It’s hard now to reanimate how viscerally so many people hated Bush a decade ago, but looking back on him now, I remember him as a homebody, someone who doesn’t like to travel, travels with his pillow, is addicted to eight hours of sleep a night; so am I. In India, he wasn’t sufficiently curious to go see the Taj Mahal. I must admit I could imagine doing the same thing. For his New Year’s resolution nine months after invading Iraq, he said he wanted to eat fewer sweets; he was widely and justifiably mocked for this, but this was also my New Year’s resolution the same year. He pretends to love his father, but he hates him. He pretends to admire his mother, but he reviles her. When the Dutch translator of Dead Languages asked if “Daddums” could be translated as “molten fool,” I said, “Yep, pretty much.”
He finds Nancy Pelosi sexy, but he won’t admit it (cf. my imaginative relation to Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann). He outsources every task he can. He walked into Condi Rice’s office and said, “Fuck Saddam—he’s going down.” I could imagine saying this. He loves to watch football and eat pretzels. He did everything he could to avoid serving in the Vietnam War; in 1974, when the war and draft were long over, I registered as a conscientious objector. As do I, he prides himself on being able to assess people immediately based on their body language. When he has the tactical advantage, he presses it to the limit; when he’s outflanked, he’s unattractively defensive. I don’t negotiate against myself: I’m incapable of embodying this Bush aperçu, but I quote it at least once a month.
He’s not very knowledgeable about the world. He has trouble pronouncing the names of foreign leaders. He’s obsessed with losing those last ten pounds. He’s remarkably tongue-tied in public but supposedly relatively smart in private. He had a lower SAT score than most of his Ivy League classmates; so did I. He wildly overvalues the poetry-in-motion of athletes. He once said he couldn’t imagine what it’s like to be poor; I have trouble reading books by people whose sensibility is wildly divergent from my own. He wasted his youth in a fog of alcohol and drugs; I didn’t do this, but sometimes I pretend I did. He reads a newspaper by glancing at the headlines—more or less what I do. He loves to get summaries of things rather than reading the thing itself. He’s never happier than in the box seat of a ballpark. He takes way too much pride in throwing the ceremonial first pitch over the plate for a strike. He’s slightly under six feet tall but pretends he’s six feet. I’m barely six feet and claim to be six-one. He’s scared to death of dying.
He was too easily seduced by Tony Blair’s patter, as was I. His wife is smarter than he is, by a lot. Asked by the White House press corps what he was going to give Laura for her birthday, he tilted his head and raised his eyebrows, conveying, unmistakably, I’m going to give it to her. (My wife’s name is still Laurie.) He’s intimidated by his father’s friends. He can express his affection most easily to dogs. He finds the metallics of war erotic. His knees are no damn good anymore, so he can’t jog and has taken up another sport: biking (for me, swimming). He loves nicknames. He’s not a good administrator. He views politics as a sporting event. He resents the New York Times’s (diminished but still undeniable) role in national life as pseudo-impartial arbiter; my most recent book is a critique of the same paper’s front-page war photography. In a crisis he freezes up, has no idea what to do, thinks first of his own safety (note how I responded to the 2001 Nisqually earthquake).
He just wants to be secure and taken care of and left alone—pretty much my impulses. Asked what he was most proud of during his presidency, he said catching a seven-pound bass. Asked in 2011 what’s on George’s mind now, Laura said, “He’s always worried about our small lake—whether it’s stocked with bass—because he loves to fish. There’s always some concern. It’s too hot. It’s too cold. Are the fish not getting enough feed? That’s what he worries about.” He’s lazy (it goes without saying). He hates to admit he’s wrong.
Every quality I despise in George Bush is a quality I despise in myself. He is my worst self realized. G. K. Chesterton, asked what’s wrong with the world, said, “I am.”