Frank Rich Reviews the Bush Follies

By Terrence McNally, AlterNet. Posted October 4, 2006.

In his new book, The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina, Frank Rich writes, "... whatever else 9/11 was, we can see now that it was the beginning of a new national narrative -- a compelling and often persuasive story that was told by the president of the United States and his administration to mobilize a shell-shocked country desperate to be led."

According to Rich, the administration's highest priority was not to eliminate Al Qaeda, but to consolidate its own power, and this aim called for a propaganda presidency in which reality was consistently replaced by "truthiness."

Rich, who became a New York Times op-ed columnist in 1994 after serving for 13 years as the newspaper's chief drama critic, talked to Terrence McNally.

Terrence McNally: Paul Krugman, fellow New York Times op-ed writer, joined the Times as a mild mannered Princeton economist. In fact, he'd been attacked by the left for being a cheerleader for globalization. Then, on the job, he morphed into a fiery critic of the Bush administration. Now here you are, for years an entertainment writer ...

Frank Rich: There's something about the Bush administration that brings out the best or worst in everyone I guess.

McNally: Tell us a bit about that evolution.

Rich: I've had a very strange career. I grew up in Washington, D.C., in a family that was not involved with politics, which is sort of like growing up in Beverly Hills in a family that's got nothing to do with show business. I was always captivated by politics, but I was also stage-struck as a kid and interested in theater and culture. I've always written about both, though I did have a long period when I was a drama critic at the Times. But even then I was writing a bit about politics and culture for the New Republic and Esquire and elsewhere.

I think that in the case of Paul, he's a numbers guy who really understands economics, and he was appalled -- and rightly so -- in the earliest days of the Bush administration when he saw their fuzzy math. The numbers just didn't add up, and I think it offended his professionalism as an economist. I don't think there was anything particularly ideological about it.

In my case, it wasn't the numbers that caught my eye, but the stagecraft. Why are they always putting on a show? Why does everything have a backdrop with Orwellian words telling you what to think? What are they hiding? What is this "Wizard of Oz"-like theater they've set up?

After all the time I spent thinking about the theater, including Washington theater, if I know nothing else, I know empty spectacle when I see it. Not to make light of something that's been tragic for many Americans and the world, but their whole spectacle is like a big empty Andrew Lloyd Webber contraption -- chandeliers rising and falling, people landing in planes on aircraft carriers and celebrating victory -- and it's empty inside.

McNally: I imagine you've wished you could have the same power as a critic of the administration that you were said to have as a critic of Broadway --

Rich: Unfortunately this is not a show that could be closed out of town. It's had quite a run.

McNally: Why did you write this book? Is it because you began to see that the primary narrative of this administration was the fact that they were putting out a "story"?

Rich: That's exactly right. I started talking about this book with my editor at Penguin a year and a half ago, maybe even longer. Because of my strong belief in wanting to tell this as a narrative as opposed to just throwing together collected columns, I felt it had to have a third act curtain. I'm such a creature of the theater and of narrative, that I felt I couldn't sit down and start writing this book unless I knew, in at least some figurative sense, when it was ending.

One place to look for an ending was in the 2004 election. I made an informal agreement with my editor that if Kerry won, well that's the end of the story, but, as we know, that did not happen.

I finally decided to write the book when I realized that Katrina was the third act curtain. That disaster and the Bush administration's response to it stripped bare everything that had been true about the administration all along. All in one place, happening 24/7, in real time, on television with all the network anchors watching: the use of spin, the claiming of triumphs and successes that hadn't happened, the slowness to react to a city under siege, looting -- just as in Baghdad after the invasion of Iraq -- everything playing out in fast motion.

Interviewer Terrence McNally hosts Free Forum on KPFK 90.7FM, Los Angeles (streaming at kpfk.org).

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