The Media's Frontier Construction of President George W. Bush
2008; Wiley; Volume: 31; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1542-734x.2008.00672.x
ISSN1542-734X
Autores Tópico(s)Literature, Film, and Journalism Analysis
ResumoIn January 2006, President George W. Bush accepted unscreened questions from students at Kansas State University. David Sanger's New York Times article captured a unique exchange when a student asked a rather unusual and pointed question. The student, curious how the president might have responded to a currently popular cowboy movie, asked, “You're a rancher. A lot of us in Kansas are ranchers. I was just wanting to get your opinion on ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ if you've seen it yet” (Sanger). The president coyly responded, “I haven't seen it … I'd be glad to talk about ranching, but I haven't seen the movie” adding further that “I hope you go back to the ranch and farms [as a topic] is what I was about to say” (Sanger). The student's question proves significant, not because he placed the president in the awkward position of addressing homosexuality, but because the student framed the president as “a rancher,” identified him with other ranchers in Kansas, and connected the president to a movie about cowboys. The student, like other Americans and global citizens, strongly identifies President Bush with cowboys and frontier/western ideology. As Americans we easily identify our leaders through frontier and western mythology because those myths have served as fundamental archetypes in the development of this nation (see Slotkin; Regeneration Through Violence; Gunfighter Nation, Smith; Lawrence; Rushing“Rhetoric”; RushingProjecting). Kathryn Westcott for BBC News notes that American presidents and politicians have associated themselves with cowboys for nearly a century because “the cowboy represents a popular point of reference in American culture … Teddy Roosevelt was a type of rancher, as was Ronald Reagan, who borrowed heavily from his former film career” (Westcott).1 President Reagan, along with other movie stars like John Wayne, was even inducted into the National Cowboy Hall of Fame (Faragher 2). Though not quite as influential as President Reagan, President Carter framed himself as a farmer in his campaigns (Richardson 1). President Johnson also cast himself as a cowboy from Texas, giving cowboy hats as gifts to various dignitaries (Tamony). These presidents easily navigated the roles of a cowboy and a politician, implementing the cowboy when needed and then gracefully returning to a politician. President Bush's presidency, on the other hand, appears marked by the permanent role of a cowboy, with occasional glimmers of the politician. But how did a man who was born in Connecticut, attended elite institutions of learning, such as Andover, Yale, and Harvard, and whose father was accused of being a “blue-blood” persuade a nation to associate him with foundational cowboy characters like John Wayne, Wyatt Earp, and Buffalo Bill? His east coast elite education would seem to disqualify him from ever achieving the working class role of the heroic cowboy. How did a businessman who failed in the oil industry and who managed a baseball team, ironically named the Texas Rangers, become associated with mythical figures? This paper resolves these questions by exposing how President Bush relies more heavily on the media rather than his formal speeches to perpetuate the image of a western cowboy and a new global frontier. In 1890 the United States Census officially marked the closing of the frontier, declaring “the unsettled area has been so broken into isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line” (Turner 1). Frederick Jackson Turner used this declaration by the US Census Bureau to urge scholars to begin examining the historical significance of the frontier, which he describes as the “meeting point between savagery and civilization” (Turner 3). In the liminal position between savagery and civilization Turner noted that America began to formulate its own identity by “stead[ily] move[ing] away from the influence of Europe,” which first brought explorers and pioneers to America, and moving towards “a steady growth of independence on American lines … to study this advance [of the frontier] … is to study the really American part of our history” (Turner 4). According to Turner the frontier was one of the most significant environments for the construction of America's newly forming identity, and Turner claims the “American intellect owes its striking characteristics” to the frontier (Turner 37). Turner believed American intellectual traits developed from frontier life and the pioneers who tamed the landscape for those who followed them. Noting that “the common sequence of frontier types (fur trader, cattle-raising pioneer, small primitive farmer, and the farmer) … succeeded rapidly and intermingled,” he theorized that the frontiersman endured the greatest hardships and prepared the way for other settlers (Turner 44). Turner recognized the role of the cattle-raising pioneer, and from the rugged character of the pioneer developed the famous image of the cowboy. Turner attributed American characteristics such as coarseness, strength, acuteness, individualism, mastery of material things, and exuberance for freedom to fur traders and frontiersmen, but these traits are often regularly attributed to the cowboy (37). Henry Nash Smith'sVirgin Land, with the benefit of more than fifty years of hindsight, notes the conflation of the frontiersman and the cowboy in popular dime novels of the late 1800s. In dime novels cowboys were depicted wearing frontiersman-style clothing such as “leggings and hunting coats” as well as “the broad sombreros of Mexican culture” (Smith 110). The dime novels began constructing the cowboy as a mythic figure by removing any association with cattle, and the cowboy transitioned from his “bad reputation” with the public as a character who “commit[ed] acts of lawlessness and brutality” to the more accepted and noble hero who is “true as steel, honest as [he] can be,” even though “the settling of a difficulty is an appeal to revolver or knife … [cowboys] are not as black as we are painted” (Smith 110–11). Nash suggests the dime novels recast the cowboy in the role of the frontiersman because he soon had “nothing to do with cattle,” and his professional duty became fighting “Indians, Mexicans, and outlaws” (Smith 111). By removing the cowboy from his historical context and conflating him with traits that originally were not associated with him, cowboy mythology began to develop. Turner's frontiersmen, who were celebrated and mythologized through characters like Leatherstocking, Daniel Boone, and Buffalo Bill, were replaced by the cowboy. According to Smith, the transition from frontiersman to cowboy was “little more than an effort to achieve an air of contemporaneity,” but by replacing already mythologized frontier figures with the cowboy, authors immediately began mythologizing the cowboy and establishing a place for him in the American consciousness (Smith 111). The mythic figure of the cowboy not only became a replacement for the frontiersman and the values he embodied during the late 1800s, but Richard Slotkin also notes that through “the media of modern mass culture, especially movies and television,” the cowboy as the embodiment of the frontier has made “the Western at least as significant an element in twentieth-century popular culture as it was in the days of Fenimore Cooper, ‘Deadwood Dick,’ and Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show” (Slotkin, Gunfighter 16). According to Slotkin, the cowboy as a substituting figure for frontier mythical figures and with the help of media technology may have surpassed his frontier kinsmen in popularity. The cowboy is simply part of “a large pattern of [a] persistent myth,” and his figure represents “historical narratives … preserved in the forms of narratives and through periodic retellings those narrative becomes traditionalized … until they are reduced to a set of powerfully evocative and resonant ‘icons’… in which history becomes a cliché.” (Slotkin, Gunfighter 16). The iconic cowboy serves as a compressed image representing an amalgam of historical and narrative forces. His mythic figure is a “deeply encoded set of metaphors” that reflects “all of the ‘lessons’ we learned from our history, and all the essential elements of our world view,” and “exists for us as a set of keywords which refer to our traditions … and transmits “coded message[s] from the culture as a whole to its individual members” (Slotkin, Gunfighter 16). As the embodiment of American myths the cowboy is a powerful figure whose foundation stretches from America's first explorers and frontiersmen to twenty-first century popular culture and politics. He is a vital figure to American history and the cultural values Americans look to develop. John Lawrence and Robert Jewett's The Myth of the American Superhero casts the cowboy as a mythic figure who represents an American superhero, and the following characterization borrows heavily from their work. The cowboy's myth often takes place within a community that is regularly set on the wide open plains of the West, isolated from industrial civilization and reliable sources of safety, thus making it vulnerable to evil outside forces. The cowboy's character and actions are more akin to superhuman figures as he arrives on the narrative scene from vague origins with pure motives and extraordinary powers to save the community he has been called to rescue. As an idealistic loner, his identity remains a secret, and while revenge may be a motivating force, his noble actions, self-restraint, and overall driving sense of justice, purify the action. The cowboy patiently ignores provocation until the antagonizing agent forces the cowboy to act, and only then does the cowboy serve out the proportioned amount of justice, restoring the community by regularly destroying the threatening force. Richard Slotkin foregrounds the cowboy's superhuman “ ‘natural’ moral code” or instincts which direct him in his adventures and battles (Slotkin, Regeneration 552). In order to destroy the antagonist or restore justice, the cowboy invokes superhuman powers through blinding fists, a near impenetrable exterior, and amazing firearm accuracy. The cowboy remains calm when facing his enemies, and upon restoring justice and defeating his enemy, the cowboy often returns to the obscure origins from whence he came. As a mythic figure, the cowboy lacks any human complexity, regularly ignoring classic sources of human temptation, such as sexual offerings, alcohol, and money. Lawrence and Jewett note that the cowboy myth “forgets that every gain entails a loss, that extraordinary benefits exact requisite costs, and that injury is usually proportionate to the amount of violence employed” (Lawrence 47). American society popularly understands the cowboy to have the infallible natural authority to enact vigilante justice without serious consequences, and because the cowboy is never permanently part of the community; since he is just passing through, he offers no real leadership to a community or political understanding. His sense of moral clarity prevents any sense of discussion or diplomacy, suggesting only one way exists—his. Lawrence and Jewett rightly point out that the cowboy creates the false impression that Americans are capable of “living in a fantasy land without ambiguities to cloud moral vision, where the evil empire of enemies is readily discernible and where they can vicariously (through identification with the superhero) smite evil before it overtakes them” (Lawrence 48). As a public figure the cowboy occupies a problematic mythic position because of the values he represents and their political implications. The cowboy's defense of an innocent community, reflective of Eden, whose only fault is “its impotence in the face of the evil of others,” prevents any examination of its own values or intruding presence upon the landscape and protects it from economic or environmental problems. (Lawrence 22). The value surrounding a community's inherent innocence obviously becomes problematic in examination of the United States' foreign and domestic policy. Any problem within the Edenic community results from outside evil forces. According to Lawrence and Jewett, western settlers moving into Indian lands were not then seen as possessing or encroaching upon lands unrightfully, but rather they were deemed mythically innocent by “western novels and films depicting small communities of peaceful and industrious citizens saved from thieves, [Indians], and blackguards by courageous cowboys” (Lawrence 25). Indians were regularly cast as the evil intruders upon Edenic communities, and innocent settlers and the cowboy's six-shooter repeatedly defended civilization from their blood-thirsty desires (Lawrence 30). It is important to remember that the cowboy embodies the previous mythic treatment of frontiersmen whose myths revolved around their primary occupation—hunting. But Rushing draws attention to the fact that the cowboy rarely hunts animals, replacing animal prey with humans (RushingProjecting 101). The cowboy's pursuit of Indians is probably one of the cowboy's most problematic values as it directly represents ethnic cleansing, removing a threat by destroying a people. Lawrence and Jewett also argue that the cowboy's destruction of the Indian as a threat to civilization “conforms to mythic expectations … that civilization has subdued savagery, most Americans have little interest in the details” (Lawrence 64). The treatment of Indians may be the “the most characteristic form of denial in monomythic culture” (Lawrence 64). The cowboy represents a powerful figure symbolizing America's history. Any depiction of the cowboy elicits the power and force of American history, but the cowboy's mythic status ignores any cultural values that might be undesirable or anti-democratic. Politicians who use the cowboy figure as a representative symbol or even who personally identify with the image invoke the myth without addressing its problematic areas. Americans regularly fall into the myth's seductive nature but miss why the cowboy would make a poor politician. His loner nature prevents him from working well with others. His moral righteousness makes him believe he is infallible, and thus above the law—an unstoppable force even when the rest of the community disagrees with him. His tendency towards violence bypasses diplomacy. In general the cowboy is an all powerful being who forces others to submit to his view of justice or be destroyed, a clear representative symbol of imperialism and an inappropriate image to present to democratic citizens. But American citizens only recognize the admirable traits of the cowboy without understanding the political implications. President Bush essentially ran his presidential campaign on a western platform and his supporters wore cowboy hats emblazoned with “Bush” to further link his character to the famous mythic cowboy (Grady).2 The domestic press paid minor attention to President Bush's tactics, perhaps because Americans regularly encounter western images, and because we have witnessed other politicians attempting to embody a similar image. While characterizations of George W. Bush as a mythic cowboy in domestic coverage was scant, the domestic press, such as Sandy Grady's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article, described fans as the “whooping faithful [who] were on their feet waving their Bush cowboy hats and Bush placards and American flags” (Grady). The foreign press also gave President Bush's cowboy antics little attention but they did manage to publish a few articles, Andrew Marshall's article in The Independent discusses how President Bush might serve as “the cowboy who's gonna round them (Congress) up.” Before the presidential election in 2000, both the foreign and domestic press only briefly mentioned President Bush's relationship to cowboy mythology, and these reports often only focused on the cowboy's garb, belt buckles, omni-present cowboy boots and, of course, the infamous cowboy hat (Lamming). However, after the election both foreign and domestic media outlets slowly began to articulate the president's mythic cowboy presence and frame his administration around their understanding of frontier mythology.3 The domestic press applauded a cowboy in the White House, occasionally questioning his sense of western wear. Theodore Gatchel reinforced this view when writing that “many Americans do not regard the term ‘cowboy’ as pejorative,” rather they feel a sense of pride in an image that shaped America (Gatchel). The image of a cowboy as a president changed the government's tone and suggested the administration would adhere to a “straight shooter standard,” significantly different from Clinton's approach (Gatchel). Americans embraced European criticisms of President Bush as a cowboy by responding “I sure hope you're right” (Gatchel). As the domestic press seemed to support President Bush's cowboy construction, the foreign press braced Europe for what they believed to be a shocking transition from President Clinton to President Bush. Newspapers began printing glossaries full of the Texan lingo audiences should be expecting from President Bush (Langton). Michael Morrison for The Washington Times rightly articulated that Europe and Britain's unwillingness to accept President Bush was related to their view of the American cowboy figure as “a reckless dangerous American” (Morrison). Neal Gabler for Salon.com noted that labeling President Bush a cowboy has been “one of the most persistent criticisms that Europeans, especially the French, leveled at President Bush” (Gabler 1). The American historical figure of the cowboy suggests to Europeans “anti-intellectualism that Europeans abhor in Americans,” a figure who is “cocksure, reckless, always ready to draw his gun and shoot” before asking questions (Gabler 1–2). But more importantly, Ian Lamming echoed how Europe questioned the political style of a cowboy “as he swaggers down from his Texas ranch … George W. Bush looks every bit the all American boy. Sporting dusty denim jeans, and a silver buckled belt, he won't be the first cowboy to inhabit the Oval Office … But what he doesn't look is an international statesman. Because he isn't” (Lamming). Between President Bush's election and September 11, 2001, Europe's view of President Bush transitioned from an unfavorable cowboy to that of a more acceptable statesman, partly due to the administration's cognizance of the European view of cowboy imagery. Jane Perlez and Frank Bruni noted the administration recognized “the common European perception [of President Bush] is of a shallow, arrogant, gun-loving, abortionhating, Christian fundamentalist Texan buffoon …‘They read all the press about the hard-line unilateralist. They really believe this stuff about cowboys. We need to get it all on a higher plane’ ” (Perlez). Minor changes to the presidential wardrobe from boots, jeans, and cowboy hats to tailored suits may have helped generate a new statesman's image. Robin Givhan made an important observation of President Bush when she noted that his banishment of jeans from the Oval Office “was a curious mandate coming from a new commander in chief, who on the campaign trail, was known for his dungarees, cowboy boots and down home plain talking rhetoric. But as the new president, he announced his belief in the power of the business suit” (Givhan). As the Administration started to recast its persona from a cowboy in the presidential elections to that of a diplomat, European support for President Bush began growing. A headline by Bill Sammon for The Washington Times in London reads, “Old world warms to Bush; early waves of criticism ebb across continent” (Sammon). Europe's view of “the president as an ignorant cowboy, no longer openly ridicules him now that he has one successful European trip under his belt” (Sammons). The foreign press “who had characterized Mr. Bush as sailing into a ‘storm of controversy’… now are sounding more measured tones” (Sammons). The foreign press not only picked up on President Bush's new statesman personae, but the domestic press also lauded President Bush for balancing the roles of cowboy and statesman, particularly in regards to the American spy plane that crashed into a Chinese fighter. Newsweek responded by claiming the American people should “give credit where credit is due: This freshman, a coaster who knew next to nothing about China and who acted as a cowboy in the first day or two of the spy plane crisis quickly mastered a new role and a new brief, and he has just aced his very first graduate-level exam in foreign policy crisis management” (“Monitor”). The international incident was President Bush's first test in foreign policy, and while not everyone agreed with the president's decision The Arizona Republic noted that “in the end, resolution came with a letter filled with compromise language, [and] diplomatic-speak” rather than the one sided cowboy language for which the President Bush has often been criticized (“Monitor”). President Bush's image as a statesman became so entrenched in the foreign press that the most recent articles about President Bush just days before September 11, mentioned his meeting with President Vicente Fox, and reporters' tour of Bush's ranch in Crawford, without any statement comparing the president to cowboys. Even more striking are two articles from French newspapers, which make no disparaging comments about cowboys, but mention only Fox and Bush's shared affinity for “cowboy boots” and the “white Cowboy hat,” that President Bush wore while speaking with reporters (Knox; “Bush shows off Texas Ranch”). The domestic press, though not nearly as opposed to President Bush's characterization of a cowboy, had similar benign comments, describing Bush discussion with reporters and suggesting he should not be operating a chainsaw in cowboy garb (“Topics of the Time”). The domestic press also covered the Farm Aid bill President Bush signed in his “Wrangler jeans and cowboy boots … with 50 farmers and their families sitting on haystacks behind him” (Blomquist). Both the domestic and foreign presses successfully transformed President Bush from the mythical cowboy into the acceptable role of a statesman. The president did very little to adjust his public image other than sartorial changes, but the media articulated the president's transition as they began to focus more prominently on his role as a statesman. As President Bush learned to recast his role from cowboy to statesman, his popularity in the United States began waning, perhaps because he may not have related to the role of a statesman the way he thrived in the role of a cowboy. Jon Roper notes that President Bush “had doubtful intellectual abilities, a nodding acquaintance with the English language, and a semi-detached attitude to international relations, indeed the whole idea of governance”; a cowboy disinterested in politics sounds more common than one intimately involved in government (Roper 133). Roper also points out that on September 10, President Bush's “public approval ratings were at their lowest levels since his inauguration nine months earlier. Majority opinion was against him on a range of policy issues. It seemed he might be like John Quincy Adams, who emulated his father in becoming a one-term president” (Roper 133). President Bush's political situation may have taken a very different route had it not been for the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001; he was “struggling with an almost wholly united and hostile opposition party in Congress and a public increasingly unmoved by his efforts. 9/11 changed at least the second of the two” as well as the historical path his presidency would take (Renshon 590). President Bush's political maturation has been well documented by journalists and historians through works such as Bob Woodward'sBush at War, Frank Bruni'sAmbling into History, and Jon Kraus's Transformed by Crisis. But Stanley Renshon's article “Presidential Address George W. Bush's Cowboy Politics” examines how President Bush underwent a significant psychological change in reaction to the events on September 11 and how these changes and maturations reflect policies related to frontier mythology. Renshon argues that “before 9/11 Mr. Bush had many domestic policy ambitions and several foreign ones. After 9/11 all those competing priorities were reframed through a policy lens of singular focus: ridding the world, not more specifically the United States, of the scourge of catastrophic terrorism” (Renshon 590). The September 11 attacks caused the president to abandon his attempt at creating the personae of a statesman and revert to his seemingly more comfortable and successful role of a cowboy. Richard Slotkin notes that “the hero of a modern mass-culture myth is offered as the embodiment of certain natural and historical principles or forces, as an idealized representation of his people's characteristic traits, and as a model for emulation” (Slotkin, Gunfighter 498). President Bush's successful presidential campaign was based on the “embodiment of certain natural and historic forces” by presenting a cowboy style of both visual and verbal rhetoric. Living most of his life in Texas would also have given him a certain familiarity with the cowboy mystique and it seems only natural that he dismiss the failed construction of a statesman and revert to the role he previously identified with—the role of a cowboy. David Frum'sThe Right Man claims that “Bush's oratory in the ten days after the terrorist attacks transformed his leadership,” but ironically Frum makes no mention of the president's speech on September 17, 2001, a speech filled with frontier language in which President Bush described a war and an image that would serve to forever frame his presidency. During this speech President Bush described the cowboy tactics he would use to defeat the enemy and the image he remembered as a child of a Wild West wanted poster that read “Wanted: Dead or Alive.” Frum was right to claim the importance of the president's rhetoric in the first ten days after the attack, but he failed to trace the intricate evolution of the president's language, or note the growing use of frontier rhetoric in the president's speeches. Frank Bruni noted the president's first public statement on September 11, 2001, after learning of the attacks, was unscripted and created in fifteen minutes by “scribbling some words with a black-felt tip on a yellow pad” in which “he vowed to ‘hunt down and find those folks’ who did this” (Bruni 2). In President Bush's first words uttered to the press, he already had developed the frontier language to frame the attackers as “folks” and incorporated the central idea of a “hunt” to suggest western notions of justice and retribution. While President Bush's language may have briefly adopted a western style, he recognized a larger more significant change, noting, “my vision shifted dramatically after September 11th because I realize[d] the stakes. I realize[d] the world ha[d] changed. My most important obligation is to protect the American people from further harm” (Renshon 591).4 Protection of the American people was and is a primary concern for President Bush. He has stated that his feelings remain the same since September 11, “America is under attack and they will pay” (Renshon 591).5 Clearly the idea of frontier justice and retribution is central to the President's Bush's frontier ideology. September 11 reinvigorated President Bush's connection to cowboy mythology and as the cowboy rises to his mythical status through conflict, so too did President Bush rise to the conflict. Renshon notes that “unlike his father, George W. obviously doesn't avoid conflict;” in fact, according to Senator Schumer, President Bush “is staking his entire presidency on … whether he can succeed in his goal of wiping out terrorism” (Renshon 589; Bruni 248). While the above paragraph uses a few of President Bush's significant quotes, most were not addressed to the American public at large and thus had little impact on the public. However, President Bush's most famous “frontier” speech permanently cemented his role of a cowboy and undermined any possible role he might have been able to achieve as a statesman. The speech echoed from America's historical consciousness and served to galvanize a nation, but as his speech united America through his cowboy mythology, he destroyed any political progress he had previously generated. The president's most often quoted frontier language derives from a speech delivered on September 17, 2001, titled “Guard and Reserves ‘Define Spirit of America’ ” (Bush, “Guard”). The speech's primary function was to “call[ ] up as many as 35,000” troops from “the Ready Reserve units of the Armed Forces and the Coast Guard to active duty” and was intended for an American audience to “thank the employers who understand that there is more to corporate life than just profit and loses” (Bush “Guard”). This speech was crucial for President Bush because up until September 17 his rhetoric now had been called “squishy” and the American public had not been pleased by his initial remarks about September 11. David Frum notes that President Bush's speeches lacked the passion of previous presidential war speeches and in turn he had disappointed the country with his lack-luster response (Frum 128). However, President Bush's rhetoric in this speech “reflects mounting anger among the public” and mirrors the president's transition from “shock turned to anger … Bush realized he needed to cast the conflict in bigger terms” (Fournier). President Bush realized “the feeling of safety is gone” and his speech sought to reassure Americans of the country's safety (Fitzgerald). President Bush's speech is broken into two portions: a formal proclamation that activates 35,000 troops, and a question and answer with t
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