Bushisms DVD Review:

In the age of the sound bite, George W. Bush has provided a feast for, well, the ears. It was said of Monica Lewinsky that the girl went down on history, and George W. Bush might equally be said to have already gone down on the history of the English language as one of its great man-handlers. Love or loath him, the incumbent President of America not only guards the free world from its enemies, but he does more in favour of freedom with speech than any other living person. Consider the following:

It’ll take time to restore chaos.

Rarely is the question asked, is our families learning?

Poor people aren’t necessarily killers.

You’re working hard to put food on your family.

Ticket counters and airplanes will fly out of Ronald Reagan airport.

I know what I believe. I will continue to articulate what I believe, and I believe that what I believe is right.

The President means what he says, but does he say what he means? ‘Bushisms’ comes to you from the same people who produced the best-selling book series, and proposes a catalogue of the most memorable of his phrases, together with some commentary by
Brian Unger and Jacob Weisberg, the only luminary being Al Franken who makes a few disjointed appearances. Alongside the actual video and audio-clips, there are cartoons from Gary Trudeau and singing, lots of singing, to the President’s words. In sixty-odd minutes, only a certain amount can be said, so you will probably have already heard much of what is on the disc.

Unfortunately this is a satirical/documantary opportunity wasted. The presentation seems to have been put together by a group of students with a thousand dollar budget and the help of friends. The graphics and music are way below the level of the average documentary. In case we’re too dumb to get any of the Presidential howlers, they’re carefully explained to us, while Al Franken doesn’t seem to be too keen to give out much, perhaps because he guessed what the end product would look like. The only point at which the film-makers show any sign of respecting their audience’s intelligence is in asking the question, why does he do it? Is it perhaps to make us ‘misunderestimate’ him? Credit where it’s due: not even Jacques Derrida deconstructed language like this man.

The problem is in a way that raw material outstrips the commentary. How can these quotations, delivered by the ultimate straight man, be put together and mulled over in a way that makes them funnier than they already are? No attempt at serious discussion of the implications of this man’s intellectual abilities is attempted, and the mockumentary angle isn’t tried either. The entertainment value of this disc is close to zero; life is in this case just so much more bizarre than anything you could have imagined, and these guys just can’t keep up with their subject. They have indeed pluri-misunderestimated their man.

There are no extra features on this DVD; not even a comment on the book series.



Dominic Gavin