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The
Bush Dyslexicon
by Mark Crispin Miller
Miller, a New York University professor of media studies, has fashioned
a devastating compendium of President George W. Bush's grammatical gaffes,
syntactical shipwrecks, mind-boggling malapropisms and simply dumb comments.
Page after page (after page) of quotations, suggests Miller, reveal that
Bush is a man who, while not stupid, is prodigiously illiterate and woefully
uneducated. Further, and compounding the problem, Bush could not care less
about these shortcomings. How then, Miller asks, and this is his larger
concern, did someone in Miller's opinion so obviously unqualified to be
president convince so many voters that he was? Miller's answer is, in a
word, television: Bush succeeded on TV not despite his "utter superficiality,"
but because his superficiality blended seamlessly with the vacuous culture
of the tube. It was not simply that Bush's handlers were able to manipulate
his image, attempting to construct out of his ignorance an anti-intellectual
"good ole boy" persona, but that news professionals in the medium were
all too willing to go along with this ploy. They went along because the
pundits of TV have become, according to Miller, increasingly right-wing,
thus natural Bush allies, but also because they no longer care to talk
about substance, preferring instead discussion of "likability" and other
attributes of pure image. While Miller is sometimes vague in his arguments,
he has produced a sharp-edged polemic questioning the wisdom of how we
elect our leaders. As President Bush has said, "It's not the way America
is all about."
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Hardcover - 304 pages (May 29, 2001)
W.W. Norton & Company; ISBN: 0393041832
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