ABSTRACT
Why do many progressive, early twenty-first-century men and women describe themselves as being unable simply to look at images of President George W. Bush, because, well because of his oft-noted smirk? What do they – what do I – read in this expression? Smugness? Indecency? Pride? A taunt? A salvo? There is often, as well, a squint, which we suspect signifies haziness or discombobulation. This squint makes it even more difficult to decipher the smirk, with which it seems to be at odds. He cannot really be smirking about his confusion, we tell ourselves. It is inconceivable that he takes pleasure in the wages of ignorance. Is this, then, a tactical demeanor? Does it signify a well wrought hexis: a passive/aggressive squint smirk, at once disarming and dismissive? “You think I’m an idiot. I’ve thought that myself. But I’m not. And by the way, I’m still the boss.” If we cannot bear to look, it must be because the squint and the smirk are the composite sign of half a dozen years of our defeat. This post-modern male Medusa, this anamorph of Alfred E. Newman, the grinning MAD magazine mascot (“What, me worry?”), and John Wayne, cocksure and impenetrable, has not quite slain us (only thousands of others), but he has paralyzed many of us. Like Ferdinand, we find that our “nerves are in their infancy again / And have no vigor in them” (The Tempest, 1.2.485-86).1
