Activist to Bush: Wait Till Voters Wake Up

If Mark Crispin Miller is right, the White House is occupied by a right-wing cabal, fronted by a man so sure of his dynastic ascendancy that he does not even bother to adhere to the rules of common English, so complacent in his privilege that he flaunts his ignorance as if it were the ultimate mark of superiority.

If Miller is right, this man was not elected president in any legal or moral sense.

If Miller is right, a sophisticated right-wing propaganda machine, operating with the aid of corporate-influenced big media, has brainwashed Americans into believing that he was.

If Miller is right, the presidency of George W. Bush dealt democracy a potentially murderous blow, a blow that left millions of voters mentally and emotionally stunned, unable to truly comprehend the enormity of the Supreme Court’s decision nine months ago.

If Miller is right, these voters are just coming to, and once they are fully conscious, there’s going to be hell to pay.

And Mark Crispin Miller seems pretty sure he is right.

“I believe there is a subterranean momentum of outrage out there that will continue to build,” says the longtime media critic and New York University professor whose work regularly appears in the Nation and on various editorial pages. “It’s as simple as this: If we can live with this gross miscarriage of justice, then we have lost the right to call ourselves a democracy.”

These are the words of a man whose midnight outrage over what he refers to as “the 36 days of Florida” forced him to put aside a book he had been working on for years and pound out in a cold fury “The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder” (W.W. Norton).

Miller, who also directs NYU’s Project on Media Ownership, is fairly well-known for his leftist politics and activism on behalf of media reform, so his take on last year’s election is not entirely surprising. Already in its fifth printing, it is an odd, angry and much more frightening than funny book that has been getting mostly good reviews (although the Washington Post slammed it). In the introduction, Miller acknowledges that it was quickly written, and that while he had begun with the idea of making sport of Bush’s tendency toward forensic fumbling, it soon became clear that it wasn’t funny at all. That far from being the understandable blank spots caused by too many hours in front of the press or endearing syntax contortions of a simple Texas boy, Bush’s frequent inability to articulate even the simplest thoughts is a clear sign of his disrespect for most of his constituency.

His lack of concern about this inability is not a hallmark of humility, but its opposite. “His sloppy speech,” Miller writes, “is not his way of saying, ‘I am one of you,’ but rather of asserting ‘the rules don’t apply to me.”’

Distressed by Seeming

Ignorance of Basic Facts

Rumors of dyslexia, Miller argues, may or may not be true, but they do not explain in any way the president’s woeful, and seemingly willful, ignorance of simple geography or the nature of the government he heads. “To believe that Social Security is not a federal program [as he did when complaining in USA Today that the Democrats “want the federal government running Social Security as if it were some kind of federal program]...,” Miller writes, “to confuse Slovenia with Slovakia [as he did when he met the foreign minister of Slovenia] and the judicial branch of the government with the executive [as he did during an interview in Austin, according to Slate, the online magazine]--is to suffer from no disability but ignorance,” an ignorance for which the Yale-educated Bush has no excuse.

The real dyslexia, Miller believes, is the one suffered by the American people, who were shown one presidential candidate--a man who would not answer simple questions about his past, who could not answer simple questions about his policies, who, according to one account, leered and joked when he spoke of a death row inmate’s plea for mercy, who seemed incapable of putting in more than a four-hour workday--while media pundits described another man altogether.

Caught between visual reality and professional spin, Miller argues, the body politic began doubting its sense of perception and soon was almost clinically dissociated, unable, or unwilling, to protest the enormous shell game the Bush campaign was orchestrating.

The book delivers what the title promises--a disheartening array of stupid statements, unsettling jokes, untruths and stonewalling. But more than that, it tries to reconstruct the forces that allowed Bush, the unsuccessful scion of a wealthy and politically elite family, to successfully portray himself as a can-do, down-home, Washington outsider. At work, Miller says, were the weird double-edged power of television, the history of recrimination and paranoia in the Republican Party, the ongoing accusations of liberal bias in the media and the media’s seeming unwillingness to hold candidate Bush to the same standards that applied to candidate Al Gore.

Book Was Written

Quickly--and It Shows

Miller tries to recuse himself from partisanship by stating that he voted for Ralph Nader, which he seems to believe absolves him of any charges of sour grapes. Yet even he admits that his vote would have been different had he lived in a state with a less-than-solid pro-Gore base, which makes his objectivity a bit suspect, and perhaps beside the point. This is clearly an anti-Bush tirade, and it is by no means unflawed--it was written quickly and that shows, in structure and the form of Miller’s argument.

But Miller’s point that we don’t know yet what happened and what it will mean seems prescient. Revelations regarding the election proceedings continue to be made--that many of the overseas ballots were counted despite postmarks past the deadline and other discrepancies, that some Florida voters may have been erroneously listed as convicted felons and stripped of their right to vote, that Florida Gov. Jeb Bush may have indeed been involved in the proceedings despite publicly recusing himself. News outlets that continued to recount those ballots with chad issues conjectured that Bush likely would have won the state. Those recounts did not take into consideration any other alleged irregularities.

Meanwhile, larger analyses are beginning to hit the bookstands--the lawyers have already had at it with at least two opposing books on the legality of the Supreme Court’s role.

Wearing its politics on its sleeve, Miller’s book speaks for those Americans who are still very angry, whose bumper stickers and T-shirts read: “He’s not my president,” who are turning over their tax refunds to various Democratic and anti-Bush organizations, who choke the Internet with furious rehashes of what happened in Florida, with indictments against various media for stories they did or did not run with.

“The facts are that even with the remarkable con the GOP pulled, more people voted for Gore than Bush,” Miller says in a phone conversation. “And these people have not gone away. They are not happy. You look at the polls--we have a country that is, at best, deeply divided about what this administration is doing. And even if it were, say 30% of voters who were outraged, that would be quite a force.” (A recent USA Today poll gave Bush a 57% approval rating.)

Still Emotional About

‘36 Days of Florida’

When speaking about “the 36 days of Florida,” Miller becomes quite a force, apoplectic almost, in a very articulate kind of way.

“I was in the midst of a book on war propaganda [‘Mad Scientists’ will be published by Norton in the fall], and I was just stunned to see how faithfully the Republicans were living up to the model in my book. Winning a propaganda war is not just a matter of pretense and tactics, but also of paranoid conviction. Watching Jim Baker’s neck turn red while he fulminated about the Democrats’ ‘mischief’ when there was no evidence of any such thing, I was very frightened. But they knew how to handle it.”

Miller reserves most of his vitriol for the Republicans--he says he will not use the term “conservative” to describe those driving the party because they are far too right-wing to be considered conservative--but he is not warm and fuzzy when discussing their rivals. Democrats, he believes, have not only been too mealy-mouthed in their opposition toward GOP initiatives; they themselves have adopted conservative positions on a host of issues, including the drug war, free trade, military spending and media concentration. Leftist politics, he says, have dissolved into a morass of identity politics obliterating the historical Democrat roots of class activism and leaving the party in a perpetual state of shifting priorities. During a crisis like the one in Florida, the upper hand goes to the better-organized force.

“And while the Democrats were in disarray the Republicans moved to Florida. They moved everything they owned to Florida. They were not going to leave Florida until Bush was declared president. One way or another. And they kept saying that the votes had been counted when they hadn’t, and that time was of the essence, when it wasn’t, and that Bush had won the election when he didn’t.”

Meanwhile, he says, the television networks, long conditioned to avoid any hint of the liberal bias with which the right-wing has calculatedly accused them of for years, continued to give Bush the benefit of the doubt.

Which is why, Miller says, “you had Cokie Roberts and Sam Donaldson resorting to these inane cliches on Inauguration Day, about how orderly the process was, about how the system could weather such storms, instead of reporting that many Americans felt completely numb and worked over, and that many were indeed protesting right there in Washington.”

This journalistic complacency, he says, gives the impression that “we’re OK with what happened, and we’re not. I think many people have felt a deep denial. Nobody wants to face what has happened because it is too huge. But I think more people will come around to the view that something is wrong here. Already we’re seeing a reduction in jokes about Bush, not, I think, because people like him, but because they are realizing that he is not an imbecile, that it is dangerous to dismiss him as such.”

Miller speaks in complete paragraphs that suffer not at all from literal transcription. His tone is forceful, but even; he does not seem to draw breath for alarming amounts of time. Although he says he is surprised and disappointed at certain media decisions not to report on his book--NPR’s rankles most--he has been at countless book signings and on radio and television shows. Everywhere he goes, he says, he is more and more convinced that far from moving past those 36 days, people are just starting to realize what happened.

At every appearance, he asks the audience how many are unable to watch the nightly news, how many are in some sort of denial that Bush is president. “At least half raise their hands,” he says, “usually two-thirds. But they don’t know what to do.”

The lack of a true opposition party in this country, he says, makes it difficult to transform that frustration into action, but he believes that protests--against the World Trade Organization, against various policy decisions, against threats on the environment--will likely increase as the electorate locates its rage and its voice, and he has great hopes for the off-year election, in which voters could express their outrage by voting ultra-right Republicans out of office.

“It is alarming that some of the subsequent revelations about what happened in Florida have seemed to vanish so quickly,” he says. “But I don’t think that means they will come to nothing. If we accept what has happened, well, we should just call ourselves a plutocracy and be done with it. It’s that simple.”

If, of course, he’s right.... asserting “the rules don’t apply to me.”’