High Noon

Why is Bush such a divisive and widely reviled figure?

Many Europeans and liberal Americans find him far more threatening and hateful than murderous Muslims.

On the face of it, Bush is a likable guy, and even if you think the Iraq war was a mistake, Bush is attempting, as best he knows how, to defend us against a mortal enemy. Surely his miscalculations are forgivable if seen in that larger light.

I’d suggest that, at a certain level, our reaction to Bush is hard-wired, and not everyone is wired the same way.

We are, for example, hardwired to enjoy a good yarn. And it isn’t just primitive people who tell stories. We have simply used our technology as a medium to tell each other stories—in movies and TV shows. We have an insatiable appetite for stories. This is a cultural universal. It knows no abatement of time and place. This is part of the perennial appeal of the Bible.

And our stories, whether old or new, share common conventions and patterns.

Take the plot device of the deus ex machina. Is this an artistic flaw? That depends on the setting of the story. In light comedy, successive coincidences, narrow escapes, innumerable subplots, improbable plot twists, and highly unlikely outcomes are integral to the genre and humorous effect—from Goldsmith, Congreve and Sheridan to Gilbert and Sullivan.

Likewise, in a story with a providential worldview, there's a logical place for a miraculous deliverance--say, in answer to prayer.

Indeed, light comedy is a secularized parody of providence: Dante on champagne!

Take a different example. Is character development an artistic virtue or flaw? Character development is a standard plot motif, and is an element of the quest genre, where the character undergoes a transformative ordeal. This can either make him a better person (the comic curve) or a worse person (tragedy).

In tragedy you have the downward motion, the downfall. Comedy, in the classic sense, is inclusive of tragedy. But after the character hits bottom, he is redeemed, and rebounds. So comedy, in this sense, completes and rounds out the downward motion with a complementary upward motion.

Although the redemptive notion has been secularized, it is revealing that many unbelievers feel the need for a redemptive ending. That doesn't fit into their official worldview.

In Scripture, the story of Saul is a classic tragedy. So is the fall of Lucifer, while the stories of Joseph, Samson, Ruth, Job, and Jesus are classic comedies. The Book of Revelation is also a comedy in this strict sense of the word.

The plot motif of the OT, and Scripture as a whole, charts a comic curve. Creation/fall/redemption. Slavery/Exodus. Exile/restoration. Incarnation/Crucifixion/Resurrection.

But there is also, as you point out, dramatic potential and dramatic realism in the archetypal hero who doesn't buckle under pressure or flinch in the face of adversity. And there are such individuals in real life.

Here the dramatic tension comes from the fact that, outwardly speaking, the hero is free to back out, and he is surrounded by other unworthy characters who are shifting and adapting whereas he, morally speaking, is not free to be false to his own convictions, and so he remains unyielding in the face of peer pressure, both from his immediate social circle, and from the approaching villain.

A textbook example is Marshal Kane in High Noon. And it isn't coincidental that High Noon is a Western. The Western is a distinctive American genre which exemplifies a distinctive American outlook.

I also don't think it's coincidental that the Western genre began to lose its centrality when it was taken over by directors of the countercultural generation.

More generally, the theme of the righteous loner is typical of the American mythos. I think it owes something to our Christian heritage, for you have the same theme in Scripture.

It also accounts for the cultural divide between Bush and the liberal establishment, both here and abroad.

Modern Europeans are communitarian in their moral orientation. Groupthink is next to godliness.

That is why they find Bush incomprehensible. And that's why they find it incomprehensible that Bush was reelected.

The liberal elites in America are just as clueless because they are European wannabes.

You see this same thing in perennial modernist-fundamentalist controversy. The religious left always wants to go with the flow of the elite opinion-makers while the religious right is prepared to swim against the tide—even if this puts it in mortal peril of being old-fashioned!

When critics compare Bush to a cowboy or gunslinger, they are right. But they mean it as a putdown. They are tone-deaf to the moral force and cultural resonance of that comparison.

By contrast, many Americans, including most of the electorate, instinctively identify with Bush, for all his obvious limitations, because he taps into a distinctive American ethos and mythos.

This is not something he does consciously. It's a product of his West Texas upbringing combined with his Bible-belt piety. And that is something they relate to at an equally subliminal level.