That's a singing mechanical rubberized fish you stupid Euro-Trash a$$wipers! Hey, can ANY of your morons fly a jet? Bush can! We saved your country in WWII! So shutup! PS - Use some soap for a change! "
Posted on 05/24/2002 5:50:24 PM PDT by Clive
Like certain distinctive wines, President George W. Bush does not travel well; for those aspects of his personality that play best in Peoria play worst in Paris. The folksy, back-slapping humour; the preference for informal groups over public performances; the simple, sometimes simplistic, framing of the global issues. These qualities partly explain why Bush enjoys such high approval ratings in the US, while in Europe he so often provokes bemusement, embarrassment or scorn.
Bush is the most American American President since Ronald Reagan. George Bush the elder was a classic East Coast cosmopolitan, with the patrician’s easy ability to blend and schmooze. Bill Clinton was the foreign tourist par excellence, with a chameleon knack for taking on the colour of his surroundings.
But Bush is as irreducibly Texan as Reagan was Californian, and for that reason, again like Reagan, most Europeans don’t quite “get” Bush, and probably never will.
The Bush mystique is almost untranslatable abroad. To appreciate it you need to have shot the breeze in a baseball dugout; you must find the sound of a train’s whistle keening across a night prairie the most beautiful music on earth; you must believe that Norman Rockwell was a great artist, wear cowboy boots without irony and know the quiet pleasure of eating Cheez Doodles in front of the Super Bowl. It is not so much the vision thing, as a pretzel thing.
Even when standing in front of the Bundestag, Bush is still firmly planted in Texas, in a way that has little to do with his supposed (and much exaggerated) lack of foreign travel. “Different as we are, we are building and defending the same house of freedom,” he told German MPs. But Bush really is different. His audience clapped enthusiastically enough, but he is never going to reach Europeans as some of his predecessors could.
West Berliners recall Bill Clinton’s visit in 1998, when he told them “because a few stood up for freedom, now and forever, Berlin bleibt doch Berlin (Berlin is still Berlin),” almost as emotionally as they remember John F. Kennedy’s 1963 speech from the balcony of Schoneberg town hall. Bush may achieve the practical result of rallying Europe against terrorism, but his words will be swiftly forgotten. Kennedy could declare “Ich bin ein Berliner”, but Bush never could, because this is so manifestly not the case.
Part of Bush’s appeal to Americans is his sense of humour, which also happens to be the aspect of his nature that Europeans find hardest to grasp. This is a President who would usually rather say something funny than anything profound. In the three years I covered France’s President Jacques Chirac, he never once made anything resembling a joke: but during Bush’s presidential campaign, the candidate lived on an endless diet of practical japes, nicknames and gags, some horribly ill-timed, such as the occasion when he attended a funeral for the victims of a gun massacre and spent the entire time waggling his eyebrows at the press.
Watch Bush approach a microphone. Even when he has something crucial to say, the eyes crinkle round the edges, the lip twitches, the eye twinkles. His is a specifically American form of democratic chumminess, the establishing of a communal wavelength, code for: “I may be President, but we’re the same underneath.” Americans immediately read this code, which is far more sophisticated that it looks; Europeans see a man mugging for the cameras.
During the election campaign Bush was delighted to be presented with a “Billy Bass”, one of those plastic fish on a wall mounting that break into song and remain amusing for about two days. He showed it all around the campaign plane. Only later did it transpire that Bush had been sent hundreds of these things from voters around the country: telling proof of quite how clearly America knew, and shared, his sense of humour. Jacques Chirac would open a vein rather than been seen with a singing plastic fish.
Bush is at his best working a crowd, high-fiving and joshing, or in a huddle with a handful of people; he is at his worst on a large podium, propounding large ideas in small sentences. “Saddam Hussein is a dangerous man who gasses his own people,” said the President in Berlin. This is the kind of blunt reduction that reassures Americans in the Midwest as much as it enrages Parisians on the Left Bank.
Compounding the culture gulf, Bush is a happy man. I don’t mean that he is smug, or one-dimensionally cheery. He is occasionally capable of expressing profound emotion. But he is comfortable in his skin, his religion, his family and his office. This has done wonders for American self-confidence at a time of the most profound trauma. If the first half of his presidency had been more placid, Bush’s natural optimism might swiftly have lost its appeal, but for many Americans something in Bush’s sunny and straightforward personality has provided an antidote for September 11.
Quite apart from his policies on the environment, Iraq and terrorism, Bush offends French sensibilities in a country where the President is expected to be aloof, cerebral, grave, private, formal and intensely serious. Thus, while France sees a caricature of crass America, much of America sees continuity, familiarity and reassurance.
Clinton was spiritually part European, but Bush’s popularity at home, and his unpopularity in much of Europe, lies partly in his refusal (or inability) to temper his Americanness.
Bush himself once told me an anecdote about an occasion when, on holiday in Scotland as a teenager, he had been mistaken for a Scottish shepherd boy by a coachload of American tourists. This was a notion he found utterly hilarious.
Perhaps had there been more of that kind of "blunt reduction" in Europe when Hitler was "gassing his own people" Germans might have been spared the destruction of their cities and Frenchmen might have been spared the choice of living with the Gestapo or living with the Milice.
Or in a nutshell, the French suck.
President Bush is a man of substance,..obviously the majority of Europeans are shallow if they don't "get it".
regards
That's a singing mechanical rubberized fish you stupid Euro-Trash a$$wipers! Hey, can ANY of your morons fly a jet? Bush can! We saved your country in WWII! So shutup! PS - Use some soap for a change! "
I'd rather be an American redneck than a French prissy-boy any day of the week. Like we need some fancy-boy prancing around in his elf shoes to tell us what's what.
The Euro-trash like to pretend they're all sophisticated when, in actuality, they behave like zoo apes and have the intelligence and integrity of your average crack whore.
Maybe, but this author's head of state (Queen Elizabeth) received one of these fish as a Christmas present (not from W, I think), and she thought it was hilarious - showed it to everyone. When I lived in Britain, I could not get over how tawdry the place seemed, how rude the people were, and how infantile the humor. Every year there is a major charity drive (pushed by newspapers) where people are expected to go around wearing clown noses as a sign of support. That makes "Billy Bass" seem positively profound.
I'm sure he would. But the irony in this article from the "Times (UK) is that these plastic fish were all the rage in London only a few months ago. Even FoxNews thought the British fascination with these oddly amusing.
You had to be there
Does the same come to mind for you also?
2 Thessalonians 2:7 For the mystery of iniquity doth already work: only he who now letteth will let, until he be taken out of the way.
And....completely irrelevant.
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