Your Turn: Man of the Season

A comment on his Iraq policy? He looks lost in the desert.
THere’s also his halmark squinty eyes. It’s the look he makes when he’s “thinking,” though I can’t help to interpret in terms of the doubt over the admin’s grasp of reality.

Funny, I saw this cover earlier today and thought you might feature it on BAG.
I see two images. One is of a man who’s somewhere he doesn’t belong (at least not anymore). That is, the photo of W looks like he’s superimposed on top of an image of a desert, since the colour of the foreground is more pronounced than the colour of the background. The second image is of a man not so much with an incoherent polcy as Daniel suggests, but one where he is surrounded by policymakers that present him with a very limited set of choices, as when people think of deserts, I would say they don’t think of them as areas of fertile vegitation.

He must be in Texas, because he’s got that hulking, swaggering, faux-masculine posture he always appropriates when he’s at his fake ranch in Crawford (contrast to the downright sissified way he minces about the Oval Office).
Some repressed Southern Baptist housewife would probably think he looks sexy as hell in this photo (blech), if Southern Baptist housewives subscribed to The Economist.
Do the British or other non-Americans get the whole John Wayne cowboy pose here, or to their eyes does he merely look like a dumb thug hooligan?

the pen is a real good point, even aside from that it looks a little photoshopped. Other people mentioned the brightness/darkness divide on the President vs. the desert, notice also the difference in clarity/quality: Bush is in sharp detail; you can see every vein and muscle in his arm. Now look at the desert, it’s blurry and grainy. I know this /could/ be a real picture, but it looks like an edit to me.
If it is an edit, that makes every detail more important (eg the pen)…maybe the watch represents that he’s running out of time? (that would go with the eyes: squinting to see the unclear, blurry, sandy future)
I also notice that the figure seems slightly out of proportion to the landscape; there’s about as much sky as there is ground (about 1cm more ground on my monitor), creating an illusion of seeing “eye-to-eye” with the President, yet the sky portion is taken up with the Economist’s title and the headline, giving an illusion of “looking up” to Bush at the same time.

What I see is a vulnerable cowboy. No hat. No horse. No dust on his clothes. No six-shooters at his sides although his hands seem ready to grab them. He appears to be trying to figure out what’s off in the distance but he’s unprotected from behind. If this picture is somehow representative of how Bush can expect to be treated by the press, it may be that the corner has been turned and it’s High Noon at the Okay Corral.

Griffin –
I know at least a few Southern Baptist women who are neither housewives nor repressed. They defy your stereotype and find George W. Bush the antithesis of sexy.
That said, I am struck by his rather hunched posture. Is he braced for a blow?

i find the distance disconcerting. the photographer tried, i believe, to create a sense of space or distance between the viewer and the shrub. and then even more space behind him.
space. the final frontier, frontier man, the belt looks like it would be better suited for a little kids cowboy outfit. a “real” cowboy would have a simple buckle or a rodeo “big” buckle. shrubs buckle seems to only be missing the red childrens cowboy hat. and broomstick pony.

I am so glad that I stumbled onto this site. The discussions and insite is most informative. I guess that a picture really is “…worth a thousand verbs!”

He looks hunched and in pain, like my Dad did when he had disc problems in his back. The shirt is just like my Dad’s too – definitely too dorky for cowboy chic. I agree with the “old and confused” assesment. And is that Iraq in the background??!?

Presidents are never, never alone. They are always surrounded by bodyguards and Marines and politicians and secretaries and babies suitable for kissing.
So where is everyone here? To me, this picture says the president has become weak, so the tribe has led him out into the desert and left him there to starve.

Forgot to mention: That ornery-varmint-look on his face could be misconstrued. The guy risks looking as dumb as a post.

I’m curious as to how this image was made. Indeed it does look as though Bush was super-imposed onto the desert image.

That’s not determinitive. I often get that effect in my photos, particularly if the focus is perfect on the subject and the background is distant. As for

Bush is in sharp detail; you can see every vein and muscle in his arm. Now look at the desert, it’s blurry and grainy.

That’s called depth of field and the grainy, unfocused background effect is referred to as bokeh. That’s how focus works on a camera. I could easily take a picture just like this with my camera.
Regarding satorial matters and this quote:

Nice shirt, pants, and a massively prominant belt buckle.

Actually, for Texas, that’s a small belt buckle. These are big belt buckles. And yes, I personally know Texans who wear buckles like that.

What I see is a vulnerable cowboy.
I agree. He also looks defensive, arms puffed out to seem bigger, but the sun is beatting down and there is no one on his side.
We (the people looking at this image) are against him and he has no allies.

Attempting to answer Griffin’s question about how us Brits see this: The ‘John Wayne cowboy pose’ aspect of the image didn’t strike me at all until you asked if we saw it that way.
My immediate reaction was how simian the pose looked, and how like his Steve Bell caricature he looked.
Steve Bell is the cartoonist for the Guardian newspaper in the UK, who always draws GWB as a monkey, see
http://www.guardian.co.uk/cartoons/stevebell/0,7371,1517810,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/cartoons/stevebell/0,7371,1501724,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/cartoons/stevebell/0,7371,1404796,00.html
etc etc (he’s been drawing him in this manner for many years now).

I don’t think I’m saying much that hasn’t already been said, but here it goes: I think that the separation between Bush and his surroundings is very telling of his foreign policy as well as his outlook on reality. The colors are very striking as well. The drab background and the bright blues and deep blacks of the foreground. It reminds me of groundhog’s day. If George sees his shadow that means we’ll have six more years of Iraqi winters. Actually, a ground hog, who pops up once a year to see what’s going on, is another apt analogy for the Bush foreign policy machine. And this isn’t really a dissection of the picture per se, but the body language conveyed in this photo is VERY hostile. The arms out, the furrowed brow, the off-kilter stance all say, “What are whining about now?” It’s all very parental…and yet, very petulant at the same time.

George’s long hot
belt buckle
This cover, to me, promotes a theme between fallacy and phallus. The belt buckle is not the only phallus in the image.

More about the pose:
I’m a native midwesterner myself, and I went to high school in the Nebraska ranch country that was once at the end of the Chisolm trail, where people decorate their homes with cattle skulls and old wagon wheels and drive expensively customized pickups to church on Sunday instead of Cadillacs.
Bush’s pose in that photo is a perfect caricature of the sort of macho strut assumed by redneck-ish arrogant high school jocks feigning machismo in cowboy country. The kids who ask “‘Sup?” of each other with a jerk-nod of the head. I know that swagger as I live and breathe.
I want to reiterate how strange it is that we only see him strutting around like that when he’s actually on his “ranch” in Texas.
I don’t know about Texas, but from where I’m from a man might wear one of those big oval rodeo belt buckles, but only a woman could get away with wearing a frilly belt like Bush is sporting in that photo. A man would catch a lot of crap or get pegged as a sissy for wearing a belt like that. Seriously.
The shirt looks like someting a junior high school vice principal would wear on his day off.

I can see a thought bubble oozing from his head…
“It’s HARD work!”
.

The pose is absolutely simian – arms thrust out, head thrust forward.
He must think of it as weightlifter or a gunfighter pose, but it comes off as awkward and wrong. Are his hands dirty? Has he burned them on something hot?
He also looks so much older today that in 200 – the – the brown skin, the gray hair. His trademark squint looks incredibly uncomfortable. A failure of vision, to be sure.
Is Bush himself a mirage?

Swaggering like you’re in pain definitely is part of the Southwestern mystique. You’re supposed to look like you’ve been injured on the ranch or injured on the football field. Movements slow and stiff, a little gimpy, with arms held out to the side as though you have a bad sunburn on your sides.
Squinting, too, fits in with the pained look.
It’s all part of the tough guy package, the image of a man who’s sporting plenty of hurt but keeps on going.
It constrasts strongly with the tough urban white man image, which is generally an injury-free look.

Like a gunslinger with no guns.

A cowboy who is never seen on a horse.

Let’s get back to what the Economist and the photographer were trying to convey. This image bespeaks isolation, defensive body language, and discomfort. Our political and emotional opinions about GW and his administration fill in the blanks for how we interpret these messages. As a news source that occasionally strives to be objective (with the tacit understanding that capitalism and market economies are the undisputed purest forms of civilization) the Economist has admirably supplied fuel to Bush supporters and detractors – no mean feat!
Last but not least, focus on GW’s head and shoulders – he’s looking out, straining his neck a little to peer further. This seems to indicate that what he seeks is a little beyond his reach. If one were to make a prediction on where GW goes from this image, it would appear he would walk– perhaps swagger — toward the camera lens to get a better view… in any case, he’s not staying put! What is he reaching for? Well, improbable as they are in this dusty scene, bananas do come to mind…

Are we to suppose George here is the embodiment of that drifter loser Ben Quick? Or Paul Newman, who was the star of that movie?
I think you’re supposed to go behind the movie to the book upon which it was based — The Hamlet. There is no heroic, good-looking, charismatic “Ben Quick” character in the book. There is, however, the loathesome drifter Flem Snopes, who moves in on the Varner fortune by marrying Will Varner’s fecund daughter Eula, after she becomes pregnant by another man. Flem is the embodiment of everything Faulkner hated about the new generation that arose in the South after the War, so much so that he followed (with increasing despair) the successes of Flem and his loathesome relatives through two more novels — The Town and The Mansion. Here, let Cleanth Brooks explain “Snopesism”:
“The insidious horror of Snopesism is its lack of any kind of integrity–its pliability, its parasitic vitality as of some low-grade, thoroughly stubborn organism–and its almost selfless ability to keep up pressure as if it were a kind of elemental force. These are Flem’s special qualities. The difficulty of fighting Flem and Snopesism in general is that it is like fighting a kind of gangrene or some sort of loathsome mold. The quality of honor–even a mean and rancorous ‘honor’–would immediately make it vulnerable….It is because he lacks honor that Flem is really invulnerable….It will therefore be only the madman, the outlaw, or the passionate man who can strike him down….Flem is a kind of monster who has betrayed everyone, first in his lust for pure money-power, and later in what Faulkner regards as a more loathsome lust, a desire for respectability.”
Sound like anyone we know? Forget “Fredo.” Think “Flem.” Or maybe “Ike” (perhaps a more fitting image, when one remembers Laura’s “joke” about George’s pleasuring of a large animal and compares it to Ike’s romance with Houston’s cow).

About the shirt & pen combo:
Does it remind anyone else of how people dressed in the ’50s? It could signify a sense of stability & normalcy. Of course, like the superficial normalcy of the ’50s, any sense of comfort the shirt signfies is false. Our economy, Iraq, world politics, etc.
Just like everything else with this president.

Why george all of the sudden? I thought his name was W, Mr. Long n Hot. I imagine the photographer wrangling him with “yeah thats it, squint n look worried” .

A lost man, in a lost world.

I’ll take him as swaggering, and like his out of focus stare pulling him to something in the viewers plain.
But I’ll add something about the bar of small print that overlaps his hands and crotch.
The hands and phallus are the archetypal tools of power for the man. Man crafts his world with his hands. He creates life with his penis. Both are bound and restrained by white text. The shadow box that contains the text emphasizes the text bars appearance to be a strap pinning down Bush’s hands and crotch
It’s as if he has all the swagger of a tough guy, but he doesn’t have his most important tools at his disposal; he has no creative ability. He’s all boastful talk and no realistic plan or solution. He’s all ego and no substance.

57 comments so far and not one about the obvious slim line bullet proof vest under the ubiquitous Crawford blue gingham button down. What is this man afraid of?..and why does he try to swagger so?? Is it because of his insecurity and the fact that he knows so many despise him. No matter how hard he trys, he’ll never measure up to the old man, or so he thinks.
His popularity polls at this stage in his presidency are the lowest ever of any second term President in US history
He’s all alone in this picture, and imo he’s starting to look tired. Of course he’s leaning left, as usual…and whats that in the background anyway…is it a hedgrow, maybe more looming storm clouds. It almost looks like the beginning of an enormous explosion….
Cover colors seem to look like army fatigue green/camo…more military conotations.

Isn’t his watch rather high on his arm? Obviously a psychopath.

I was struck by the almost total absence of vegetation, leaving him without the only task he has shown any competence at:
“Whut am I supposed ta do now? I cleared all the brush and I still got three years left ta go!”

I’ve been thinking about the exact location of the background. Running back through the comments, the geographic references range from northeast or Californa beaches, to arid Texas to a generic desert. Of course, a number of comments link the setting to the Iraq policy – but I’m wondering if The Economist wasn’t intending to literally depict Bush lost in Iraq.

It looks like the beach and dunes on Martha’s Vineyard. Does Kennebunkport have a beach?
I’ve been to the neighborhood of his pig farm/ranch and I can’t imagine where you’d find sand and a backdrop like that around Waco, but if it truly is on the “ranch”, the place is even more desolate and barren than I thought.
It could be Galveston, but the sand’s too white, there are no plastic bottles and rotting seaweed, and I don’t see any dead crabs or chunks of oil tar.

Did anyone remember that the Chimp is afraid of horses? What kinda ‘Cowboy’ is afraid of horses? Oh well, it fits with the rest of his faux image, fake ranch and all.
He looks like a damned monkey playing dress-up. How horrible he ’speaks’ for the US…
John M.

I came in here late, but my very first impression was the pouty lower lip and his thrust-forward head mannerism, and secondly his posture. Those that can’t stand Bush certainly have sources for ‘chimp’, and this is why.
He thrusts his head forward sometimes when making a point, and he did it often during the 2004 debates – his words don’t have enough force so something else has to be done.
Lastly, he needs a tailor. I think the Brits will notice that sort of thing, as they will likely notice the aggressive posture.
D

A cowboy; without his hat.
A cowboy; without his horse
A cowboy without his gun
and most important
A cowboy without his ‘pard
(partner)
In a hot desert, alone-with only his wits.
No hope for the Man from Connecticut.

Okay, better late than never. The menacing buffoon has been leering at me from the coffee table for a while, and finally it hit me.
This is the Little Big Man scene in which Dustin Hoffman was standing in front of the mirror practicing his draw and squinting with his “snake eyes”.
Bush is The Sasparillo Kid.