MONday, JUNE 3, 2002

Stupidity may be back in vogue

 

I'm sorry to report that it looks as though stupidity -- or at least the feigned version -- is making a comeback in the White House.

Our president was holding a joint press conference in Paris -- France, not Texas -- with French President Jacques Chirac recently when an American reporter made the mistake of asking Chirac a fairly simple question in the local language.

I'm not sure what the question was, but it was undoubtedly a little more relevant to the proceedings than "Ou sont les toilettes?" That's about the only complete sentence I can make in French anymore, although I do know a lot of nouns and adjectives from listening to my wife and children converse in their native tongue.

Anyway, the reporter -- and more power to him, he was a television reporter -- did Chirac the courtesy of asking a question in French while he was in France. Our guy, good ol' George Dubya, took umbrage. In case Bush is reading this, my version of Webster defines umbrage as "offense" or "resentment.

Bush made a remark something like, "Wow! Four words of French, and he thinks he's international." Then he compounded his near-witticism by saying, "Que bueno. Now I'm international too," leaving everyone at the press conference to wonder why on earth Bush was speaking Spanish in Paris."

My response when I heard that was probably exactly what Dana Carvey's old Church Lady character would have said. Isn't that special?

Couldn't he at least have used the one French sentence every red-blooded American boy of his generation learned from "Lady Marmalade" and Patti Labelle? "Voulez-vous couchez avec moi ce soir?"

I guess he was afraid Chirac might have misunderstood and thought Bush was making a pass at him.

You will have to cut me a little slack on this one. I'm so tired of Bush's down-home, idiot good old boy act that I could scream. I've got nothing against good old boys, but the man grew up in a family of Eastern aristocrats, attended prep school at Andover, got a bachelors degree from Yale and an MBA from Harvard.

Sorry if this disillusions you, but just as Big George Bush didn't really like pork rinds, George Jr.'s Texas veneer is about a mile wide and an inch deep.

He's actually a very intelligent man -- some say he's intellectually lazy, and I can certainly identify with that -- but Dubya isn't the kind of guy who couldn't spell "dog" if you spotted him the "d" and the "o."

Sure, he's prone to malapropisms like "strategory," and yes, his Spanish accent is pretty awful. Still, they don't hand out Harvard MBA degrees in Cracker Jack boxes. If Bush hadn't gone into politics, he might have wound up as one of those captains of industry you read about in People magazine all the time.

He may not have known the presidents of four countries most Americans couldn't locate on a map when he was running for president, but the odds are pretty good that if you put him on that quiz show with the obnoxious English woman, he wouldn't be the first one to be told he was the weakest link.

I loved the few episodes Comedy Central ran of "That's My Bush," but I recognized it wasn't a documentary. I also found myself feeling really sorry for Timothy Bottoms, who has fallen one helluva long way since "The Last Picture Show" and "The Paper Chase."

I think if I were Bottoms, I would have considered truck driving school or the exciting world of computer repair before I would have signed to do that show. Our president may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I'm pretty sure he has a three-digit IQ. The character Bottoms played on "That's My Bush" would have come in second to the guy in the Steinbeck book who asked Lenny if they could have rabbits once they settled down.

If you didn't recognize the "Of Mice and Men" reference, you might have come in third. Sorry, but I'm feeling more than a little steamed at folks who think looking stupid somehow makes them adorable or electable.

As far as the NBC reporter who had the gaul -- er, gall -- to ask President Chirac a question in French, do you think Bush realizes that every question he gets at his own press conferences are in English? Do you think he realizes not all the reporters are Americans?

I'm reminded of a story the late Lewis Grizzard used to tell about his high school days, when his little school in Georgia got an exchange student from France. All the boys were infatuated with her, and one of Grizzard's friends thought he was being particularly suave when he walked up to her and in his best down-home accent, said, "Buenos dias, senorita."

It is almost a given to the rest of the world that most Americans can't speak any language but their own, and it's a given in England that we don't even speak that one very well. The fact is, when it comes to politics, stupidity sells. We may not really want our president to be the guy who snapped towels in the locker room and cheated off the nerds in math class, but we want him to pretend he did.

We want our president to be like that old "Saturday Night Live" skit in which Phil Hartman played Ronald Reagan as a blithering idiot in public who had the proverbial steel-trap mind as soon as he was out of view of the cameras.

Dubya probably saw that skit and used it as a blueprint for his entire political career.

Unfortunately, that says more about us than it does about him. As for what it says, I don't think I can say it in mixed company.

That's my Bush? Nope, that's our country.

Que bueno.