ABSTRACT
President Bush definitively introduced the content of the new storyline to the United Nations and the world on 12 September 2002. In this address he positioned the new enemy target, Saddam Hussein, with words that would be repeated in address after address until the invasion itself began. Use of repetition, especially from a position of authority, eventually creates accepted categories of reality, which then shape perceptions, attitudes and behavior. What may have seemed unimaginable only a year before, unilaterally invading a sovereign nation that did not attack us and whose threat to us was tenuous at best, transforms into the reality from which the nation operates. Shotter (1993) reminds us that language is an essential social process that shapes our categories of reality. President Bush constituted a new understanding of reality through continuous talk that framed characters and storylines in repetitive speech acts, creating the context from which a new reality could logically emerge. Thus, what was once unimaginable morphed almost imperceptibly into the nation’s (and the world’s) new reality.
