DR. PANGLOSS AND THE IRON FIST

Now I get it. George W. Bush had a secret speech writer to help him with yesterday's address to the U.N. -- none other than the infallible, ineffable Dr. Pangloss. The New York Times suggested as much this morning in its lead editorial, describing the address on the surface at least as "a Panglossian report on how well things were going in Iraq." (Free registration required.)

Anybody mildly familiar with 18th-century French literature knows that after Candide's tutor Dr. Pangloss is left for dead  -- having been whipped, hanged and dissected -- he still believes in the chief tenet of his philosophy: "Everything in this world happens for the best." Which is pretty much what Bush wants us to believe. Taking us for Candide stand-ins, he aimed his address "more at a domestic audience than the world community," as the Times editorial put it, "given how sunny a picture he painted of a situation in which the administration is finding almost nothing as easy as it had hoped."

In my quick take yesterday on "Shrub's Folly," I noted how much time he spent on the subject of sex slavery, a subject we hadn't much heard about from him before. Here's why he did it:  "By elevating an effort to halt human trafficking to near the top of his agenda ... President Bush was trying to put a softer face on American foreign policy and emphasize his stance to a domestic coalition that includes the religious right, his advisers and other said." (Free registration required.)

It's commendable of him, don't you think? Christian organizations and conservative human rights advocates have long focused on the issue, as have liberals and feminists. Maybe with his new-found focus on the international trade in sex slavery, President Bush can bring democracy to Iraq, solve the problems of the Middle East, disarm North Korea, catch Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, find more jobs, turn around the U.S. economy, neutralize his political opposition at home and win a second term. Failing that, he can always take up "cultivating his garden," where Dr. Pangloss left off.

September 24, 2003 11:31 AM |

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Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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This page contains a single entry by CriticalMASS published on September 24, 2003 11:31 AM.

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