November 6, 2006
Bush reads too much
Tom Lehrer, an American singer and satirist, liked to tell a joke about Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon’s ill-fated vice president – “There was a tragic fire at the vice president’s mansion and the library was destroyed. Both books were burned. But the real tragedy was that he hadn’t finished colouring in one of them.”
Since President Bush is also widely derided as a dummy, one might expect similar gibes to be made about him. But they would be entirely unjust. The problem with the president is not that he reads too little – but that he reads too much. Last August “US News and World Report” reported that “the president is actually engaged in an informal contest with White House senior adviser Karl Rove to see who can read more books this year. The latest score card has Bush ahead 60-50.”
How can the president be getting through this many books and still governing the country? You might suspect that Mr Bush is only reading very short books – the Mr Men series perhaps.
But not at all, the list provided by US News showed that the president loves big fat biographies of historical figures like Mao and Alexander II – he also likes books about baseball. Perhaps he has been on a speed-reading course? As Woody Allen once joked – “I’ve read ‘War and Peace’ in 15 minutes. It’s about Russia.” But no again – in another interview, the president informed the world that he gets through about a page a minute.
If this is the case – and the president is seriously intent on reading about 100 books this year – I would argue that his reading habits now qualify as a serious dereliction of duty. Couldn’t he wait until he leaves office before settling down to reading “The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth?”
I also think there are signs that the president’s historical reading is leading him to take a dangerously long view of the problems of today. About six weeks ago, Mr Bush gave an interview to a group of conservative columnists. All of them emerged to write respectful and – in some cases – fawning profiles of the man in the Oval Office. But Max Boot of the Council on Foreign Relations did note that the president “spoke repeatedly of how the world would look 50 years from now.” Mr Boot worried that his thinking was now infected by – “a certain fatalism that come from focussing so much on the long term.”
It is true that losing the mid-term elections, or even the war in Iraq, can be put into perspective, if compared to – say – the fall of Rome. But there are still a few problems in the president’s in-tray that seem fairly urgent. Perhaps Bush the bookworm can now be persuaded to put aside his biographies of great men, and get on with the job in hand?
