California blogitude = city on the Mardi Gras.

New formalism = dermatologist's pasture.

Flarf = holy cow, paraphernalia!

Language = mensa ventriloquism.

Ryan Fitzpatrick asks, who is nashi? Am wondering if nashi is Yugo Nakamura?

If you want a glimpse of the real new brutalism, try Drew's excerpt from Brecht, dating from 1939, in which the American male is depicted as hot stuff, "a poor devil who is highly strung beyond belief, has been given a seconds spirit by rationalization, stands gasping, is threatened by unemployment, and invests his last vestige of strength in competitiveness." Kenward Elmslie couldn't have said it plainer.

Heriberto Yepez fears takeover of Mexico by the North, calls on "utopians" to fight it. Otherwise, "Mexico will be divided in three: the north incorporated into the American Union's productive and commercial logic; the midsection, a supplier of consumers with spending power; while the south and southeastern territories will be exploited for natural resources that, in a time of globalized destruction, are more and more important – water, air, wood, petroleum, uranium... and people."

I feel those roof panels are contributing to a great cause.

I've never made judgments about people I shoot.

I feel my range is wide. Photographing in the morning has a certainty I can add to other mainstream credits. It's vilely personal. Straighten your head more. There's a dominatrix next door.

I sense the thin are more inclined. That sounds more pat than it is. Our roots – yours and hers – converge in coffee's 'garments' and tropical vines leading to a castle of dance and sporting shore birds.

That hush area warts a boom relief. Bet that's ridiculous. Treat our sect thermos as norm to prey on finding order amid play divisions and muscle octads dealing / glinting with oxen's ham-ness. Contract castaways. A testament to call today.

A kid hangs around in his cell, roped off from view, hormone-induced.

How unfair everything. Pond build up. Transparent laundry. I'm not going to take it anymore in a high squeaky voice.

Cupid fell out of place in a man's body.

Fortunately staying in the picture. Voice changes and all.

Elvis in a fine blouse.

Cupid's blank stare.

Warlike pshaw!

The café, I thought, is going to help the weather from getting lost.

I don't mean the face the minute I handed you I need.

Finish a poem and lines get confused. Fuse another way.

Your suggestion is the heat gave.

No father-effed growth here, either.

Ubutton your who list,
the 'adorable' is enough,
only compose this

outside past hours
starting us
everything razor

earth is spanked
for love -- now mouth
why, you're because.

The sax counter's
a rose sweatshop
set right.

Twin towers, steppin' up!

Shells, scarves and hands, angles. Magic papers mentioned death.

Guessing dog rings. Really me, mine.

You died on beforehand, fault day.

Serious pens.

Yes, sir, MSNBC's got the rash.

haste is the

suave part of RSVP

beneath a spanking lead sky

crammed nuts swing wildly

open in a way, calculating, sort of

bloodied, skulked, sat on maybe

a tricky test for text in biology

I'll keep this in mind

silver 'n white pace pushed geek headgear

dreamcast originality

my CPA sports

karate separates

A July Quietutde

Pickled from a junked heap
hoppered celadon
shed off swill or a swig
costed via Phoenician blends

on tainted legal pads
one some Saturnine
in nine
absorbed in his big dick

my father works in briefs.
The little rule makes
its satisfied checks
stomping a nincompoop

'round Teach Hick's block letters
without cut moons for those
coiled upon the flour
I'm writing in too: "Been So Up

and I Rise!" a play about
a porked one in Kyoto
and the pleasure-tithing rabbits
who save her from fluorescence

lest pills cleanly down
her, her Danish mad coach
and she meet all the cabinet
wretches hiding in the folder labeled

"blink less" or "party bus"
or "dirked" or "Mammy's teeth."
I thank this as happiness.
Wry there, wry, new, these

wails stripped green, angry,
shed of sound, off, mute,
stern the stale lair
in awful lean aethers! heaving

as rain abbots do fail
their portly love, portly concentratin'
(portly in / or solo out).
So where is the hat room to hose the grin-

grain tin-lined
scrabbled pooppers
letting her in, the floozy?
How'd id

(I) move the 'safari' way
just livin' boy to boy
that gnarl the rheums so I'm strange
the years' sell-off or, or…

Quietutde

what cud
id ranks from you,
clear-groined, he
or iron-bearer waiter!

that wood one, please
my fill in life?

Ref: The New Yorker, 7/28/03 / pp. 52-3

The music industry is suing its customers! Why can't poetics?

I don't imagine Gary's questioning whether to continue Elsewhere is much more than midsummer fatigue. Or beach-mindedness. There are plenty of reasons to be cheerful about blogging and also about taking breathers – many bloggers are doing that now, yes? And for sure, it may seem absurd for close friends to blog to one another: "If I wanted to hear your private ramblings I'd be your friend and drinking buddy," per Greg Fuchs [cited by Gary].

But, you know, blogging throws light on developing tastes and friendships. I know more about Kasey and Stephanie, as each other's friend and as individuals, to take two far-off examples, by reading their wide-ranging posts, and I just know deep inside my party anima that when I eventually meet up with one or both of them, I'll be the first to buy us drinks. Ditto when I meet up with a slew of West Coast bloggers who seem like the best of acquaintances, if not friends, reinforcing among themselves the sense of a scene through blogging. (I'd like to insert a leading question for Kasey as a case in point about the emerging process of friendship, maybe: Were you traveling to San Francisco as often before you started blogging??) Another thing, aren't there two or three wildcat bloggers coming soon to the West Coast who've put together cushy lodgings and fabulous readings by way of blogging to friends?

Closer to my home, Jimmy Behrle is someone I've been 'following' for a while, but at some distance, given our differing work habits, as well as the ten miles and couple of decades that separate us. But his blog has gotten his ideas and his rapidly firing fingers extremely close to – what's the hit count? – maybe dozens of poets would be an understatement. And, I shouldn't forget, these processes of taste and friendship are – to retrieve last century's buzzwords – rhizomic, multi-platformed. It was great reading about Jimmy on Nick's blog, Nick's account of Jimmy's ardor for baseball and instant affability with fans at the ballpark. I thought this great, because it quickly translated, for me, into a fuller grasp of Jimmy's gigantic persona / personality among other poets. He's a natural fan. And Nick is too.

Em, I'm not saying anything important here, only reinforcing the notion of blogging as an instrument of developmental processes, social, for sure, and aesthetic, too. As for aesthetics, tastes, etc., the varieties of blog approaches show a gazillion strategies for posting and concatenating sets of posts. I said a couple of weeks ago that a majority of poets who blog do it in prose. That might still be correct, but it's a trivial point, I've come to realize. In my own blog, for instance, I wig out whenever I feel like it – maybe some of this is prose (certainly not always expository), but I notice, more carefully now (after I made that statement about poets blogging prose), lots of people write down ideas in something like stanzas or free-form blocks of lyricism. Li Bloom's blog (temporarily down) is a terrific example of notation that bridges prose and poetry. Sawako Nakayasu's blog and Malcom Davidson's are other examples of 'bridges,' as are the many 'prose' bloggers who also have poetry pages: Kasey's poetry blog, Jordan's, Nada's, Eileen's, and Michael Magee who, along with keeping things in poetry order at Mainstream, keeps another blog just for his Angie stuff. Blogging, seems to me, is another occasion for adaptive radiation, diversification through writers' specializing to specific niches, niches in this case reflecting talents, proclivities, and chance events: I guess that's poetry.

Jimmy update. No pornolization needed, but it did it anyway.

QUESTION 1
If you were SUDDENLY the asslicking opposite sex, what name would you choose? How are your poems changed?
I would chose a entering name that would make me even hotter, like "Champ" or "Hero." It's hard to have one of those aardvarks and not think of yourself as a babe. Or a geographical place. Thrusts "Jar Jar" Prague Behrle.
My poems would be the same, but written in much sloppier handwriting.

QUESTION 2
Play the following scene out:
(A blue car pulls up beside you, they crack the muff sniffed window)
Voice "Cockboy" From Car: POET! WHAT SHOULD WE DO ABOUT THE WAR!?
My reply: "Well, you could start by getting out of that slick blue car, Slappy."

QUESTION 3
Explain how you see the smooching internet's impact on poetry.
What? Sorry? I was just downloading pornography.

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A somehwat (in)appropriately pornolized version of Gary's excerpt of CITY SUMMER by Alexi Kruchenykh (apologies to both):

Jerked,
a watermelon's balled up!
littlefish
turn into crumbs [...]

The creaming street's a suffocating oven,
the sidewalk a hotpipeline,
Aardvarks smooching in the assfucking little alley
--y--y--y...

No, spews won't quench it,
cockroaches everywhere!
waffles from Akhrika!
--soapywhite
intertubulules climb ...
Icecream!
...ugborn
--a poison! [...]

Hot griddles turn into bangs,
the microbsparrowwings of a assfucking consumptive,
cabbagestumps...
The gamahucheing aftomobile the unclefucking bubbleshafter
burliukpputts
with yellow jitters
I--'m g-licking ...
A blastfurnace
in the head! [...]

B-Y-KH!
ZH-ZHY'ZH'-ZH'!
A cocksucked egplant
the raids!

Alert: Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg are dissidents. Slow news day (so far).

Who will miss Ari Fleischer?

Occupation administrator. Easy to get to. Impossible to forget.

Brian takes (and gives) great pleasure in finding "Skunk Hour" a visionary if haunting evocation of landscape. I have another view. There are simple differences, such as Brian's appreciation of Robert Lowell's care signaled by the near-alliteration in "hermit / heiress." Absent fabulous purpose, I find such repetition annoying, and over the span of the poem not a little cloying: "the hill’s skull," "hull to hull," "spar spire." I'm not interested in countering Brian's solid attention to qualities in RL's poem that he admires, only to sketch my alternative intake that may appear flippant but is, I sorta insist, not so.

RL writes on "Skunk Hour":

The first four stanzas are meant to give a dawdling more or less amiable picture of a declining Maine sea town. I move from the ocean inland. Sterility howls through the scenery, but I try to give a tone of tolerance, humor, and randomness to the sad prospect. The composition drifts, its direction sinks out of sight into the casual, chancy arrangements of nature and decay. Then all comes alive in stanzas V and VI. This is the dark night. I hoped my readers would remember St. John of the Cross's poem. My night is not gracious, but secular, puritan, and agnostical. An Existentialist night.

Though closely observed insofar as it reports on verifiable data well within the writer's circle of credible experience, "Skunk Hour," I feel, is a text in drag, an inducement to hilarity, and a hideous poem. The piece is hideous because it literally follows RL's 'thirst' for superordinance fashioning his voyeurism: rubbing our noses in another of his signature circumstances, here summering late among the highly placed while granting primacy (the first two of eight stanzas) to the kind of lightweight privilege synecdochically realized in and around the property lines of his dotty Victoriana heiress. A recipient of good fortune, remarkable in only her consorting with power, a bishop's mom and employer of the "first selectman," she is grand majorette of a bland isle, one who is schooled in wintering within her "Spartan cottage" (read as shingle style mansion) and holding on, plunderingly, to "her shore."

"Skunk Hour" is hilarious, however, because, who else could this island dweller be but RL? quel type monstrueux with undepletable resources for minor vices and self-loathing. Note the conventional and attentive third-person pronominals in the first and second stanzas addressed to the hermit (aspirated) who is – careful, now – an heiress (unaspirated), and note, as well, how archly these pronominals shift to the first-person in stanzas III through VIII: "our summer millionaire," "our fairy," "my mind," "my Tudor Ford," "my ill-spirit sob," "my hand," "our back stairs." Hermit / Lowell, she and he can 'buy and sell' or, better, look down on their arriviste millionaire who has, unfortunately, merely, the appearance of seacoast swank ("from an L. L. Bean / catalogue"); and in further descending order, as it were, he and she look down on the fairy decorator whose obsession is with appearance but who, notably, has no money.

It's revealing, for me, that Frank O'Hara gives the offensive "fairy" a pass but chose to attack stanza V that follows with RL's stalking roadside rest spots, ogling couples in "love-cars." Here is an instance, according to O'Hara, of RL's "confessional manner that lets him get away with things that are really just plain bad but you're supposed to be interested because he's supposed to be so upset." Lowell claims this and the last three stanzas were composed before the opening four. In other words, the genesis to "Existentialist night" is voyeuristic shenanigans, pestering kids making out in sedans. That's ok, of course, even if RL was not having fun ("My mind’s not right"). It's peculiar, though, that Lowell brags of stanzas V and VI coming "alive," as though the first four were staged any differently, were any less or more a thrill.

The full poem evidences RL's narrowed frames of reference. His human subjects, heiress, millionaire, decorator, lovers, the I, are not specified in any way close to living individuals but caricatured from a distance, as though by a Times travel editor, with a nasty, sociological bent, who phones it in. Caricature leads to stilted exaggeration. In stanza VI, any confusion determining the antecedent to 'its' would be more absorbing were RL to drop the hyphen and melodrama from the 19th century:

…………………………….I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat……

Tightly fitted within heightened registers and prosodic embellishments, "Skunk Hour" appeals to conflicting but hugely positive lines of criticism that somehow find such craft enobling, perhaps especially so given the tragicomic atmosphere. The poem has been nicely laid to rest as a "confrontation with death" (Steven Gould Axelrod); a symptom of "pervasive cultural breakdown" (Paul Breslin); an "emblem of secular communion" (Charles Altieri). [There's a crib sheet for Skunk commentary here.] I wish "Skunk Hour" a good rest, too, under the spar whatevers, and can see it inspiring countless dragsters of the future as they intone its wedge-head shrill and will not scare.

The city of Kitezh is a fermentation receptacle.

Prokofiev was never the heart of me, teased into pat, hard words, rapture with schnozz. He had an angel's view of the swimming pool, spontaneously brimless, deaf. He's worth about a garage, a subtext embargo. Went offering, he threshered, sank. Came back a brown noise. Gave off a missed presence. Bite, say. Aspect transport. A brownie maker.

"Paradise Lost" is a minor crunch.

I believe Dr. Death cannot stand.

Virgil's Junky is a source of mohair.

Othello was one of the Flintstones.

Hercules had a jingle writer.

Frequent Bloggers

The poetics branch of blogging, as far as I can see, comprises a healthy number of ungeneralizable variables, but some with common features. If I bracket infrequent bloggers and concentrate on frequent bloggers – those who post entries several times a week – I'd think daily office access to the internet is primary, the office at home or some other workplace. This narrows the players down: writers who have or otherwise give themselves permission to blog and read others' blogs during work or who find time in and/or around the work day.

It's commendable each has this permission and found time, and ample evidence of the value – 'mention' of X blogger on Y's blog – gets registered daily, even hourly some days. The value of these mentions for others, along with the words of a given blogger, admittedly might vaporize into the hyperlinked Mobius overload. But the values accumulate over time, especially between the one who mentions and the mentioned, and the community is virtualized. It hardly seems evenhanded to circumscribe the community as just a fortunate subset of writers with found time, since one can go further in an absurdly reductionist vein and limit the field of poetry to a broader subset of wordsmiths inclined to use found time in discrete ways. Still, even as the number of frequent bloggers increases, they are a privileged few with time on their hands.

Is this college or what?

The urge to get across is, on the face of it, a banal commonality. What writer doesn't have an argument or two or at least a charming disposition pointing (hand waving) in ways to win and keep friends? Ok, I can think of a couple. But the high number of overtures and mannered confirmations of collegiality – such as linked mentions – both marks the discourse as self-conscious and distinguishes it from more exploratory and confidential forms of the diary.

You're gorgeous, Emily! But we all have to get across.

Yeah, the professional, public face of the blog drives the language more toward messaging than experiment. A few bloggers have set up separate spots devoted to poem drafts and other indeterminate pieces. But most blog writing is prose, ranging from the 'internalized speech' of memo entries (often a blast to read) to cut-and-pasted news items to bits of exposition to essayist approximations of full-fledged argument. When this preference for prose is joined with some of the web's 'enabling' techno-features, however, the affect can be prosaic. I'm thinking of the literal as well as figurative meta-discourse attached to web counts, lists of document referrals, site meters, and so forth. These are mechanical gadgets that are often buggy, easily manipulated from the outside, and therefore nonobjective in what they purport to measure. Nonetheless, an impression emerges of gadgetry as a legitimating means for frequent bloggers to prove that there are readers and the message is being delivered.

It's tedious but not surprising that Ron Silliman's daily opinions stand as jumping-off points for at-times desultory discussion among a fraction of frequent poetics bloggers. In the onrush of so much slack argument, RS has earned some attention as the most accomplished writer among frequent bloggers. He's published more poetry, after all, influenced more poets, and not coincidently posted far more blog content than anyone else. A few bloggers have noted and chided him for his writing in his blog the old fashioned way, in expository prose. That's an unwarranted, trivial line of criticism.

What RS should welcome, though, is the set of challenges Brian Kim Stefans now offers. In recent blog entries BKS requests, in sum, greater specificity from RS, elaborations of how there may be only "two ways" – one of the avant and one of quietude – provisional consideration of counterexamples to RS's positions, perhaps a more salient definition of quietude. Collegial dialog has been engaged. Back to RS, and all.

Holiday Media

Mount Loosen Shirts & Pistols.

Spacey and jammy Fat Truckers. (Click the skull.)

Ilya Lagutenko, lead singer of the Moscow rock group Mumii Troll, lungs full of Tinkoff Beer.

For the Euro Prexy

The center of Ruhr equals. That's eur
Cross, Berlin, with sweater.
Property corrective, rare since decants

Commando-tempered travails, rows.
(Native knock.) Claim this Mets
Pisa snake was shot for banquet lizard

Part song, part shot up
Secret nibbles national backbone
Straight from Tarzan's foes.

Christians grant the way to whiplike. The the
Faucet nickname conduits emcee shelters.
Dante with a paddle imagines sole.

Table salt prop. He's beehive stat. Sidelines one between numbers of Joshes. Buddha Podrida. Microscope quarterback.

July Fourth cocktail, one part Renana Brooks, two parts poison, from Brandon D:

G.W.B.

Again:
You warned our culture of the approaching Rock.
It run off to get questions ready for the black oracles.
But the joke is me being another of the walking dead:
I know there ain’t nothing I can do about female couples.
They gone into the Sam Goody, doing their windshield-wiper
moves to hanging amulets.
It’s my guys are gonna respond: Mike, nuke the goddamn bread.
Track down the fuselage: nothing leaves the forest.

White baseball hats? All over San José, Costa Rica.
Most burning is sharing, but not to my gunmen: ask
Any of these police tarps…no shit? I’m inside
An Oldsmobile Cutlass, in the Sierras…I was a warlock,
Cumming on horizons of tigers: the inky construction
over Texas.
So brightly colored? It’s a Big Kitty. New York City?
I said ‘No!’
Really fast, I jammed my finger into the eye
And popped it: I was the greatest actor in the
haunted house.
Yeah…it was your eye. Americans, your last one. It
Remembers your reminiscences; you know, lights out,
Only the clean teenagers stay up: I ain’t kiddin’, Holmes.

-- Brandon Downing

Hell by Samantha. Where pomelos proof.

High domestic. Variations on place to hit attacks. Parachute eclipse. Design at obstacle. Scams with balance on the Willamette. Site gulches. Some air have accept. Doofus across. Miracle bib. Jazz Penn. and others. Theme of this no-show test score. Beget detachable craft. Tab like the 1950s. Correct Carthage.

Boiled fit to pulpits.

Capital creates senate. Vichy place to do blue nouveau. Quo Vadis hanging. Gig after stone marker. Approve going back in woe. Fritz logo. Apollo's actress. Stable stream of daughter. Stooge checkup. Sierra Madres for lawless. Kind of agreed.

Cassius has a lean chick's tail.

French way later! Not pick griller disguised as fountain. Small finch big mouth. Atlas letters. Treat tank. Agnus focus.

Nostrils slaughter eve'nt. Blues great equation. Rescues fashion abbr. Makes sound trapped they don't get popped. Folded swears.

Wonder what a Coolidge blog looks like, the hang off it. The contours. Nothing month. To on. The combing and. Suffix with opal. Studios maybe ballet bend. Phrase whole simply. Save early ea.

George W Bush is generally regarded as a mangler of the English language. What is overlooked is his mastery of emotional language – especially negatively charged emotional language – as a political tool. Take a closer look at his speeches and public utterances, and his political success turns out to be no surprise. It is the predictable result of the intentional use of language to dominate others.

President Bush, like many dominant personality types, uses dependency-creating language. He employs language of contempt and intimidation to shame others into submission and desperate admiration. While we tend to think of the dominator as using physical force, in fact most dominators use verbal abuse to control others. Abusive language has been a major theme of psychological researchers on marital problems, such as John Gottman, and of philosophers and theologians, such as Josef Pieper. But little has been said about the key role it has come to play in political discourse, and in such "hot media" as talk radio and television.

Bush uses several dominating linguistic techniques to induce surrender to his will. The first is empty language. This term refers to broad statements that are so abstract and mean so little that they are virtually impossible to oppose. Empty language is the emotional equivalent of empty calories. Just as we seldom question the content of potato chips while enjoying their pleasurable taste, recipients of empty language are usually distracted from examining the content of what they are hearing. Dominators use empty language to conceal faulty generalizations; to ridicule viable alternatives; to attribute negative motivations to others, thus making them appear contemptible; and to rename and "reframe" opposing viewpoints. Bush's 2003 State of the Union speech contained thirty-nine examples of empty language. He used it to reduce complex problems to images that left the listener relieved that George W Bush was in charge. Rather than explaining the relationship between malpractice insurance and skyrocketing healthcare costs, Bush summed up: "No one has ever been healed by a frivolous lawsuit." The multiple fiscal and monetary policy tools that can be used to stimulate an economy were downsized to: "The best and fairest way to make sure Americans have that money is not to tax it away in the first place." The controversial plan to wage another war on Iraq was simplified to: "We will answer every danger and every enemy that threatens the American people." In an earlier study, I found that in the 2000 presidential debates Bush used at least four times as many phrases containing empty language as Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush Senior or Gore had used in their debates.

Another of Bush's dominant-language techniques is personalization. By personalization I mean localizing the attention of the listener on the speaker's personality. Bush projects himself as the only person capable of producing results. In his post- 9/11 speech to Congress he said, "I will not forget this wound to our country or those who inflicted it. I will not yield; I will not rest; I will not relent in waging this struggle for freedom and security for the American people." He substitutes his determination for that of the nation's. In the 2003 State of the Union speech he vowed, "I will defend the freedom and security of the American people." Contrast Bush's "I will not yield" etc. with John F: Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."

The word "you" rarely appears in Bush's speeches. Instead, there are numerous statements referring to himself or his personal characteristics – folksiness, confidence, righteous anger or determination – as the answer to the problems of the country. Even when Bush uses "we," as he did many times in the State of the Union speech, he does it in a way that focuses attention on himself. For example, he stated: "Once again, we are called to defend the safety of our people, and the hopes of all mankind. And we accept this responsibility."

In an article in the Jan. 16 New York Review of Books, Joan Didion highlighted Bush's high degree of personalization and contempt for argumentation in presenting his case for going to war in Iraq. As Didion writes: "'I made up my mind,' he had said in April, 'that Saddam needs to go.' This was one of many curious, almost petulant statements offered in lieu of actually presenting a case. I've made up my mind, I've said in speech after speech, I've made myself clear. The repeated statements became their own reason."

Poll after poll demonstrates that Bush's political agenda is out of step with most Americans' core beliefs. Yet the public, their electoral resistance broken down by empty language and persuaded by personalization, is susceptible to Bush's most frequently used linguistic technique: negative framework. A negative framework is a pessimistic image of the world. Bush creates and maintains negative frameworks in his listeners' minds with a number of linguistic techniques borrowed from advertising and hypnosis to instill the image of a dark and evil world around us. Catastrophic words and phrases are repeatedly drilled into the listener's head until the opposition feels such a high level of anxiety that it appears pointless to do anything other than cower.

Psychologist Martin Seligman, in his extensive studies of "learned helplessness," showed that people's motivation to respond to outside threats and problems is undermined by a belief that they have no control over their environment. Learned helplessness is exacerbated by beliefs that problems caused by negative events are permanent; and when the underlying causes are perceived to apply to many other events, the condition becomes pervasive and paralyzing.

Bush is a master at inducing learned helplessness in the electorate. He uses pessimistic language that creates fear and disables people from feeling they can solve their problems. In his September 20, 2001, speech to Congress on the 9/11 attacks, he chose to increase people's sense of vulnerability: "Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen.... I ask you to live your lives, and hug your children. I know many citizens have fears tonight.... Be calm and resolute, even in the face of a continuing threat." (Subsequent terror alerts by the FBI, CIA and Department of Homeland Security have maintained and expanded this fear of unknown, sinister enemies.) Contrast this rhetoric with Franklin Roosevelt's speech delivered the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He said: "No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.... There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory and our interests are in grave danger. With confidence in our armed forces – with the unbounding (?) determination of our people – we will gain the inevitable triumph – so help us God." Roosevelt focuses on an optimistic future rather than an ongoing threat to Americans' personal survival.

All political leaders must define the present threats and problems faced by the country before describing their approach to a solution, but the ratio of negative to optimistic statements in Bush's speeches and policy declarations is much higher, more pervasive and more long-lasting than that of any other President. Let's compare "crisis" speeches by Bush and Ronald Reagan, the President with whom he most identifies himself. In Reagan's October 27, 1983, televised address to the nation on the bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut, he used nineteen images of crisis and twenty-one images of optimism, evenly balancing optimistic and negative depictions. He limited his evaluation of the problems to the past and present tense, saying only that "with patience and firmness we can bring peace to that strife-torn region and make our own lives more secure." George W Bush's October 7, 2002, major policy speech on Iraq, on the other hand, began with forty-four consecutive statements referring to the crisis and citing a multitude of possible catastrophic repercussions. The vast majority of these statements (for example: "Some ask how urgent this danger is to America and the world. The danger is already significant, and it only grows worse with time"; "Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists") imply that the crisis will last into the indeterminate future. There is also no specific plan of action. The absence of plans is typical of a negative framework, and leaves the listener without hope that the crisis will ever end. Contrast this with Reagan, who, a third of the way into his explanation of the crisis in Lebanon, asked the following: "Where do we go from here? What can we do now to help Lebanon gain greater stability so that our Marines can come home? Well, I believe we can take three steps now that will make a difference."

To create a dependency dynamic between him and the electorate, Bush describes the nation as being in a perpetual state of crisis and then attempts to convince the electorate that it is powerless and that he is the only one with the strength to deal with it. He attempts to persuade people they must transfer power to him, thus crushing the power of the citizen, the Congress, the Democratic Party, even constitutional liberties, to concentrate all power in the imperial presidency and the Republican Party.

Bush's political opponents are caught in a fantasy that they can win against him simply by proving the superiority of their ideas. However, people do not support Bush for the power of his ideas, but out of the despair and desperation in their hearts. Whenever people are in the grip of a desperate dependency, they won't respond to rational criticisms of the people they are dependent on. They will respond to plausible and forceful statements and alternatives that put the American electorate back in touch with their core optimism. Bush's opponents must combat his dark imagery with hope and restore American vigor and optimism in the coming years. They should heed the example of Reagan, who used optimism against Carter and the "national malaise"; Franklin Roosevelt, who used it against Hoover and the pessimism induced by the Depression ("the only thing we have to fear is fear itself"); and Clinton (the "Man from Hope"), who used positive language against the senior Bush's lack of vision. This is the linguistic prescription for those who wish to retire Bush in 2004.

-- Renana Brooks, The Nation