Within an hour or so of Bush's speech being history I received an email from a conservative friend praising the President's performance (you know, I'm not sure if I can really call such people "conservative" any more since there doesn't seem to be a coherent political theory there).
So I read this email, written by a man of considerable intelligence and wide experience, and wondered how it could be that I see a stumbling, smirking, narrow-minded danger while he sees a resolute leader for dangerous times. At least Tony Blair can deliver a speech.
I suppose I could dismiss my friend's enthusiasm for Bush as evidence of 'false consciousness' or, less elegantly, 'bubba-ism' but it surely isn't quite so straightforward.
It's a difficult thing to understand -- I haven't a clue as to how this mechanism of American culture works (though I'm inclined to accept Wojtek's ideas) but it's very discouraging.
It may be, as I think someone else wrote, that long-established American tendencies towards anti-intellectualism have at last found their apotheosis -- that late stage capitalism, so adept at creating a sealed distraction-sphere of un-knowledge, has produced an entire cohort of people who are only comfortable with those who seem to be clumsy in thought and deed yet somehow 'real' which makes all forgivable.
I don't want to indulge the urge towards hyperbole and alarmism but maybe a little stroll off of Fort Caution is required -- perhaps this is the first indication of the final stages of capitalist development's effect upon the human mind: first we're seperated from an understanding of our natural environment through encapsulation within the technosphere -- then we're seperated from an understanding of the human created world of politics and so on through a dependence upon a narrow information space -- finally, we're unable to intelligently determine cause and effect, to filter truth from fiction, to determine what's quality and what's trash.
Merely thinking aloud here.
DRM