President Bush's Face
Sunday, November 20, 2005
President Bush's Face
It has every appearance of being middle-class, that look he gets, though of course it's not. Maybe I say it's a middle-class face because it's one I've grown up with. I've seen it on the faces of relatives and teachers I've known, and it leaves me sort of helpless. Why? Because it combines all the signs of anger, always anger, alongside an infuriating degree of vulnerability. In a universal sense, it is the look of someone who strongly believes in something he knows to be bullshit even as he sets to explaining it to you. It's painful to watch, but engaging for the degree of honest effort in involves. The throat clicks over impossible verbalizations but the brow remains uncluttered. We know how it feels to wear this face. Anyone who's had a job has had to wear it. Anyone who's seen a parent attempt to rationalize a divorce as it happens has seen it and had to love it.
Bush may not wear this face perpetually, but it is his public face, the one we know. If he did wear it perpetually, at home, while eating eggs, it would be understandable-- because, like most of us, or at least like many of us, he's bad at his job. Which is to say he's not perfect, "unable to take calculated risks," "seizes up in the face of failure," "stares out the window at inappropriate hours," etc.
You can say it's the face of someone chronically mendacious or stupid, but that's not exactly true. No one in American life is mendacious and stupid (or on the other hand, bright and trustworthy), so much as he or she is fired or not fired from a job, able or unable to pay the bills. His face is a face that believes openly and non-verbally, one people who have been lied to continually can vote for. It is a face which under duress may blurt the truth.
Or look at it this way: on the one hand, there is the face of a man who slaps you on the back as he explains why there's not going to be a holiday bonus this year. He may as well be saying there will be. Being a professional and therefore above the fray, it does not matter to him, and in this way a truth from him is worse than lying. A lie would at least allow for flexibility, some acknowledgment of a shared revulsion at a painful cut. This face would never show it, or allow for any truth outside of what he's said. It is what passes for truth: it is authority.
Then there is the face of a woman negotiating a payment plan for her overdue gas bill over the telephone. How did the bill get so behind? How do you intend to pay the remainder? Dignity in this case demands an explanation which is both true and which also bends mere fact to that demand. Which face would you vote for?
To dispute that face you'd have to be an unreformed technocrat, inquiring politely for human blood at the mention of mere incompetence, the sort who would just as easily deprive someone of their job at an ad agency as deprive an entire family of their lives at the welfare office, all for the sake of a few principles: growth, client happiness, a germ-free home. Democracy. An angelic conscious.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 1:29 PM,
