In watching George W. Bush’s sermonettes preached to a congregation of carefully-selected sycophants, it is evident that the quality of political discourse has dipped below levels that would even have embarrassed Ronald Reagan. Bush sounds like the speaker at a bowling league awards dinner; a conversationalist who would offend no one at any highway truck stop. His rhetoric is elevated no higher than that of high-schoolers running for class treasurer.
There was a time when Americans were dumb enough to look to politicians – particularly presidents – for a sense of social wisdom. Men like FDR, Eisenhower, Kennedy, even Carter, were placed upon pedestals to whose heights parents urged their children to aspire. But in the age of the boobeoisie, pedestals are to be eschewed, not out of a sense of individuals transcending their subservient state and insisting upon sovereignty over themselves; but to realize that ultimate state of egalitarianism in which the idea of distinction becomes politically-incorrect. The centuries-old notion of “philosopher kings” is an absurdity that has not completely worked its way out of the minds of academic philosophers, and has long nourished the mindset upon which the state has depended. But in George Bush, the philosopher king has collapsed into the boorish emperor. He was the perfect lout to enthrone for the boobs who like to delude themselves with the thought that, because their “leader” wears blue-jeans and checkered shirts just like they do, and has the same unfocused speech and mannerisms as they, that they are thereby empowered.
Though H.L. Mencken died almost half a century ago, he grasped the essence of modern America in observing: “As democracy is perfected, the office of the president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
While, in the short run, such a state of affairs is most destructive of the values upon which a decent, free, and productive society depends, the longer term implications are encouraging. The collapse of pedestals of power is further evidence of the continuing decentralization of society, a transformation against which the boobish collective and its mirror-image leader rail in the “struggle against global extremism.”
12:12 pm on August 10, 2005
