intellectual-dominated Europe, from which the many millions fled to America’s shores, vowing to rid themselves of the presence of intellectuals for ever?
My wife and I took note of the anti-intellectualism of the Bush campaign early in in candidacy....and we feared for what would happen if he ever became president.....it all came to pass...
