<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” />“George Bush is a hard little man . . .”
A few years back there was a famous photographer on Charlie Rose. (Forgive me — I forget his name.) This man had taken iconic shots of everyone of celebrity or infamy from Winston Churchill on. If you've ever been a photographer or a videographer, you know what an intimate process shooting someone is.
Every single person interested this photographer. Even the villains. He grokked and savored their uniqueness.
This was back in Charlie Rose's era of having swilled the WMD-9/11 terrors koolaid. If not quite a toady for the Bush Administration in that timeframe, he, like Ms. Miller, was a bit of a chalabi. (If I may update quisling.¹)
This was a confection show as was appropriate. A lot of stunning portraits. Tabloidism at a caviar level.
Friskily with a certain sycophance like a Golden Retriever puppy, Charlie asks Mr. Photo, “You shot a portrait of our (sic) President when he was governor of <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Texas?”
All the air went out of the room. The amusing flock of anecdotes all fell out of the sky like dead birds. There was a long silence, ghastly on TV. Mr. Photo's voice lost all its buttery over-&-undertones, and he said with flint, “He's a hard little man.”
The president, George W. Bush was the only figure of the past 54 years that this observant photographer had not either loved, liked, or been interested in. It was that moment, I think when I felt the rising menace of this cold and colorless of soul Administration most starkly.
Mr. Photo, pressed for more comment, said, “We were alone in a room in the Governor's mansion and as I was setting up the shots, Governor Bush just watched me warily through slitted eyes. He is a hard little man.”
Mr. Photo did not say it except between the lines. But Mr. Bush was right to be wary. As many tribes in less modern lands knew, a photo can show your soul. Awkward if you don't have one.
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¹ There are a few notes on this piece, amigoas.
Quisling is one of those words that starts as a name and becomes a lower-case generic word like kleenex, xerox, sandwich, and google. Quisling was Norwegian who collaborated with the Germans in WW2 and was firing-squadded. When I’m feeling more than usually betrayed by Digrif, I call him a quisling. Note that in the Land of Euphonies, or delights of sound, quisling is a word that hisses like a snake. The sibilance or hissing underlines the subliminal feeling of treachery. (Not fair really to snakes which just have the misfortune not to be furry and not to blink. We feel odd around the blinkless.) That sound which is resonant of a feeling or thing is called onomatopoetic – and the classic is murmur & the tintinnabulation of the bells bells bells
Hear the sledges with the bells-
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells-
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells. EA Poe
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Koolaid. A undrinkable drink. Cloyingly sweet with cheap imitation flavors. Lots of people like it. But as an eponym or word from a name, to drink someone’s koolaid comes from the hideous Jonestown event where all these followers of Mr. Jones, yet another religious charlatan, a tautology if there ever was one, who took all these folks to Guyana in 1978 and they obediently drank the poisoned grape koolaid he passed around and 900 of them died. It was horrible, but in a humor so dark that it’s almost obsidian, the term has become more of a banter. “Yeah, well, she drank your koolaid.” Meaning that she swallowed your silky jive.
Chalabi is the slitherer to whom we owe the Iraq war. He was an exile of such snake-oil persuasion powers that the BushCo Cabal not just hook & line, but sinker too swallowed his fishy bait. He was the koolaid purveyor to Ms. Miller who used the New York Times to give credence to the Chalabi-BushCo fantasies of Sadam making nukes at the bottom of secret wells behind palaces. So I update quisling by using chalabi who is a conman’s conman.
sycophant .. ‘an informer against those who stole figs’ – in other words, a rat. Someone the prince can count on to fink slimily. It has gotten generalized to mean a vile flatterer, a smoocher of royal rumps – or in our day, trumps’ rumps. Obsequious – a word oilily worth saying.
sic .. sic means thus. It's used literally to say that some misspelling or bad usage was in the original statement — kind of puffed-uppedly noting that cool you noticed that it was wrong because you're not so much of a rube as the original writer. Or as in this case I am highlighting that Charlie, supposedly a journalist, uses 'our' rather than 'the' as an unnecessary fondness. Charlie, by the way, has regained some spine or at least a few vertebrae lately as the war spirals into perpetual hell.
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You sure he didn't say “horrid” little man?
Clearly Mr. Bush is a spoiled, narcissitic, and as the sursublime Anne Richards put it, “born on 3rd base & thought he hit a triple,” horrid little man, but the “hard” is revealing against this hail-fellow, well-met, supposedly affable, gee, maam, cowboy garbage.
People who have been up close after their child got scrambled by IEDs say something similar about Mr. Bush. Hard.
But then homo horribilis is an easier construction.
Chalabi is certainly a rubber man. He keeps bouncing back. It's interesting how such a person can affect the lives on the whole planet. In the end it might be good when America's super strength is seen as a dinosaur weakness.
3 years, 2 months, 28 days left. I don't think George2 has the belly for it. Ashes in the belly is what he looks like to me.
Doubts about Iraq must be leaking in around the edges of his bellicose hallucination.
I see Mr. Bush as increasingly going through the motions. And therefore more rats leaving the sinking ship with unflattering tales of the plague years. The bubonic administration. Heck with the danger being the avian flu. I'm afraid of getting attacked by W's lethal bubonic angst.