From the beginning, and particularly after September 11, the Bush Administration has made masterful use of symbols and images to portray George W. Bush as a strong leader, even as a 'hero'. Those not susceptible to the GOP groupthink can only observe with mild disgust while such a pitiful excuse for a leader is worshipped as a Great Man by so many.
That has made me think about a great little book by the British military historian John Keegan --
The Mask of Command. Keegan explores the way leadership roles change with the times by looking at four distinctively different "heroes": Alexander the Great is the prototypical "heroic" leader; The Duke of Wellington is the "anti-hero," a man prepared to fight but without Alexander's theatrics; Ulysses S. Grant is the "un-hero" and the great general of a victorious army because he considered himself no better than his men; and Adolf Hitler is the "false hero," relying on simulated heroism and remaining at a safe distance while his soldiers fought in his name. An excerpt:
John Keegan, in [i]The Mask of Command[/i], wrote:He (Hitler) ?- for all the half-educated rhetoric of his writings and speeches, his psychological tophamper of rancours, insecurities and imagined injustices, and the muddled hatreds of what he called his philosophy ?- was a man in touch with a mainstream of life. He knew the power of the appeal to manhood, comradeship and warriordom, knew how to articulate it and knew how to bend it to his political purpose.
The "appeal to manhood" thing looks a bit different in America today than it did in Germany in the 1930s and '40s. Hitler built his Reich from the still smoldering German resentment left over from World War I. The psychosocial foundations of the Bush Regime are not so obvious, but he does appeal strongly to white working-class men who feel entitled to a bigger (or should I say higher?) piece of the pie than they are getting these days. This is true in spite of the fact it is GOP
policies, not terrorists or liberals, making sure only rich people get pie.
But back to Bush's quickie visit to Iraq and his false heroism. It appears that if wrapping oneself in the flag isn't working, try wearing a jacket that spells "A-R-M-Y" and get yourself cheered by combat troops.
Dana Milbank, in the Washington Post, wrote:While the troops cheered the moment, it is too soon to know whether the image of Bush in his Army jacket yesterday will become a symbol of strong leadership or a symbol of unwarranted bravado.
Bush faces a public relations problem similar to Hitler's -- he is an unheroic man trying to pass himself off as a hero. Author Keegan discusses the fact that while Hitler was allegedly "leading" armies, he was doing so from a number of remote hideaways, far from danger:
Quote:His acute understanding of the popular mind let him to perceive, however, that the reality of isolation from danger conferred by the remoteness of all Führer headquarters, must be offset by the illusion of shared risk. Hitler's was certainly not unalert to the ancient and central dilemma of the general: where to stand, how often to be seen? In front always, sometimes or never? Were questions on which he had pondered privately and publicly since the first days of his ascent to power. "By virtue of a natural order," he had written in Mein Kampf, the strongest man is destined to fulfill the great mission
"
Propaganda, though no such crude encapsulation was ever applied to the means of his public representation, was the solution. Hitler had an acute grasp of the importance of propaganda from an early age; had applauded the superiority of Allied over German propaganda in the First World War in Mein Kampf and had there singled out its didactic essentials: The selection of a few simple messages for endless repetition. "The receptivity of the masses is very limited," he wrote, "their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous; in consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans until the last member of the public understands what you want him to understand by your slogans." Goebbels, the propaganda minister ?- "enlightenment" minister was its exact title, a brilliant pilfering from the age when to the world Germany meant Herder and Goethe ?- had already burdened the German public consciousness with a kaleidoscopic image of Hitler as his people's mentor and protector, the unsleeping guardian of their interests, the lonely helmsman of their destiny, the orphan of their collective sufferings, and the guarantor of their future return to greatness. To that image he added, from the outset of war, the picture of a Hitler unwillingly re-outfitted in the battle gear of a frontfighter, marching to victory as if ?- not wholly present in body but totally in spirit ?- at the head of troops...
Obviously, Bush's plunging approval numbers have persuaded Karl Rove that the Commander-in-Chief needs to be seen as a war leader, accepting the cheers of hardened combat troops while sporting an Army jacket. Not the least reason of which is they won't be able to use any of the video of Bush in a flight suit from the
Lincoln.
I could go on for a bit about how Karl Rove's mistake continues to be his banking on Iraq calming down, the unpredictability of war and so on, but I'll save that for another time. Summarizing the divergent views of Bush's little turkey trot:
What a guy! What a hero! -- to some.
Unadulterated horse droppings to the rest of us.
