It is truly strange to consider the possibility that Tony Snow was telling the truth when he said that George W. Bush just read Albert Camus’s The Stranger. For those of you that haven’t read it, The Stranger is an odd little bit of existentialism, based on the life of a vaguely sociopathic anti-hero named Meursault. It takes place in Algeria. Meursault’s mother dies, but he doesn’t really feel any grief. He seems incapable of any genuine empathy. The day after her funeral he begins a love affair with a secretary from his office. She comes to love him and wants to be married. Meursault is indifferent. He is incapable of love.
Meursault has a friend named Raymond Sintes. Raymond is a serious misogynist that beats his Arab ex-girlfriend. This leads to a confrontation at the beach between the ex-girlfriend’s brother and his Arab friends, and Mersault and Raymond. Mersault leaves the beach and gets a gun. He then returns to the beach and kills the brother, pumping four shots into him.
He is arrested for murder and put on trial. Even though he has many character witnesses, it is the testimony of his girfriend that dooms him to the guillotine. The jury is outraged to learn that he started a love affair the day after burying his mother.
In the end, a chaplain tries valiantly to get Mersault to accept Christianity and ask for forgiveness. Mersault finds him insulting and annoying. He cannot embrace religion. He goes to his death with a positive attitude.
The basic outlines of the character Mersault are his total lack of responsibility and his near total lack of empathy.
It really got me thinking about how George W. Bush would react to reading The Stranger, if he were actually capable of reading more than two double-spaced pages in a row without succumbing to his itch to play video golf.
There is a real sense in which Mersault’s character can be seen as a parable for Bush’s life. The death of Mersault’s mother can be seen as the death of 3,000 people on 9/11. Bush tried but was incapable of feeling real empathy.
Today we’ve had a national tragedy. Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack on our country. I have spoken to the Vice President, to the Governor of New York, to the Director of the FBI, and have ordered that the full resources of the federal government go to help the victims and their families, and to conduct a full-scale investigation to hunt down and to find those folks who committed this act.- September 11, 2001, 9:30AM, Media Center, Emma Booker Elementary School, Bradenton, Florida.
Before the funerals could even begin, George W. Bush began his love affair.
“The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, ‘I want you to find whether Iraq did this.’ Now he never said, ‘Make it up.’ But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this.
“I said, ‘Mr. President. We’ve done this before. We have been looking at this. We looked at it with an open mind. There’s no connection.’
“He came back at me and said, “Iraq! Saddam! Find out if there’s a connection.’ And in a very intimidating way. I mean that we should come back with that answer. We wrote a report.”- Richard Clarke’s account of September 12, 2001.
Meanwhile, Bush’s friends Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld authorize the use of torture, including on Arab women. When this is all revealed at Abu Ghraib, the intensity of the fight between George W. Bush and Arab men intensifies.
Bush responds by nudging Israel to destroy the infrastructure of Lebanon.
The parallels are eerie. The only question is whether the ending will be the same? Will someone eventually arrest George W. Bush for war crimes, and will the testimony of his lover, Iraq, be what dooms him at trial? Will the jury look at Iraq and become convinced that Bush is an unfeeling sociopath?
Strange reading choice for George W. Bush.
