I doubt that there will ever be a great play called "The Tragedy of George Bush." As a playwright, I find a problem with Bush as a dramatic character in a serious drama. Although he is perfectly suited for satire, he is now caught up in a tragic national drama, the Iraq war, and it is as if Shakespeare's Bottom had stumbled into Hamlet by mistake and taken over the stage.
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The closest that true drama has ever come to a leader such as Bush is that of Shakespeare's Henry V, the wastrel inheritor of the English crown who puts aside his carousing, abandons his friend Falstaff, and takes his nation into a war with France. But Henry's character is buoyed up by his eloquence, ennobled by his courage and his love of England. Nobody can accuse George Bush of eloquence or locate his courage and love of country as he labors to strip it of its natural wonders, and sell his power to its worst exploiters. What he shares with Henry V is a ruthless ambition wed to a sense of royal entitlement. As Henry exploited his soldier's patriotism, Bush exploits his nation's fears. Our unwatched borders, unguarded ports, and unarmed Humvees tell their own story about this President as our protector.
Like most incurious people Bush starts with a belief and then searches desperately for the evidence to support it. This faith-based approach to the world is one that most often has tragic consequences for others, rarely for the man himself, protected by his power and by the fear he has exploited in others. Bush is many things, but he is not insincere. It is delusional to believe that he does not believe what he says. In his heart of hearts he still believes that there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to be found if only we had the right dogs to sniff them out.
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Our political history is filled with complex characters that provide the material for great drama. Lyndon Johnson -- for all his buffoonery -- was a figure worthy of a great tragedy. He started with the noble goals of Civil Rights and a Great Society that would embrace all, and ended with a war that destroyed his presidency and cost thousands of young men their lives. Even Dick Nixon had his own malignant grandeur, a true fall from grace, or at least a fall from power through the very trickery that had brought him to power. It was no small achievement of his to reach out to China and to implement much of Johnson's Great Society. But this kind of accomplishment under a flawed leader cannot happen under George Bush. As Gertrude Stein famously said of California, "there is no there there."
(Actually, I think it was just Oakland she was referring to, not ALL of CA)
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