Mark Crispin Miller on Bush and cyberspace discourse

[Doug Millison]

"[...] What I had discovered was not flattering to Bush. Close study of his
jabberings not only reconfirms the fact of his supreme unfitness for the
presidential job (a fact that even certain of his own supporters grudgingly
conceded, prior to 9/11), but also throws into relief that bone-deep
nastiness which all the spin about his "likeability" could never quite
obscure. His thin skin, his short fuse, his elephantine memory for slights
(and quickness to imagine them), and--above all--his perfect lack of
empathy shine through in countless of his gaffes, and in most of his jokes.
It is (or so I argue in the book) all there in the man's own utterances,
which, in cold print, are every bit as edifying as the propaganda drive on
his behalf was mystifying.

Once I started to promote the book, I learned that Bush's psychopathic
traits exert a strong appeal to his most zealous fans, many of whom took
full advantage of the first-strike capabilities of cyber-space to let me
know their thoughts. For example, I received this e-mail in
mid-August--just after W's big speech on stem cell researchÜwith "THE BUSH
DYSLEXICON" written in the subject line:


Mark . . .
I just finished your above-named book (borrowed it, wouldn't buy it) and it
confirms my suspicion that you are a typical left-wing jerkoff !!! Did you
happen to catch Bush's speech last night. . . . he really put it up your
left-wing asshole . . . asshole!
Fred Fittin


To call that message "anti-intellectual" would be a comic understatement.
Since it's unlikely that he read the book, or knows anybody who would have
a copy, Fred could not be said so much to hate it as to have despised the
very thought of it. Any act of critical intelligence, any reasoned effort
to see through the mask of power, enrages types like Fred. Such high-strung
troops demand a God-like father-figure who will always reassure them that
they needn't think, and so they snap into attack mode any time they sense a
threat to such authority; and in this case, their fury is especially
intense, because their idol is so small a man that even they can see that
something's missing. Thus Fred cast that feeble speech of W's, which
thrilled no-one, as if it had been one of Hitler's finest--a
rafter-rattling diatribe that really put it to, or up, the assholes of the
left.
[...]"

http://www.centerforbookculture.org/context/no9/miller.html