Bling Bling in the ATL

Been a lot of talking about the White House Correspondents Dinner. It was newsworthy, interesting. As soon as I heard about it on the nets, I rushed to BIBs house, and it was on replay on CSPAN. Yay CSPAN.

Basically, 2 comedy bits. In the first, Bush appears with a look-alike and does a schtick where the look-alike says what Bush thinks, then Bush says what he normally says. Very funny, very eery, and we have GWB himself to credit for this must-see-TV moment: according to Bumiller of the Times, "White House officials and Mr. Bridges said the double stand-up was the idea of the president." Colbert has the tough act to follow, and brings it on with a laundry list of every messed up skeleton in the closet packaged as a joke, delivered in character as a Bush loyalist. The crowd winces, Bush looks like mad as a spitting cat, grabs Laura and leaves.

Most of the news/blog commentary on the dinner falls in one of two camps: From the right, "I think Colbert is brilliant. I also think he stunk up the place last night. Save for a few riffs, he was just off. And he certainly came in a distant second to Bush's act. " [Jonah Goldberg] From the left, "The story could just as well have been Bush and Laura's discomfort and the crowd's semi-hostile reaction to Colbert's razor-sharp barbs. In fact, I would guess that from the perspective of newsworthiness and public interest, Bush-the-playful-president is far less compelling than a comedy sketch gone awry, a pissed-off prez, and a shell-shocked audience." [Peter Daou]

The two sides disagree on what constitutes funny or appropriate, but seem to agree on one thing: the Bush bit was light-hearted and funny, the Colbert bit was somehow off because it wasn't funny/reconciliatory and instead told too much truthiness to power.

I think, actually, that the truthiest read of all would be to psychoanalize the spectacle of Bush presenting himself with a Doppelganger who voices his inner, 'bad' thoughts and good grammer/pronunciation, while Bush voices outer, "good" thoughts and bad grammar/ mispronunciation. No doubt one could wring some fascinating and revealing insights about why our president such a sociopathic narcissistic homicidal megalomaniac.

There aren't transcripts of Bush's doppelganger routine online yet, and don't have time to do a read right now. One line I remember - when Bush stepped out of character at the end, and introduced Steve Bridges, the double, he quipped that Bridges had done all of the debates with John Kerry.

Anyhow. Heres a little bit from Freud's the Uncanny as food for thought and as a pointer for where I'm going with this.

"the phenomenon of the ‘double’, which appears in every shape and in every degree of development. Thus we have characters who are to be considered identical because they look alike. This relation is accentuated by mental processes leaping from one of these characters to another — by what we should call telepathy —, so that the one possesses knowledge, feelings and experience in common with the other. Or it is marked by the fact that the subject identifies himself with someone else, so that he is in doubt as to which his self is, or substitutes the extraneous self for his own. In other words, there is a doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self. And finally there is the constant recurrence of the same thing — the repetition of the same features or character-traits or vicissitudes, of the same crimes, or even the same names through several consecutive generations.

The theme of the ‘double’ has been very thoroughly treated by Otto Rank (1914). He has gone into the connections which the ‘double’ has with reflections in mirrors, with shadows, with guardian spirits, with the belief in the soul and with the fear of death; but he also lets in a flood of light on the surprising evolution of the idea. For the ‘double’ was originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego, an ‘energetic denial of the power of death’, as Rank says; and probably the ‘immortal’ soul was the first ‘double’ of the body. This invention of doubling as a preservation against extinction has its counterpart in the language of dreams, which is found of representing castration by a doubling or multiplication of a genital symbol. The same desire led the Ancient Egyptians to develop the art of making images of the dead in lasting materials. Such ideas, however, have sprung from the soil of unbounded self-love, from the primary narcissism which dominates the mind of the child and of primitive man. But when this stage has been surmounted, the ‘double’ reverses its aspect. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death.

The idea of the ‘double’ does not necessarily disappear with the passing of primary narcissism, for it can receive fresh meaning from the later stages of the ego’s development. A special agency is slowly formed there, which is able to stand over against the rest of the ego, which has the function of observing and criticizing the self and of exercising a censorship within the mind, and which we become aware of as our ‘conscience’. In the pathological case of delusions of being watched, this mental agency becomes isolated, dissociated from the ego, and discernible to the physician’s eye. The fact that an agency of this kind exists, which is able to treat the rest of the ego like an object — the fact, that is, that man is capable of self-observation — renders it possible to invest the old idea of a ‘double’ with a new meaning and to ascribe a number of things to it — above all, those things which seem to self-criticism to belong to the old surmounted narcissism of earliest times.

But it is not only this latter material, offensive as it is to the criticism of the ego, which may be incorporated in the idea of a double. There are also all the unfulfilled but possible futures to which we still like to cling in phantasy, all the strivings of the ego which adverse external circumstances have crushed, and all our suppressed acts of volition which nourish in us the illusion of Free Will. [Cf. Freud, 1901b, Chapter XII (B).]

But after having thus considered the manifest motivation of the figure of a 'double', we have to admit that none of this helps us to understand the extraordinarily strong feeling of something uncanny that pervades the conception; and our knowledge of pathological mental processes enables us to add that nothing in this more superficial material could account for the urge towards defence which has caused the ego to project that material outward as something foreign to itself. When all is said and done, the quality of uncanniness can only come from the fact of the 'double' being a creation dating back to a very early mental stage, long since surmounted — a stage, incidentally, at which it wore a more friendly aspect. The 'double' has become a thing of terror, just as, after the collapse of their religion, the gods turned into demons.

...

Where the uncanny comes from infantile complexes the question of material reality does not arise; its place is taken by psychical reality. What is involved is an actual repression of some content of thought and a return of this repressed content, not a cessation of belief in the reality of such a content. We might say that in the one case what had been repressed is a particular ideational content, and in the other the belief in its (material) reality. But this last phrase no doubt extends the term ‘repression’ beyond its legitimate meaning. It would be more correct to take into account a psychological distinction which can be detected here, and to say that the animistic beliefs of civilized people are in a state of having been (to a greater or lesser extent) surmounted [rather than repressed]. Our conclusion could then be stated thus: an uncanny experience occurs either when infantile complexes which have been repressed are once more revived by some impression, or when primitive beliefs which have been surmounted seem once more to be confirmed. Finally, we must not let our predilection for smooth solutions and lucid exposition blind us to the fact that these two classes of uncanny experience are not always sharply distinguishable. When we consider that primitive beliefs are most intimately connected with infantile complexes, and are, in fact, based on them, we shall not be greatly astonished to find that the distinction is often a hazy one.