|
COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
In recent days, as the White House speechwriters were weighing the language and the imagery of Tuesday's State of the Union address, President Bush was extemporizing his way toward war. He declared himself (vaguely) "sick and tired of games," exasperated by the arms-inspection process in Iraq and Saddam Hussein's attempts to evade it. And (even more vaguely) he warned any Iraqi commander who launched a weapon of mass destruction, "When Iraq is liberated, you will be treated, tried, and persecuted as a war criminal."
Ever since the last Presidential campaign, Bush's wary relationship to his native tongue has been the stuff of easy comedy; his love of being "misunderestimated" a gift not merely to the writers of "Saturday Night Live" but also to Karl Rove's political operation, which had been eager to contrast Candidate Bush's studied homeliness with Candidate Gore, who liked to tell reporters of his fondness for the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. What pork rinds were to the father, malapropisms are to the son-- a gesture of cross-cultural solidarity.
On the level of state, however,...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
