The First Entertainer?

A reader from Alabama adds to the commentary on Mrs. Bush’s speech at the White House Correspondents’ dinner:

While Laura Bush’s performance was vulgar and crass, what bothered me more was that she gave a performance at all. The president is now not just first magistrate of the republic, and commander-in-chief of the armed forces, but also the first entertainer. Why should the president or any of his retinue or family be doing schtick? I believe that his trend started with JFK, and has gotten worse ever since.

At least this recent function was not widely broadcast. But others have been. I think that I lost all respect for President Bush and his administration, when he and his handlers permitted his vacuous daughters to address his party’s convention. I also dislike the newly minted (and probably now ineradicable) custom of having spouses address political conventions, as both Mrs. Bush and Mrs. Heinz-Kerry did. Why should I care what Laura Bush has to say? Is it to inform us that her husband is a good guy—not a drunk or a wife-beater? Don’t we already assume that? [LA note: not everyone assumes that. See my exchange with the Englishwoman who thinks Bush is a psychopath.]

In America, everything is now entertainment: politics, medicine, criminal justice, psychological therapy

P.S. I enjoy your web-site. Keep up the excellent work. It is something I now regularly browse in the time that I used to devote to reading NRO, since NRO has seemingly become nothing but a shill for the Bush administration (and WalMart, for that matter—has an issue of NR gone out recently, without having a flag-waving tribute to that “All-American” store?).

LA to reader:

I agree with everything you’ve said, particularly about the families of candidates giving speeches, the nadir of which was the Bush daughters, Humpy and Sleazy, giving their embarrassing, vulgar speech at the convention, during which, among other things, they made a sexual crack about their own grandmother (at which she was visibly appalled), and after which their mother said how “proud” she was of them. (And why weren’t their remarks at least vetted?)

This is all the consequence of modern society’s destruction of the public sphere, which in turn is a result of the loss of the transcendent. There is only the private sphere now, so public men must show their private selves as the only authentic part of themselves, and their families are a part of that. It’s degrading to politics. Much more needs to be said against this.

Thanks for the comments about VFR.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 04, 2005 11:17 AM | Send