After last week's election debacle giving George W. Bush and his administration
the ability to push through a compliant Congress their domestic right-wing
"reforms" -- ultra-conservative judicial appointments, drilling in the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge, and a war on terrorism conducted at home and abroad
without regard for domestic or international law -- liberals are looking to
anyone and everyone for signs of hope. Former vice-president Al Gore. Filmmaker
Michael Moore. Even California congresswoman Nancy Pelosi. Of course, they're
not going to find it with these people. But here's who will give them hope --
and it's the one person no one would ever associate with liberal goals:
the first lady. It's true. The person best situated to expose the corruption of
the Bush regime as a money-obsessed, fascistic organization is hiding in plain
sight.
To be sure, Laura Bush as fifth column-ist is a radical proposition. After all,
she is just the first lady, and not a very feisty one at that. But the position
of first lady -- "It is a role, not a job," as Hillary Rodham Clinton famously
quipped -- is vital to every presidential administration, both in shaping its
policies and in influencing how it is viewed by the media. This was obvious in
the cases of Hillary Clinton (seen by many as the brains and the balls behind
the man in the oral office) and Nancy Reagan (viewed as the ultimate Hollywood
social climber who used national politics as a stepping stone to Vanity Fair
covers). But it was just as true of other administrations. Bess Truman
provided congenial domestic ballast to her husband's no-nonsense gruffness.
Lady Bird Johnson's Johnny Appleseed plans to plant trees and flowers across
the nation detracted from her own considerable political power even as it
softened her husband's hard-ball politics on civil rights and Vietnam. Pat
Nixon's wifely steadfastness humanized Dick's psychopathic, criminal
deportment. Rosalynn Carter made Jimmy's peanut-farmer demeanor palatable.
Betty Ford offered us human pathos and tragedy as a counterweight to her
husband's emotional banality. Sometimes the power of the first lady is
intentional -- Bess Truman's statements about her husband's brusqueness, while
given out in homespun colloquialisms, were highly crafted media spin. And
sometimes it is accidental -- it's hard to imagine that Betty Ford ever really
wanted to be spokesperson for those battling substance-abuse dependencies, a
position in which she found herself. But across the board, first ladies and
their actions are a vital part of an administration's media presence and
political clout. Or, as we may hope in the case of Laura Bush, its undoing.
SINCE SHE became first lady, Laura Bush has faced a series of challenges about
how to define herself and her husband's administration. The first challenge, of
course, was how to explain why she, a librarian, was married to a man who
speaks English as if he were still learning the language. The second challenge
was how to be as unlike Hillary Clinton as possible. Hillary -- whom the
Republicans maligned throughout her husband's two terms in office as a mixture
of Satan, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Demi Moore's character in Disclosure --
was perceived as greedy for power, unscrupulous, amoral (so much so that
she apparently chose to tolerate her husband's philandering), and smart. Really
smart. Mrs. Bush doesn't seem to be power hungry, unscrupulous, or amoral. But,
as we are beginning to see, she is smart. Very smart. (Which again raises
questions about her partnership with a man who brags about having graduated
from college with a C average.)
Indeed, beneath Bush's mild, blandly friendly exterior lurks a mind that may be
-- dare we say it? -- as devious as Hillary's. Bush's first-lady project -- all
first ladies need one, it's a cross between public service and public relations
-- is the promotion of literature and reading. If we're lucky, the successful
implementation of Laura Bush's national agenda will be the downfall of her
husband's administration.
It may appear as though Laura Bush is taking cues from her mother-in-law,
Barbara "Rhymes with Rich" Bush, who talked about literacy (clearly, this was
an effort that should have started at home, with her own children) while her
husband prosecuted a war on . . . Iraq. But she's not. In a master
stroke of triangulation that few observers appreciate, Bush is taking a page
from Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. Kennedy, of course, is revered for her efforts
to bring culture and intellectual refinement to the White House. But while
Jackie was obsessed with bringing European highbrows such as Pablo Casals, Igor
Stravinsky, Rudolf Nureyev, André Malraux, and Salvador Dali to gala
White House functions -- in a successful effort to connect US art and artists
with broader international traditions -- Laura Bush has taken a narrower,
arguably more parochial tack in her bid for the mantle of culture queen, by
focusing solely on literature.
Even before her husband's inauguration, Bush claimed that her White
House mandate was the realm of education and literature. In her earliest
interviews, she proclaimed her love of literature. And in a July 2000 interview
with the New York Times, Bush stated that her favorite book was "The
Grand Inquisitor" chapter of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.
Eyebrows rose at the prospect of the little woman from Texas laying claim
to such highbrow literature. After all, Bush's public image up to this point
was that of patient wife who forced her alcoholic husband to give up the drink.
As it turned out, she was reading books by authors whose names her husband
couldn't even pronounce.
Since that time, Mrs. Bush has forged ahead full speed -- but with a delicacy
and comportment very unlike Hillary's -- to promote reading and
literature across the country. She has devoted much of her time and
public-speaking engagements to promoting American literature. During political
junkets, she visits the homes of noted literary heroes: Louisa May Alcott in
Massachusetts and Katherine Anne Porter in Texas, for example. And she recently
organized a series of highly publicized literary conferences at the White
House.
This seems like safe Jackie Kennedy territory and is no doubt intended to
please everyone. But does it? Can this Republican first lady actually get away
with promoting American literature in a White House that is noted not only for
the near illiteracy of its leader, but also for its refusal to take seriously
any support of the arts in the United States? There can be little doubt that
most Republicans pay Laura Bush's work small heed. After all, she has to do
something, and promoting American literature is something that the likes of
America-first advocates such as Senate minority (soon-to-be majority) leader
Trent Lott and the odious Lynne Cheney, wife of the vice-president, can get
behind.
But what is Laura Bush really doing? An October 6 story in the New
York Times, titled THE FIRST LADY BUILDS A LITERARY ROOM OF HER OWN,
gives us a peek. Over the past year, Bush has set up the first three White
House conferences in her "Salute to America's Authors" series, on Mark Twain,
the Harlem Renaissance, and Western women writers. She has managed to nab
important literary folks to speak, including David Levering Lewis, a prominent
black historian whose biography of W.E.B. Du Bois won a Pulitzer Prize;
Cambridge-based author Justin Kaplan, who penned a Pulitzer Prize-winning
biography of Mark Twain; and Ursula Smith and Linda Peavy, who are life
partners and chroniclers of the lives of women in the Old West. More amazing is
that most of these speakers are confirmed George W. haters (a fact that the
Times article dwelled on at length).
Look at the topics and authors Bush is promoting. Mark Twain was a brilliant
critic of US society -- particularly those aspects of it fueled by money. His
1873 novel The Gilded Age, written with Charles Dudley Warner, is
a sustained attack on corporate greed gone wild -- a theme Twain featured
prominently in his writings when he wasn't railing against racism (which he
loathed in all forms), Christianity (which he considered a bane of humanity),
and human stupidity (which he never learned to endure).
The Harlem Renaissance was a glorious moment in US cultural history that
brought modernism into the mainstream and gave African-Americans a loud public
voice to which they'd never had access before. It was also a radical moment in
which people of color called for a new and aggressive political identity that
would challenge and transform the racist rule of the white majority. As for the
panel on women writers of the West, it included speakers on the works of Willa
Cather (a lesbian who wrote honestly about how westward expansion ruined the
beauty of the country) and Edna Ferber (who wrote about the horrors of racism
in Show Boat and about the enormous economic and psychological damage
brought on by Big Oil money in Giant). The only featured author who can
be deemed inoffensive from a culturally conservative point of view is Laura
Ingalls Wilder, who wrote the Little House on the Prairie series.
Regarding future seminar topics, Bush says she's considering the memoirs of
Lillian Hellman -- a former Communist who told off the House Un-American
Activities Committee. She's also thinking of organizing events to discuss Emily
Dickinson, Walt Whitman, William Faulkner, and Truman Capote. These are all
great American writers. But they are also all -- to varying degrees --
incredibly subversive. Dickinson wove her love of women delicately into obscure
verse, but at the heart of her poetry is a black, even frightening, vision of
the emotional deadness of America. Whitman not-so-delicately wove his love for
boys and men throughout his poems as he celebrated a democracy that is best
explored in casual sex and by venerating the male body. ("I sing the body
electric" was more than just a metaphor for old Walt.) Faulkner was an
incessant critic of American race relations and used racial metaphors to
explore the moral vacuity at the center of US culture. And Truman Capote -- not
only a flagrant homosexual but also a keen observer and merciless appraiser of
the American upper class (to which the Bushes belong) -- used his outsider
status to advance sarcastic, incisive critiques of American cultural life.
IN MAKING such radical selections, Laura Bush seems to be mounting a
full-fledged literary assault on almost everything that her husband's party
holds dear. To head off this charge, Bush insists: "There's nothing political
about American literature. Everyone can like American literature, no matter
what your party." Such a statement is, on its face, idiotic. The strength of
American literature is that it has served as one of the main venues for vital,
ongoing political debate throughout our history. The great and important
American writers -- from Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Phillis
Wheatley to Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Theodore
Dreiser, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway on up
through Toni Morrison and Philip Roth -- were and are political.
Laura Bush surely knows this. But like many a woman whose public and political
life comes from her husband's (or father's) political office, she is in an
impossible situation. She cannot deviate very far from the "official" party
line, yet she's expected to create a public image and mission. Literature seems
like a safe idea -- but only if you don't really say much about it. To state
that "American literature is not political" is a glorious lie that works for
Bush perfectly. She can maintain her image as the nice librarian lady while
undercutting the basic tenets of the Republican Party.
In this light, it's worth thinking about Bush's answer to the question of what
is her favorite book. Giving "The Grand Inquisitor" chapter of Dostoyevsky's
The Brothers Karamazov as her answer was a brave and even dangerous
move. Brave because it labeled her as an intellectual. Dangerous because it
almost gave away her game. In that section of the book -- it is a long fable
told by cynical brother Ivan to his saintly brother Alyosha -- Christ once
again comes to earth during the Spanish Inquisition and is arrested for being a
troublemaker and a political rabble-rouser. The Inquisitor explains that since
his last appearance on earth, the Church founded by Jesus has discovered that
people don't want freedom. Rather, they want authority that will tell them what
to do; in contemporary terms, they want fascism. Jesus says nothing and is
sentenced to be burned alive. The Inquisitor states the fascist credo: "Oh, we
shall convince them that they will only become free when they resign their
freedom to us, and submit to us. The most tormenting secrets of their
conscience -- all, all they will bring to us, and we will decide all things,
and they will joyfully believe our decision, because it will deliver them from
their great care and their present terrible torments of personal and free
decision."
Ivan's original ending to the story is that Jesus is burned, but he offers an
alternative -- well, a kinder, gentler -- ending as well. In this ending, Jesus
plants a homoerotic kiss on the Grand Inquisitor's lips and is allowed to go as
long as he never returns to earth again. It's still an ending that presumes
that humankind will always be happier with fascism, but at least Jesus escapes
having to die again, so the potential for mercy still exists in the world.
Clearly, Laura Bush understands full well the import of "The Grand Inquisitor."
Although she gave this answer before her husband was appointed president, the
moral of "The Grand Inquisitor" has more meaning and more power than ever
before in our society, which is now under the stern supervision of another
Grand Inquisitor, John Ashcroft. It also raises the question "What would Jesus
do?" -- so popular among evangelical Christians -- to a new level.
Dostoyevsky's answer, of course, is that Jesus wouldn't have a chance in hell
to do anything against the exaggerated, untempered power of the Grand
Inquisitor.
Before we get too excited about Laura Bush's, um, crusade, it's fair to point
out that few Americans -- much less high-ranking members of Bush's
administration -- have likely read The Brothers Karamazov. But if the
first lady succeeds with her project to get more people reading, or rereading,
the works of Whitman, Dickinson, Faulkner -- and especially Dostoyevsky's "The
Grand Inquisitor" -- she may do more damage to her husband's administration
than anything tried by some mopey liberal. In this, she may prove herself to be
the most subversive person in her husband's administration -- and the salvation
of the rest of us.
Michael Bronski can be reached at mabronski@aol.com.
Issue Date: November 15 - 21, 2002
