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Summary: One of the most important books of this age.
Review: Not only does Mark Crispin Miller's book expose the political facade of G.W. Bush, it goes deeper into the political culture that allows these things to happen. He analyzes how language is twisted, television soundbytes and political slogans rule our thoughts, and how Bush's stupidity is a clever facade, that masks a political genius that would give Machiavelli chills.
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Summary: Precisely what Miller meant.......
Review: The snide reaction of customer kathy82 in this review column is precisely the kind of anti-intellectualism to which Miller refers as being largely responsible, in the general population, for overlooking Dubya's tremendous shortcomings as a potential president, much less a capable statesman, and electing him based on the propaganda engine of image versus substance. In my view, Americans today, being so disenchanted with government in its many failures, are confusing rich elitism with intellectualism, and are rejecting both. We are drifting into a nether world of sound bites, of gossip rags, cheap thrills, flea markets, and soap opera life, which is sapping our national strength and true heritage. This is not happening by chance, but by careful manipulation. A distracted public is a pliable one and a submissive one, however much we may believe otherwise. In my school years, one was proud of achievement, good grades and promise. This is scorned now in large part among school peers and even parents. Such glee and support for mindlessness, such disdain for intelligence and critical thinking, is precisely the direction in which we are being corralled. Such books as Miller's remind us that we have indeed come a long way.... down. And that needs to change.
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Summary: Eat your hearts out, o ye glib and effete...
Review: Funny how someone so "dumb" manages to run rings around the Ivy League princelings, isn't it? And to think your own deathless prose will never see the light of day, while Bush's occasional stumbles will reign immortal. Aw, ain't it just a darn shame...
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Summary: A grammatical comedy (with a deeper message)........
Review: Early on in The Bush Dyslexicon, it is made apparent to readers that although George Bush is the featured target of choice for scrutiny, he certainly is not the first president we've had that suffers from poor speaking abilities or other illiteracy problems. It just so happens that George Bush's afflictions are more readily noticeable and profound than those of our past leaders.The Bush Dyslexicon is not only a collection of Bush's grammatical disasters, it is also a biography of sorts revealing his ascent to the White House which is quite profound, or depressing, depending on your point of view. Being a product of Yale University, you would expect Bush to be a highly educated and proficient leader under normal circumstances. In reality, much information about Bush is not normal. Never rising above mediocre status as a student, far from being well read and informed, and flaunting his disdain for education in general, it is not hard to imagine how he has become immersed in his own illiterate and dyslexic world. Even more disconcerting is the fact that Bush doesn't even appear to care that he can't speak intelligibly on anything. As Mark Miller depicts in his book, when Bush does speak, you are reminded as a reader to look closely at what our president is actually saying. In delivering his messages and statements on many different subjects, it is apparent that Bush is quite comfortable being insincere, hypocritical, uncompassionate, forgetful, and just plain uncaring in a lot of ways. This doesn't say much in hopes for a better democracy and better leadership. Throughout this book, I found many of George Bush's quotes to be quite funny while other quotes could be labeled as bizarre, cruel, or downright meaningless. Somewhere along the way during your passage through this book, you begin to realize that it is not so funny anymore and you take stock of your president and your government and understand that the whole situation is in a very bad way. The Bush Dyslexicon, nevertheless, is a very well written and detailed narrative on not only George Bush, but also the sad state of our union, the divisive media machine that hurts us more than it helps us, and our democracy which is badly in need of repair. This book is highly recommended to all readers who want to know the real George Bush and what he is really about.
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Summary: Give this book to everyone you know
Review: Let me preface this review: Okay, so I'm a liberal. A rabble-rousing, loudmouthed, discontent liberal. The media is in a state of tragedy, with the corporations that own it using it as a tool to shape not only their success, but also the political and cultural climate of our country. Mark Crispin Miller, in this eloquent diatribe, is sounding the alarm on this very scenario. He is shaking us in our beds as the building burns down around us trying to get us to wake up. The most important step in taking democracy out of the media and giving it back to the people is to listen to Mr. Miller, and spread his message as if it were gospel. This book is more scholarly than light reading, but it is well-written and well-documented. Read this book with an open mind (and a bookmark--he jumps a lot), as it may not be indictful enough of Bush if you dislike him, and it may be a bit too indictful of Bush if you do. Mr. Miller has a sharp analytical mind and a very keen focus. He does not go off on tangents, he doesn't play make-believe, and he doesn't make excuses. If this book makes you want to kick your television set, then you get it. Right on, Mr. Miller! And thank you.
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Summary: not very funny
Review: I have been listening to and reading Mark Crispin Miller for a long time and my nickname for him is "the sorehead". That is because he is always talking about things that he doesn't like. And he really doesn't like George Bush. I guess I must be a sorehead, too, since I find myself agreeing with most of what he says.
This book exposes Bush for what he really is: a shrewd, calculating, ruthless politician who has trouble speaking. He has received an incredible amount of good will after the 9/11 attacks but he would have had to be a total dunce not to be able to garner that (and he has managed to squander most of that). The important part of this book for me was how the national media has been so easy on him. I have heard him over and over again on TV and wonder why none of the press pushes him to answer their questions. It's always one non-sequitor after another.
Miller also talks in an afterward about the demonization of the Clintons. I have always been curious about this. It is one thing to dislike a politician but the attacks on Clinton and Hillary were truly venomous. I never cared for Clinton myself but the right wingers absolutely hated him. Miller brings this out and how Bush exploited these feelings to effectively denigrate Gore.
This was a very good book but probably doomed to obscurity since most people just don't want to hear it.
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Summary: Not just another collection of "BUSHISMS"
Review: When I first saw this book, I thought it was just another collection of idiotic sounding, yet inane collection of misstatements by our unimpressive, unelected President. Was I ever wrong! The Bush Dyslexicon is actually an indictment of the whole American media and society's bias against intelligence. This is about the whole "Dumbing Down of America." George W. Bush is one of the main symbols of a short-sighted nation looking at the surface and nothing deeper. For everyone who thinks our President is just an affable, but harmless idiot, PLEASE read this book and find out the story beneath the surface.
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Summary: Deep pathology
Review: Miller's Bush is no Adlai Stevenson: but, Bush is no Yogi Berra, either. The Bush style is clear only when expressing anger, appealing to avarice with false promises, hiding the fact of lust, encouraging sloth and gluttony and business as usual in response to Sep 11, explaining theft as economic growth, and inciting to false national pride. At best Bush-ese simulates a demonic translation into corporatese of less meaningful parts of the Christian bible. The effect was last seen in a book called "The Boomer Bible", a hilarious summa of the intellectual limitations, lack of compassion, and false religiosity of the worst of a generation. The Boomer Bible cheerfully sums up the ignorance and self-justification of the sort of Baby Boomer who sold out, and regards his intellectual and moral universe as the only universe worth considering. A small defect of the Bush Dyslexicon is that Miller treats Bush as an individual and not as a Boomer type. Bush is a result of a decline from Prescott through through the President. Prescott's generation saw its pre-war position threatened by labor unions, people of color, and the enlarged post-war middle class that no longer listened to classical music on Sunday. The Bush *famiglia* has pulled, over time, a stunt pulled by many leading American families over the past fifty years. These families were led by absent, weak or overbearing fathers too busy at the CIA to be fathers: their scions, rather than step up to the hard work of democratic leadership, wasted Ivy League educations or dropped out. The previous lower tiers, the engineers, the middle managers, were downsized and then replaced by the declining members of the old elite...or, in Bush's case, are beguiled by phony populism into following a false good ole boy. Among themselves, the lads enforced a conformity merely masquerading as "freedom" in which anything higher than Bluto was mocked, and financial success became the only criterion of truth (a sign in the 1989 Princeton p-rade: "The Nation in Princeton's Service.") Growing up in a family where this was in progress, perhaps the current President realized that cultivated, complex or even coherent, speech (and, *a fortiori*, writing) would be a disadvantage, because of the trickery involved in the change to an invisible nomenklatura. Complex speech would be mined for negatives: coherence could be used against the writer and the speaker in a court of law or at the SEC. This phenomenon is widespread. A telling moment occured when Al Gore gave a complete and coherent account of the changes in Medicare. Bush responded with the "fuzzy math" soundbyte. Bush's pseudo populism is being exposed as I write. Over a period of about forty-five minutes on the morning of March 6 after Bush's press conference, only two callers expressed support to the CSpan phone in line for the President. Both callers were reduced to a Fundamentalist simplicity in which the ONLY comfort available was the bald fact of the President's complete mediocrity: the hope is for a general salvation unlinked to works, such as math. This Fundamentalism of the self is a zero-sum game, no longer trickle-down. Bush isn't the same old, same old: not just another Republican, not just an almagam of Richard Nixon's hatred of humanity, and Eisenhower's apparent lack of verbal skill. In the family dynamics inside the Bush clan, we see growing dysfunction. Bush's confrontations with Poppy show that neither had learned how to live together, job one of sons and fathers. Bush's daughter's behavior needs only to be compared with Chelsea's academic and romantic triumphs to show that the Bush family, absent its money, is just another declining New England clan, drowning its sorrows in booze or dry drunks. But it's one thing to smash up the car; the Bushes have smashed up the Republic and its world standing even on their own selfish terms. Aliteracy, which shades into illiteracy, may seem minor. The problem is that words as words point outside and are linked with reality. Compare this paragraph written by a former President, U. S. Grant: "It would be impossible for me to describe the feeling that overcame me at the news of these assassinations [Lincoln and Seward], most especially the assassination of the President. I knew his goodness of heart, his generosity, his yielding disposition, his desire to have everybody happy, and above all his desire to see all the people of the United States enter again upon the full privileges of citizenship with equality above all." Compare George Bush's theocratic, rambling and repetitious words after September 11... which, as Miller shows, continually leave mourning and return to Bush's favorite topic of a "revenge" illegal under international law and with an illdefined target that today is Saddam Hussein. However, Bush's speech of 9-14-2001 does pass corporate tests, such as lack of "verbosity" where "verbosity" means "density of ideas" and not of words (Bush's repetitions are not this "verbosity.") Grant FAILS this test for in one paragraph, and with conciseness interpreted as a ratio of words to ideas, Grant identifies two assassinations, paints an accurate word picture of Lincoln, and moves to Lincoln's goals for Reconstruction. Whereas what Bush said was "this was terrible, just terrible and makes us cry (ah'm a lovin guy), and we need to whack someone 'cause we're special." As a result, the United States has suffered a massive diplomatic defeat, and is threatening to violate the UN Charter. As I write, Dennis Hastert is boasting that when he was struggling as a teacher in Illinois, he took the advice of his school principal, who called Hastert's degree in "hisstry and philassaphy" useless and advised a certificate in "supervision." The rest, for the Speaker, was "hisstry", and his "philassaphy" is clear, as is his President's philassaphy. You don't need hisstry and philassaphy, just a certificate and a mentor, and a preloaded Supreme Court. Writing and speaking with clarity need not apply.
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Summary: Depressing
Review: If you aren't quite disappointed enough in the state of politics, the media, and voter apathy this book should help you hit rock bottom. I used this book to compile numerous quotes by our commander-in-chief for use as email signatures, but it was worth more than that. Mark Crispin Miller writes about the sad state of America explaining why Bush is the perfect president for the so called "Information Age." It was nothing, that hadn't occurred to me before, but the research and documentation in this book left me to believe my worst fears were true. This book is not, however, a complete condemnation of G.W. Bush. He's presented as a side affect of the problem with America. That our media has become so entangled with entertainment that issues or anything of substance that might enable viewers/readers to make an educated choice when voting is shunned for fear of ratings suicide. This would not be a problem if not for the, less than critical, public that allows this system to exist. More than that a public that demands it by voting for this with their viewer/readership. This played into Bush's hand as someone who belted out freudian slips and misnomers making a spectacle of himself for the entertainment of voters, and against the dryer and more businesslike Gore. The media is portrayed as neither left or right, but hollow and irrelevant while it remains the publics only conduit to information. At the same time I can't help but notice that almost half of American voters don't consider it important that the president be eloquent or intelligent. Whatever one thinks of the election and the Florida fiasco it's hard to deny in this evidence that, for better or worse, America got the president it deserved.
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Summary: Interesting critique of current US political discourse
Review: In this book, Mark Crispin Miller presents a superb analysis of the state of political discourse in contemporary US media, where the public are expected to accept all arguments and accusations put forth, no matter how illogical or absurd, and without the benefit of proper debate or expression of contrary opinion. Bush's malapropisms and mangled syntax may be humourous wallpaper, but they are not as interesting or important as Miller's media critique, which makes this book well worth buying. Watching the current Iraq crises and its handling by the US government and media in the public domain merely substantiates the author's thesis.
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