Boy-President in a Failed World?

By Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com. Posted July 12, 2005.

On Thursday morning, with the London bombings monopolizing the TV set, I watched our President take that long, outdoor, photo-op walk from the G-8 summit meeting to the microphones to make a statement to reporters. Exploding subways, a blistered bus, the dead, wounded, dazed, and distraught just then staggering through our on-screen morning, and there he was. He had his normal, slightly bowlegged walk, his arms held just out from his side in a fashion that brings the otherwise unusable word "akimbo" to mind.

It's a walk -- the walk to the podium at the White House press conference, to the presidential helicopter, to the Rose Garden microphone -- that is now his well-practiced signature move. For some people, a tone of voice or a facial expression can tell you everything you need to know; that's how the President's walk acts for him. And nothing puts spine in that walk the way the war on terror does. Each horror is like a shot of adrenalin.

As he approached the microphones on Thursday, while ambulances and police cars rushed through the streets of London, everything about him radiated a single word: resolve. It was a word that came to mind even before he used it making his brief statement, and then turned, no less resolutely, to walk away just as the word "Iraq" came out of the mouth of some reporter as part of an unfinished question. This was definitely our War (on Terror) President back in the saddle.

He said nothing to surprise. He offered "heartfelt condolences to the people of London, people who lost lives"; he spoke of defending Americans against heightened dangers ("I have been in contact with our Homeland Security folks. I instructed them to be in touch with local and state officials about the facts of what took place here and in London, and to be extra vigilant, as our folks start heading to work."); he extolled the strength of resolve of the other G-8 leaders by comparing it to his own ("I was most impressed by the resolve of all the leaders in the room. Their resolve is as strong as my resolve."); and he presented for the umpteenth time his Manichaean vision of a world of good and evil in which he and his administration are unhesitatingly the representatives of all goodness. ("[T]he contrast couldn't be clearer between the intentions and the hearts of those of us who care deeply about human rights and human liberty, and those who kill -- those who have got such evil in their heart that they will take the lives of innocent folks.")

There's something so confoundingly dreamlike about all this, so fantastic, even absurd, especially set against the background of the murder of random people taking public transportation in one of the globe's great cities. As reality grows ever darker, our President never ventures far from his scripted version of a fictional world that is nowhere to be seen. Let's keep in mind that this was the same President who, only the day before in Denmark, had launched a vigorous, completely ludicrous defense of his Guantánamo prison complex. Just two weeks earlier, his Vice President had pointed out -- as if he were making one of those Caribbean tourist ads -- that the prisoners there were lucky to be housed and fed so admirably in the balmy "tropics."

Now, the President was practically proffering tickets to those tropics for Europeans who wanted to check the situation out for themselves. ("[T]he prisoners are well-treated in Guantánamo. There's total transparency. The International Red Cross can inspect any time, any day. And you're welcome to go. The press, of course, is welcome to go down to Guantánamo...There's very few prison systems around the world that have seen such scrutiny as this one. And for those of you here on the continent of Europe who have doubt, I'd suggest buying an airplane ticket and going down and look -- take a look for yourself.")

It was certainly a unique vacation package he was offering. As it happens, Jane Mayer of The New Yorker magazine took one of those tickets and, even getting a military dog-and-pony show at the prison, was struck by "the utter lack of due process" in the one trial-like proceeding she saw. ("It looked like a court hearing, but there were no lawyers.") The place -- despite having its own Starbucks for the Americans -- struck her as a giant dystopian experiment in mind manipulation.

A number of FBI agents took these tickets a while ago and sent back harrowing tales of mistreatment and torture ("The documents showed that FBI agents were particularly upset with what they saw as physical and mental abuse of the detainees, including the sticking of lighted cigarettes in their ears, choking, beatings, temperature changes, hooding, the use of dogs and other forms of harassment."); or simply consider what the elder President Bush's White House physician, a former doctor in the Army Medical Corps, had to say recently on this Bush administration's treatment of prisoners:

Tom Engelhardt, editor of Tomdispatch.com, is co-founder of the American Empire Project and author of "The End of Victory Culture."

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