The White House Christmas Card: Laura Doing A Little Projection?

i see the washington memorial.
i see the jefferson memorial.
where’s the lincoln memorial?

Let your light so shine before men
Let your light so shine…
So that they might know some kindness again –
We all need help to feel fine -
Let’s have some wine!

I find this image really compositionally challenged. All the weight seems to be in the upper right hand corner with the ornate top of the column. Try as I might, I just can’t get my eye to move around the image much before being rammed back up to the top right. It is weird, washed out and not a great looking card. Will be interesting to see what the Obamas do on these occasions.
And a Bible verse on the inside? Seems inappropriate for the official card.

The wreath reminds me less of an Xmas wreath and more of a funeral wreath. Well, I guess I can’t tell if it’s actually a wreath or just a ribbon. Anyway, I’m ready to bury the corpse, so let’s just get it over with.

The mood is funereal. Not a living soul left, just a blood-red wreath in remembrance of the fallen. An Egyptian phallus, a Greek phallus – petrified hard-ons from great empires frame a frozen landscape … what a bleak, horrible image. And the verse – Dubya’s “good works” shine a light as crepuscular as the image.
The fact that she *chose* this image is the scariest thing about it. There’s no warmth in Laura Bush’s White House. Everyone’s gone.

Any indication of what the source of the original is? Or its medium?

No wonder the Laura has issues (beyond blind incompetence) if that’s the view from her window. The masonic penis of George Bush seems to look down its nose (glans?) at her, as if to acknowledge that they both know her eunuch husband is unworthy of both his name and his office, while Thomas Jefferson looks on in agreement.

This image has a “view from the window” quality, which seems to be Laura’s unsubtle way of telling us that, 1. They still occupy the White House, and 2. They have their own perspective that people on the outside can’t ever understand. The phallic symbols of legacy are a whole other story. And I thought Christmas cards were sent to wish people a Merry Christmas!

Paulo:

Hallmark Designs 2008 Presidential Holiday Card

I suspect it’s difficult to develop a fuller sense of self at this point in one’s life, but you have to wonder how long George Bush’s pathetic inferiority has inflicted narcissistic injury on Laura. She must be tired. I always had a sense that what Barbara Bush said scornfully, Laura Bush only whispered to herself.

first corinthians seasoned greet

Whoops, I mean George Washington.

Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock’d them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley

The image has a dreamy quality… soft edges, soft colors, soft glow of sunset. Something like the soft-focus lens or diffusion filter photographers/cameramen use when they want to soften contrast and detail and eliminate blemishes…in other words, when they want to amend reality.

According to the Hallmark press release: “The card image is an exclusive design of a view from the Truman Balcony of the White House.” HST is another one of W’s heroes whose worth was not firmly established until well after his presidency ended.
Couple of thoughts: the garland along the railing seems to establish a “W” motif as well.
The view is south, which is where most think W’s presidential reputation is headed, well beyond the Jefferson Memorial, ending up within walking distance of the Antarctic pole, the bottom of the world.
Elton John’s “Sun going down on me:”
“Dont let the sun go down on me
Although I search myself, its always someone else I see, yeah
Id just allow a fragment of your life to wander free baby, oh
Cause losing everything is like the sun going down on me.”
An appropriate epitaph, I believe. (If you want more, look up the lyrics, many of which also apply to 43’s presidency.)

I’ve always thought it ironic that W identifies so strongly with the “other” George. There were TWO other Georges, after all, including W’s own “Poppy.” (Which also makes the current guy “George III”) W really is a poster child for all of the insecurities, insanities, inferiorities that one can experience. I wonder if Laura wouldn’t be happier as a spinster librarian somewhere, like the one in Garrison Keillor’s radio bits.

The hi-res from Hallmark is murkier and more somber than produced here. Its positively mournful, W receding already into history. . . . and here’s the subtext — the inversion of chronological history, with W, just out of frame on the Truman Balcony looking glumly out over his remaining days as time moves past him.. . . and there, of course, is the Washington monument, first in the chain of commanders, first also in the preeminent sense, and then in far distance, to which the eye is drawn by the low, clouded horizon, is the Jefferson Memorial, so as our eyes move outward we proceed forward in time, and from this perspective, the distance between Washington, Jefferson and W is a vast, isolated singularity.. ..

It is a very cold photo, no doubt. Usually there is a sense of warmth and light in dark times, winter. After all, isn’t Christmas supposed to be the “season of light?”
The lone ancient-sort of column on the right, the weight pressing down onto the highly decorative cap of it, is certainly in contrast to the sharply defined modern-looking monument to the left, with no way to place any weight or cap on it.
Of course, the dialog is joined by the rotunda far across the cold expanse, the “river” in the center linking them all and rising up all around them, as if to swallow them up, like the tides of Katrina?
Go away into the cold night, Mr. Bush. Hope you can bail, Laura.

The Hallmark press release provided to us, and BAG’s link to the inside of the card, shows clearly – in the largest type font, in fact – that the text below the Biblical quote, is “May your heart and home be filled with the joys of the holiday season.”
Truncating, in this case, seems to have helped create some misunderstanding of the Bush card.

“i see the washington memorial.
i see the jefferson memorial.
where’s the lincoln memorial?”
Well observed. I thought that the image was claustrophobic–the viewer is really constrained by all those marble pillars. If it had been a “landscape” orientation, it might have been a really beautiful panorama, and we might have been able to see the Lincoln Memorial, too. But that would have suggested a broadness of view that, unfortunately, President Bush does not seem to possess. Another thing: In order to get this particular perspective, wouldn’t the viewer have to have his or her back pressed against the wall? Why hasn’t the viewer stepped up to the rail to get the best view? There’s a crouching quality to this point of view.

is laura as lonely as this image suggests? there is a feeling of being remote and trapped.
begala calls the white house the best appointed federal penitentiary.

yg, (bar(e)r(e)n)inn(‘er)(heart)land(e)scape
Corinthian-Capit(a)l columns/shafts/mon(s)ument
BaBu: “Why should we hear about body bags and deaths. It’s not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?”
‘Not every man is man enough to go there’

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

i see the washington memorial.
i see the jefferson memorial.
where’s the lincoln memorial?
matt, it would be far to the right.
The major DC governmental landmarks form a sort of secular cross, with
the Capitol Building and Lincoln Memorial forming the long part,
the White House and Jefferson Memorial the shorter crosspiece, and
the Washington Monument at (near) the intersection of the two lines.

you know this is the view from the other side of the Washington Memorial which was seen across the wading pool from where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his speech. Perhaps Laura isn’t projecting her sadness or hurt ego, but her anticipation of the era that Martin Luther King, Jr. dreamt of… and spoke of on that fateful day. I actually think it is a sign heralding a change. It’s actually rather fitting. She may be sad at leaving, but she sees the MLK, Jr. forecast and is alluding to that powerful sweep across America.

This is beautiful, and it gives a since of private thought. I feel that I’m sitting on the balcony looking up at the pillar and everything else in peripheral focus. It gives an actual feeling of what it would be like to just be there, alone and not really focused on what it below because you have lived there long enough that it’s familiar.
I love it.