Bush & Camus effe lache in et engels..

[dirkie]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Sorry de link werkt niet zonder password of zo.
Een priceless stukje filosofie.
Het is een soort gewoonte dat de zittende President
verklapt welke boeken hij in het afgelopen jaar zoal
gelezen heeft. GW Bush zegt dus o.m. Albert Camus "The
Stranger" gelezen te hebben.
Enjoy! Dirkie
=================================
Op-Ed Columnist

  Camus Comes to Crawford

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: August 16, 2006

WASHINGTON

Strangely enough, we find two famous men reading
Albert Camus’s “The Stranger” this summer.

One is Jean Girard, the villainous gay French race car
driver hilariously played by Sacha Baron Cohen (a k a
Ali G and Borat) — the sinuous rival to Will Ferrell’s
stocky Ricky Bobby in “Talladega Nights.”

Girard, a jazz-loving, white-silk-scarf-wearing,
America-disdaining Formula Un driver sponsored by
Perrier, is so smooth he can sip macchiato from a
china cup, smoke Gitanes and read “L’Etranger” behind
the wheel and still lead the Nascar pack.

Frenchie contemptuously informs “cowboy” Bobby that
America merely gave the world George Bush, Cheerios
and the ThighMaster while France invented democracy,
existentialism and the ménage à trois.

The other guy kindling to Camus is none other than the
aforementioned George Bush, who read “The Stranger” in
English on his Crawford vacation and, Tony Snow told
me, “liked it.” Name-dropping existentialists is good
for picking up girls, as Woody Allen’s schlemiels
found, or getting through the clove-cigarette fog of
Humanities 101. But it does seem odd that W., who once
mocked NBC’s David Gregory as “intercontinental” for
posing a question in French to the French president in
France, would choose Camus over Grisham.

Camus is not beach reading — or brush reading. How on
earth did this book make it into the hands of our
proudly anti-intellectual president?

“I don’t know how ‘L’Etranger’ made it onto his list,”
Mr. Snow said. “I must confess, I read ‘L’Etranger’ 25
years ago.” The rest of W.’s reading list was
presidentially correct: two books on Lincoln and the
Pulitzer Prize-winning “Polio: An American Story,” by
David Oshinsky. (Not a word by Merleau-Ponty.)

Debunking the theory that W. had a sports section or
Mad magazine’s “Spy vs. Spy” tucked inside the 1946
classic of angst, Mr. Snow noted that he and the
president had “a brief conversation on the origins of
French existentialism, Camus and Sartre.” Pressed for
more details by an astonished columnist having trouble
envisioning Waco as the Left Bank, the press secretary
laughed. “Confidential conversation,” he said,
extending the administration’s lack of transparency to
literature.

He brushed off suggestions that the supremely
unself-reflective W. was going through a Carteresque
malaise-in-the-gorge moment: “He doesn’t feel like an
existentialist trapped in Algeria during the
unpleasantness.”

It takes a while to adjust to the idea of W., who has
created chaos trying to impose moral order on the
globe, perusing Camus, who wrote about the eternal
frustration of moral order in human affairs. What does
W., the archenemy of absurdity as a view of life,
kindle to in C., the apostle of absurdity as a view of
life? What can W., the born-again monogamist, spark to
in C., the amorous atheist? In some ways, Mr. Bush is
supremely not a Camus man. Camus hated the blindness
caused by ideology, and Mr. Bush wallows in it. Camus
celebrated lucidity while the president keeps seeing
only what he wants to see.

Mr. Bush’s life has been premised on his confidence
that he will always be insulated from the consequences
and the cruelties of existence, unlike Meursault. W.
or his people always work to change fate, whether it’s
an election or the Middle East.

If you think about it long enough, though, it begins
to make a sort of wacky sense.

“The Stranger” is about the emotionally detached
Meursault, who makes a lot of bad decisions and
pre-emptively kills an Arab in the sand. Get it?
Camus’s protagonist moves through an opaque, obscure
and violent world that is indifferent to his beliefs
and desires. Get it?

If there was ever a moment when this president could
regard the unanticipated consequences of his actions,
behold the world littered with the very opposite of
what he intended for it and appreciate the gritty
stoicism of the philosophy of absurdism, this is it.
Iraq in civil war. Al Qaeda metastasizing and
plotting. Hezbollah, Iran and Syria knitting closer,
celebrating a “victory” in standing up to Israel, the
U.S. and Britain, and mocking W.’s plan for a “new
Middle East.” The North Koreans luxuriating in their
nuclear capability. Chávez becoming the new Castro on
a global scale.

Maybe next the president should pick up Camus’s other
classic, “The Myth of Sisyphus.” Was there ever a
national enterprise more Sisyphean than the war in
Iraq?

If there was ever a confirmation of Camus’s sense of
the absurdity of life, it’s that the president is
reading him.
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