An Open Letter to Al Gore...

An Open Letter to Al Gore, Assorted Democratic
Websites, the People of Europe, and Interested Others

Since before his installation in office, I have heard George W. Bush
ridiculed as a "cowboy"—criticized for his "cowboy diplomacy,"
mocked on web sites such as "All Hat and No Cattle," and that sort of
thing—and I am one patriotic American who thinks it's high time for
this practice to come to an end. So I'm going to be polite about it for
now, and just ask:

Please. Please stop calling the President of the United States, George
W. Bush, a "cowboy."

I came to the realization that this would be a good idea a couple of
weeks before the onset of war in Iraq, listening to Vice-President
Cheney on a television talk show. Asked how he responded to the
perception of Mr. Bush as a cowboy, Mr. Cheney answered that as a
Westerner, he thought of a cowboy as a good thing. He went on to
remark that, true to the stereotype of the Western cowboy, Mr. Bush
is a stand-up guy—a straightforward man with a rare ability to "cut to
the chase." In other words, Mr. Cheney—with astonishing delicacy,
really, for a lantern-jawed Son of the Big Sky Country himself—took a
question about global contempt for a belligerent simpleton and turned
it into a manly statement of masculine admiration for a manfully male
man's kind of man. You could sense Mr. Cheney's trousers tightening
as he spoke.

The problem, of course, is that Mr. Bush is NOT a straightforward,
stand-up guy. It's hard to know even where to begin, because lies
splatter out of his mouth every time he opens it. But let's cut straight to
the wallet with the famous tax-cut speech in which the man drawled,
"Ninety-two million Americans will keep an average of $1083 more of
their own money when this tax plan goes through." Now, Mr. Bush
and his speech writers know what the word "average" means—the
speech writers do, for sure—and every one of them knows what people
are going to think when they hear it come out of the Presidential
mouth: that the average American will get $1083 more to keep at
home.

But "the average American" and "an average of $1083" are not the
same thing at all. The way the tax cut really plays is that out of a
hypothetical cut of $2,009,140, one American gets $2,000,000 to keep
at home, and 1,828 Americans get $5.00 each to keep at home. (Yes,
math lovers, the average is $1083.) The 1,828 peasants lose
$2,009,140 in government services, enough to run the elementary
school for a year or pave Main Street after a rough winter. The
wealthier man does not require these services in the first place—
especially now that he has $2,000,000 more in disposable cash to bank
in the Bahamas or pay his children's tuition to, say, Phillips Academy
in beautiful Andover, Massachusetts. Of course, this is America, and
the 1,828 commoners are encouraged to invest their five-dollar bills
offshore if they wish, or buy a box of chalk for Buddy and Missy to use
in learning their alphabets, out front on the sidewalk. Perhaps the
lucky windfall recipients could pool their money to afford something
that would benefit everyone—a government, for example!

Mr. Bush said that win or lose, he would ask for a UN Security
Council vote on the second Iraq resolution so that, in cowboy
parlance, everybody would have to "lay their cards on the table." He
did not ask for that vote; instead, facing certain defeat, he committed
America to war. (Later, in a spectacular bit of bravado, he would refer
to this attempt to get a war resolution through the UN as "seeking a
diplomatic solution," the failure of which necessitated the invasion.
Normally, "seeking a diplomatic solution" is defined as trying to find
an alternative to war rather than approval for a war.) Mr. Bush said
he would help rebuild the Afghanistan he had bombed to rubble the
year before. He forgot. Literally--his next year's budget proposal had
no money set aside for this purpose. He was going to give $15 billion to
fight AIDS. Oops—looks like the ferocious lapdogs in his Republican
Congress cut that funding. Darn 'em. Mr. Bush said he was going to
give top priority to funding homeland security and the first responders
who would actually deal with terrorist emergencies in the USA. He
hasn't checked his answering machine, apparently, because our first
responders are going begging—and the only thing that's been done
about upgrading homeland security has been a welter of laws gutting
our Bill of Rights...laws whose application has been expanded, without
so much as a pause for common decency, from fighting terrorism to
the pursuit of ordinary criminal investigations.

And so on. Examples of Mr. Bush's failure to be a straightforward,
stand-up guy clog the world's newspapers every day, however much
the reporting of them may be spun, muted, or just plain choked off in
America. And in America, as I contemplated an early draft of these
observations, he was having his flunkies in Congress push through a
declaration of support for American troops in Iraq—to which, with
incredible cynicism, they had attached a declaration of support for
George W. Bush, too—and, unbelievably, for his appalling
mismanagement of the Iraqi situation. Congressmen not wishing to
support Mr. Bush's cynicism and incompetence in that situation, of
course, were vigorously portrayed as unwilling to support our young
men and women in uniform.

The failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, or establish
any tie to September 11 or Al Qaida, or produce a peaceful and
democratic society there, has touched off a carnival of semantic hair-
splitting, temporizing, equivocation and absolute shameless evasive
bullshitting among Mr. Bush's cronies and various neo-conservative
pundits--all to the general purpose of obscuring or confusing what Mr.
Bush actually said in the run-up to the war, never mind how
orgasmically they praised its unmistakeable bluntness at the time. Mr.
Bush himself spends little time going back to edit his past remarks so
that they seem to conform better to reality--he's much too busy editing
reality from one day to the next in the present, so that it seems to
conform to his past remarks. Consider the brazen claim, during his
visit to Poland, that we had found Saddam's weapons of mass
destruction--two rusty trailers used to fill weather balloons.

Mr. Bush is many things, but "straightforward" isn't one of them.

And cutting to the chase is not that remarkable a skill if the chase to
which you're cutting is always an agenda laid out in advance by your
masters, and all you have to do is not allow anything on God's green
earth—evidence, logic, common decency, democracy—to deter you
from that agenda. In Mr. Bush's case, the appearance of judicious
consideration is strictly that, an appearance, put on for the sole sake
of appearance. The cutting he does on his way to the chase will always
include the honest, common-sense alternatives offered by sincere and
well-informed people who struggle under the misconception that he is
as sincere as they are, however less informed. Consider the numerous
reasonable, optimistically offered plans for the peaceful disarmament
of Iraq which Mr. Bush "cut" on his way to the "chase" of an
American invasion—plans based on the misconception that disarming
Iraq was actually the point, but which did not include long-term
American occupation of the strategic, oil-rich territory in question.

A cowboy? Any cowboy--the rough-hewn original, the metaphorical
Marshall Dillon so deeply stimulating to Mr. Cheney, the bar-fighting
wanna-be--would be substantially more straightforward, upright, and
honest than Mr. Bush. The characterization is misleading, and an
offense to cowboys of any stripe.

But there are other, bigger reasons for me to urge you—beg you, in
fact—to stop using the word "cowboy" when you discuss the man. You
mean it scornfully, and doubtless it feels good to say it. I laugh along
with the grotesque "cowboy" effigies in your peace parades and anti-
Bush protests, regretting only that they couldn't be more mean-
spirited. But what you apparently don't realize is that every time you
call him a cowboy, you actually help consolidate his support here in
America, ensuring that the world will continue to wallow in bloodshed
and fear for the foreseeable future.

In some cases, of course, it doesn't make any difference. His more
affluent supporters, the guys in the $2,000,000 refund club, see a need
to keep a grip on their champagne flutes in highbrow company. They
may do as Mr. Cheney does and deflect the cowboy remarks into
praise of Mr. Bush's frontier forthrightness; they may bow their heads,
blush, and suggest that talking politics is somehow inappropriate in
polite company. No matter, though—because, from their point of view,
he's enacting an agenda, and your criticisms only matter to the extent
that you can get in the way of that agenda. (That's why ten million
protesters worldwide were ignored going into Iraq, or dismissively
compared to "focus groups," while Paul O'Neill gets a savage
mauling--he actually threatens the agenda.) They couldn't care less
what he is, or with what contempt and revulsion the world views him,
as long as he's advancing their agenda. But they're sports, and will do
what they can to confuse you with their harmlessness and keep the
charity auction pleasant. Dropping the whole "cowboy" thing won't
affect their thinking one way or another—but it might give them one
less opportunity here or there to run some liberal's questions up the
kind of railroad tunnel Wile E. Coyote used to paint for the
Roadrunner.

But dropping the whole "cowboy" thing will matter on a couple of
other important fronts.

First, there are the fickle and wavering masses of American
Suburbia—many of whom may cringe every time Mr. Bush wedges
one of the Presidential Tony Llama's into the Presidential Mouth. But
every time you seize on one of Mr. Bush's apparent slips of the tongue
and call him a cowboy over it, you give one of his pallid, chinless
handlers the chance to step out and pretend to be exasperated by the
President's forthrightness. "Gee," they'll say with rueful, head-
shaking admiration, "we mere political geeks can't keep a lid on the
President's plain-spoken honesty. He's just too firmly, fully packed
with testosterone to worry about opinion polls whenever he opens his
mouth. He's too busy standing tall over terrorism to fret about
details." Every time you give Mr. Bush's handlers that chance, they'll
scoop up another wavering voter out there in the hinterlands—
someone who decides, "Well, geez, he seems like a dangerous, self-
centered moron, but at least he's honest."

Finally—and here we are at the heart of the matter, and in the
heartland of America—there are the Good Ol' Boys. Packing
barrooms across America, swilling beer and smoking cigarettes,
twitching their biceps to make them jump when the waitress is looking,
proudly bellowing for another side o' Freedom Fries, maybe with a
side o' Freedom Dressin' to go with 'em—are hordes of proudly anti-
intellectual males. They speak with southern accents and contrive to
have poor grammar, even if they were born and bred in Newark and
did just fine in high school. They listen to country music. They drive
pickup trucks decorated with American and Confederate flags
displayed side by side, never mind the absolute contradiction of the
loyalties expressed. They sport bumper stickers proposing to shoot
holes in the reader, or to blow irradiated holes in various parts of the
planet itself. They wear ball caps decorated with threats of violence, or
laments about their marital or financial status, or the logos of auto
makers or arms manufacturers.

They are not cowboys, by and large. People who actually tend cattle
are a tiny, tiny minority in the United States—but except for the most
blatant phonies, they may well be men of physical occupations. They
are truck drivers and mechanics and feed-store clerks and mill
workers. They like to be thought of as rough and ready, plain-spoken
and straightforward and brave--and a great many of them actually are.
They studiously avoid any behavior which might be perceived as
effeminate, sometimes exaggerating their own crudity to avoid being
seen as sensitive or thoughtful. Within their own areas of expertise,
they know better than to take the crude shortcut; they know that if you
re-use old head gaskets, for example, you're asking to find oil in the
antifreeze one fine morning. But in areas outside their expertise—
international relations, for example--they overwhelmingly favor
Alexandrian solutions to the world's Gordian knots. Why don't we just
nuke the bastards, for Christ's sake? They would have no idea who
Alexander was or what the Gordian knot was, and take pride in that.

They are not cowboys—more properly, they would be called
"rednecks." But rednecks have found common identity in the whole
"Western" concept—the "cowboy thing"—and when you call George
W. Bush a cowboy, what you accomplish is to solidify their support
behind him.

That support is critical, as they may be the single largest indivisible
voting block in America. (Rush Limbaugh has forty million listeners,
and Dale Earnhart memorabilia dukes it out with online Viagra for top
market shares. There are a bunch of these guys.) They don't miss the
sarcastic tone of your remarks—not at all. In fact, they focus on that
tone immediately—and they resent it as an affront to themselves and
people like them. They know you equate the word "cowboy" with
ignorance and rash belligerence—but weirdly, while they are
perversely proud of these very qualities, and cultivate them, and listen
to endless hours of country music celebrating them, they are also
deeply resentful of any goddamn liberal or faggot foreigner who would
dare to point them out.

I have said they are not cowboys, and sure enough they're not. (I know
the difference, by the way. I'm not a cowboy myself, but I run a horse
ranch, and spent ten years of my life working on one cattle operation
or another. My father was a working cowhand in his youth, and my
grandfather a cattle and sheep rancher well into old age.) They only
pretend to be cowboys. But in their own way, they are authentic—
pretending to be cowboys is a legitimate part of their culture, as many
of them have actually been raised by people who also pretended to be
cowboys. Pretending to be cowboys doesn't really negate the truth that
they probably work hard and get little enough out of it; that they have
some hard-nosed practical expertise in life, and get their hands dirty;
that they may indeed have a lot of legitimate gripes in the world; that if
politicians told the truth, these boys would probably vote for the right
ones most of the time. A lot of them are actually pretty good people,
who sincerely mean to do the right thing and who actually do admire
straightforwardness and honesty.

Is it becoming clear? When you call George W. Bush a cowboy, you
help George W. Bush convince these people that he's a guy like they
are—a decent, hard-working guy who likes to cut the bullshit and get
to the point—who is being unfairly criticized by whiners and
intellectuals and people who are jealous of his muscular, manly style of
leadership. If you would just call George W. Bush what he is in fact,
you could go far toward breaking up this solid voting block and
ensuring that he exits the Oval Office in 2004—a generally recognized
First Step back toward sanity in the world. For George W. Bush is not
a cowboy at all—and he is not a cowboy in a much deeper sense than
his redneck supporters are not cowboys. What George W. Bush is,
from the ground up, is a poseur.

There. It's said: Poseur.

Admit it, now—France, doesn't that roll more neatly off the Gaulic
tongue? It's your word, after all, like so many in our language. Mr.
Gore—Tennessee farm background and all—I remember you talking
about the zeitgeist of the American press just before you pulled out of
Campaign 2004. Like zeitgeist, poseur is a Starbucks-and-croissant
kind of word, but aren't you really, actually just a little bit more
comfortable with it?

Mr. Bush is a poseur, which means that he isn't just not a cowboy in
the sense that he doesn't know diddly-squat about roping cows or
stretching a barbed wire fence, either; he's not a cowboy in a whole
different way than construction workers who wear pointed boots and
listen to Tammy Wynette are not cowboys. He's not a cowboy on a
deeper level entirely—he's someone who only pretends to be someone
who pretends to be a cowboy. In fact—since self-made Texas
businessmen tend to dress themselves up as cowboys in a sort of
solidarity statement with their redneck surroundings—George W. may
in fact be that most rare of creatures, the stage-three poseur. Because
he has never been a self-made anything at all, it could be said that he is
only pretending to be one of a class of businessmen (stage one) who
often pretend to belong to a class of laborers (stage two) who identify
themselves by pretending to be cowboys (stage three). Whether Mr.
Bush qualifies for this exalted level of poseury depends on whether he
is pretending to be a self-made businessman in the first place, or is
cutting straight to the chase (as it were) by directly pretending to be a
redneck. Probably we're not going to get a straight answer on this one
out of Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's wardrobe specialist.

Al… France… anybody else interested in saving the planet… you'd get
a lot more mileage out of the word poseur if you just started using it,
and stuck with using it, than you get out of the cowboy thing now. It
does, after all, have the powerful stink of truth about it…a stink that
Scott McClellan can't wash off, and that Rush Limbaugh can't quite
ignore, no matter how numb he is from loading up on OxyContins
before the show.

George W. Bush was born in the State of Connecticut to a wealthy,
deeply connected East Coast banking family. He did move to Texas
when he was two years old, but not to a tarpaper shanty in the cotton
fields, or the windblown bunkhouse on a working ranch—the most
revealing photographs from his early childhood show a little guy in a
suit attending the dedication of an offshore drilling platform with
Daddy, not a young buckaroo heeling calves at spring branding.

From Texas, he moved back to the Northeast for his formative years,
attending Phillips Academy in Andover, Pennsylvania—what is called
a prep school, where the students wear beanies and blazers. The
average real cowboy, and the vast majority of people who pretend to
be cowboys, would be hard put to define such terms as prep school,
beanie, and blazer on a pop quiz (though on the last, you'd get plenty of
knowledgeable discourse on the Chevy wagons by that name, and
some background chatter about their tendency to flip on hard turns if
you spring 'em up too high). But from all indications, George W. Bush
was perfectly comfortable at Phillips—indeed, a social success.

There's no suggestion in contemporary accounts that he spent much
time with his boots up on the porch rail, rolling smokes and brooding
for the wide-open spaces of his boyhood.

At Phillips, George W. Bush was a cheerleader. Now, I've mentioned
that the word cowboy, justly or unjustly, conveys different nuances of
meaning to different people. I should mention here that the concept of
male cheerleader, in the heartland of America, has only a single
nuance, and it's not the same as any of the nuances of "cowboy." Now,
a male cheerleader at a co-educational school might escape that
nuance by pointing out that he gets to lift female cheerleaders into the
air by their behinds—simple envy might get him a little slack from the
guys at the tavern. But a cheerleader at an all-male academy, as
Phillips was until several years after Mr. Bush left, has no escape from
that nuance—nor should he be allowed any. He's filling a niche there--
standing on the sidelines, rooting for the boys at their rough play--that
in more open school societies is overwhelmingly populated with girls.
(There are precedents in nature for this. One example is the breeding
behavior of certain species of fishes and amphibians, when one gender
is absent from a local population--some individuals will actually
change genders for the purpose of sexual union. Another example is
prison.)

Is there something unfair, something uncomfortably Republican about
the tone of the preceding paragraph? Well, okay--but the truth is that
this guy is planning to rule the world on the strength of a
manufactured image. In my mind, that makes it fair to check for
hidden zippers and padding.

Cowboy George in his round-up duds at Andover, hanging out at the corral with the
other buckaroos. Notice how comfortable they seem to be with getting on top of one
another .

It's branding time, and Cowboy George tosses a lariat of cheers onto the playing field,
roping in another victory for the Andover "A.". He wouldn't accept less than victory
then, and he won't accept less today.

And today, perhaps reminiscing with fellow Westerner Dick Cheney about a little
steer-rasslin' the night before…

Effigies of Mr. Bush in his Andover beanie, or cheerleader garb—and
tireless attention to his actual testosterone level, based on such life
achievements as making the rally squad and failing to finish his
National Guard commitment—are going to wreak more havoc with
the barroom crowd than any number of cowboy jokes. And believe
me—recasting him as a boys' school cheerleader, and paying close
attention to nurturing that image, is not going to create a backlash of
sympathy among the un-cowboy middle class in America. There just
aren't that many male cheerleaders.

From Phillips, to which he was admitted as a legacy—the privileged
offspring of a more capable alumnus—Mr. Bush was admitted to Yale,
also as a legacy. There he specialized in fraternity life at the campus
party house. Nothing wrong with partying, from the cowboy point of
view—but drinking one's way through an Ivy League school on
Poppy's money and the "Gentleman's C" is still a far, far distant thing
from lurching down the back roads in your mud runner after the bars
close Saturday night, nursing a short case of Lone Stars, shooting
holes in mail boxes and wondering where you're going to come up with
the payments on your double-wide.

From Yale to Harvard--a mysterious acceptance into the Air National
Guard, mysteriously abbreviated (more on this later)--various
apprenticeships in political campaigns--numerous failed business
ventures from which he required rescuing by friends of the family--a
spectacularly corrupt term as part-owner of a professional baseball
team--and then his signature period as the governor of Texas.
Signature, I say, because he put his signature on more execution
orders than any governor in American history.

Cowboy? When? Where? Admittedly, he did buy a ranch--just in time
to declare for the presidency--and he occasionally makes a show of
clearing brush there. But I'm willing to bet Euros to pesos, folks, that
he's never laid a hand to the greasewood there unless a camera was
rolling--except for rehearsals, maybe.

See Mr. Bush strutting down the electoral runway in other empty ensembles from Karl's Kloset, Klothier to Kings, in future installments. Coming up...Compassionate Christian...Fearless Warrior...Unwavering Leader... and so forth, ad nauseum.