Friday, March 10, 2006

George W. Bush Comes to South Bend

I’ve long noted that there are two kinds of political junkies.  One group hangs on every word of the President.  They find the man endlessly fascinating and know every utterance, facial expression and tic of the commander-in-chief.  Scratch a Reagan or Kennedy lover and they will mimic the president’s accent in a second.  The curious thing here is that even those who despise these presidents also hang on their every word.  They too are equally obsessed with the physicality of the man.  For Nixon haters, for instance, the stooped shoulders and the awkward grace that came so naturally to the man are trotted out for a laugh; for Clinton despisers, they just can’t get enough of the man’s body that begins with the bitten lip thing he does when he’s sad and goes down to those pasty white thighs of his, and ends, well you know where it ends.  Now, the other group of political junkies can’t bear to even hear the President’s voice.  They purposefully turn off the tv or radio whenever he is on to insure their blood pressure doesn’t soar.  I am in this group when it comes to our current President.  Every time I see him on tv or listen to him on the radio, I feel that I have been air-lifted into Abu Graib.  I find his whiney voice, his mangling of the English language, his tired jokes and the dopey nicknames of his subordinates so hard to bear that I avoid the man like the plague.

I tell you all of this because W. got the better of me when he came to South Bend the other day.  As my bad luck would have it, my little family was flying out of town that same day, and so we got to watch all of his emblems and vestiges of state power up close and real personal.  I knew we were heading into trouble when we were greeted at the airport by dozens of tractors and other heavy machinery.  My hunch is that this was to ward off a suicide bomber from blowing up Air Force One.  I can understand that decision.  But it was the sheer quantity of cars / trucks / SUV / emergency vehicles that supported him that still stick in my mind.  Along with the other people waiting for their flights to take off, we all rushed like lemmings to the windows in the hope of seeing our Prez when his entourage came roaring down the tarmac.  I even took a nice photo of Air Force One.  In short, the President’s little visit was just eye candy for those who marvel at the sheer awesomeness of American power.  Only after he had left did I begin to ponder the copious amount of gasoline these vehicles burned to get Bush to that fund-raiser at Bethel College and back to the airport.

As my bad luck would have it, again, I had plenty of time to ponder this last question.  My flight, you see, was delayed over 3 hours in South Bend.  During those hours I learned the following about the waiting area: that the soda and pretzel machines don’t really work and don’t return change very well, that the video games are state of the art from the Reagan era, and that the Arrival and Departure monitors lie like a rug.  By the time we finally made it to Chicago we learned that we had not only missed our connection, but that we would be getting to spend some more quality time in a non-descript hotel in the middle of nowhere that evening.  Trust me, when I went to sleep I was not reciting that sweet line from Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.”

Oh, one more thing about the President’s visit.  Shortly before I went to the airport I turned on the tv to see how the local media were covering it.  They all reported with that breathless manner that I love.  But then I noticed a curious distinction: one local station broke away once the President started to speak and said that since he was speaking at a political fund-raiser they would not be airing him unless he said something newsworthy.  I’d like to think they did this because of old fashioned ideas about political fairness and equal time for Bush’s opponents.  But I think soap operas just sell better these days.  I then took a look at another local station, and they simply left their cameras and microphones on while the President spoke about what a courageous fellow this Chris Chocola guy is.  Given their respective approval ratings in Michiana, I’m not sure the station was doing either a service.

Broadcast by Jonathan Nashel on March 10, 2006
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