Magic for a People Trained in Pragmatism: Kenneth Burke, Mein Kampf, and the Early 9/11 Oratory of George W. Bush

Abstract

In 1939 Kenneth Burke's book review of Mein Kampf, in isolating how the “crude magic” of Nazism worked, called for rhetorical critics to enter the social and political scene of the day by resisting strongman rule wherever it appeared: “[A] people trained in pragmatism should want to inspect this magic” (Philosophy 192). George W. Bush, who also had “crude magic,” used the Hitlerian rhetoric of a common enemy and a geographic center in order to realign post 9/11 attitudes sufficient to identify the non-Western other as a common enemy, to convert New York's fallen Twin Towers into a new and noneconomic symbol of US government, and to transform himself from a lazy cowboy into a medicine-man.

Notes

1 From my first reader to my last, I have benefited from remarkable scholars. Thanks to Tilly and John Warnock for their support and encouragement of my initial draft. Thanks to RR readers Barry Brummett and Jack Selzer for their thoughtful and illuminating comments, all of which made this a stronger essay. And finally I'd like to thank Nicole Quackenbush for her generosity and insight.

2 “The Failure of the League in the Ethiopian crisis could not have been more complete … ‘Fifty-two nations had combined to resist aggression’; A.J. P. Taylor has written, ‘all they accomplished was that Haile Selassie lost all his country instead of only half’” (Divine 26).

3 Although “[t]he great German blitzkrieg, culminating in the fall of France, transformed American attitudes toward the war in Europe,” US isolationism proved so pervasive that the America First Committee, founded in September 1940, publicly argued that “all out aid to Britain could end only in American entry into the European War” (Divine 86, 99).

4 Garth Pauley records that contemporary reviewers of Mein Kampf “simply filled their space by characterizing Hitler as delusional, insane, vulgar, and psychotic”; the reviewer for the Saturday Review of Literature argued that it contained “racial nonsense.”

5 A psychotherapist accused Bush of being “an incompetent and psychologically disabled decision-maker” (Briggs and Briggs); the rapper Kanye West publicly argued that Bush's slow response to Katrina was racially motivated—“George Bush doesn't care about black people” (Bush, Decision Points 325); Bush's famous “Fool me once” gaffe has now been viewed over one million times on YouTube.

6 I note at this point that my argument rejects the premise that George W. Bush and Adolf Hitler were engaged in a similar project or that the two are comparable political leaders. To illustrate the differences between the two men: Hitler was a decorated veteran of WWI, and Bush artfully avoided direct service in Vietnam; Hitler had no college, and Bush graduated from Yale and Harvard; Hitler was orphaned at eighteen and never married, and Bush has increased one of the largest and most influential families in US politics; in 1933 Hitler became German Chancellor at age forty-four after the failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923 (in which he tried to overthrow the government at age thirty-three), and Bush became President at fifty-five after two terms as the Governor of Texas.

7 This transformation is not overstated: when Bush first heard the proposal, on 13 September 2001, for what became the War in Afghanistan, Director of the Counterterrorism Center Cofer Black assured him that “once we're on the ground, [victory] should go in weeks” (Woodward 53); Bush would later admit that revenge motivated his justification of waterboarding: “I thought about my meeting with Danny Pearl's widow, who was pregnant with his son when he was murdered. I thought about the 2,973 people stolen from their families by al Qaeda on 9/11. And I thought about my duty to protect the country from another act of terror. ‘Damn right,’ I said” (Decision Points 170).

8 It is worth noting that Burke was a gifted translator, and the first English translator of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice; in 1939, on the verge of another world war, few Americans were calling the Germans “a great people” or praising Hitler's ability to persuade.

9 The Holocaust saw the death of between eleven and fourteen million, including approximately six million Jews. It is not my intention here to disrespect any of the victims of WWII; rather, it is to be very careful to illustrate, through their rhetorical choices, a common link between the rhetorics of Hitler and Bush.

10 Unfortunately, I lack the space in this essay to pursue several evocative strands of rhetorical scholarship as they relate to 9/11, and I thereby encourage other scholars to pursue the following: (1) the tie between Hitler's use of volk and Bush's embrace of folksy speech and mannerism, (2) the manifest ways in which Bush seeks to identify himself and 9/11 with FDR and Pearl Harbor, and (3) the rhetorical function of how New York City became the emotional touchstone of Bush's understanding of 9/11.

11 “‘I can't wait to get back home,’ Bush said. … Bush is said to occasionally rhapsodize about the breezes on his ranch—baffling aides who cannot understand why he chooses this region's bleak topography and culture to, say, Kennebunkport or … Martha's Vineyard” (Allen).

12 Despite this, Political Science Professor John P. Burke writes about the surprising success of the Bush transition, especially when one considers the two facts that “[Bush] was the first president-elect to receive fewer popular votes than his opponent since Benjamin Harrison in 1888 and he was the first president since Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 to attain an electoral vote majority based on contested results” (5).

13 Žižek argues the opposite: “So what about the phrase which reverberates everywhere: ‘Nothing will ever be the same after September 11’?. … What if, precisely, nothing epochal happened on September 11? What if—as the massive display of American patriotism seems to demonstrate—the shattering experience of September 11 served as a device which enabled the hegemonic American ideology to ‘go back to basics’, to reassert its basic ideological co-ordinates against the antiglobalist and other critical temptations?” (46–47).

14 Bush writes of this transformation: “When I woke up on September 12, America was a different place. … The focus of my presidency, which I had expected to be about domestic policy, was now war” (Decision Points 139).

15 Hitler witnessed a similar time of flux: In his early twenties he learned how the Social Democrats’ Red-only “doctrine of intolerance” led directly to its political success: “Like a woman … who … would rather bow to a strong man than dominate a weakling, likewise the masses love a commander more than a petitioner and feel inwardly more satisfied by a doctrine, tolerating no other beside itself, than by the granting of liberalistic freedom” (Hitler 42).

16 Burke quotes Hitler on the best conditions for effective oratory: “[I]n the morning and even during the day men's will power revolts with highest energy against an attempt at being forced under another man's will … In the evening, however, they succumb. … The same purpose serves also the artificially created and yet mysterious dusk of the Catholic churches” (qtd. in Philosophy 213). To what extent might those ten days in September be understood as one long national day of slowly lengthening shadows, a mysterious dusk to which our collective attitudes and need for answers eventually, like Hitler's nighttime listener, succumbed?

17 As Foxman notes, “Hitler's contribution to the history of ideas can be found in his clear and forceful articulation of numerous theories already in circulation during the early twentieth century rather than in any original thoughts of his own” (xix). Social Darwinism and Pan-Germanism, as well as standard critiques of democracy and Marxism, were included in Rosenberg's articulation of Nazism and the racist nationalism of Adolf Lanz.

18 Bush also understands this lesson: when first brainstorming about how his administration would respond to the attacks, “he called the threat ‘a cancer’ and added, ‘We don't want to define [it] too broadly for the average man to understand” (Woodward 43).

19 Or, consider a like statement by Žižek: “Take Nazi ideology. The Jew as its Real is a spectre evoked in order to conceal social antagonisms—that is, the figure of the Jew allows us to perceive social totality as a whole” (32).

20 Zarefsky points out that the weakest part of this speech occurs when Bush claims “they stand against us because we stand in their way”: “It in no way excuses terrorism to inquire why in much of the world there is antipathy to global capitalism” (143).

21 Bush later admits his rage on September 11: “My first reaction was outrage. Someone had dared attack America. They were going to pay. … My blood was boiling. We were going to find out who did this, and kick their ass” (Decision Points 126–28).

22 As Said argues, “Since World War II, and more noticeably after each of the Arab–Israeli wars, the Arab Muslim has become a figure … in the policy planner's world” (Said 284–85). Here Bush updates that figure to serve that post-9/11 dualisms that will make his magic work.

23 A construction that in keeping with his WWII parallelism complements the FDR's “Four Freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Murphy also makes this point: “They also hated our freedoms, which the president recited in a way that strongly resembled Franklin D. Roosevelt's four freedoms” (615).

24 Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review, argues that Bush is a perfect model for the Christian Right: “If Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson had sat down some 15 years ago and created the profile of their perfect president—a born-again Christian from the Bible Belt, flagrantly open about his faith—George W. Bush would fit it almost to a T” (qtd. in Rozell 11).

25 Murphy discusses this part of the speech in terms of Burkean ratios: “[al-Qaeda] were crazed murderers. … an agent/act ratio crafted the characterization, partly because the who and why questions came first and framed the others. Terrorists did what they did because character (blood) drove them” (616).

26 Hitler objectified Jewish hatred in an international conspiracy that would destroy “finance”; Bush objectifies Muslim hatred in an international conspiracy that would destroy “freedom.” Burke points out the logical flaw in Hitler's thought: “Nowhere does this book, which is so full of war plans, make the slightest attempt to explain the steps whereby the triumph of ‘Jewish Bolshevism,’ which destroys all finance, will be the triumph of ‘Jewish’ finance” (Philosophy 196). The pattern can easily be applied to Bush's fallacious anti-terrorism logic.

27 As he did back in August of 2001, during Bush's famous “working vacation” in Crawford. In Decision Points Bush purports in 2005 to have simply moved the center of US government out West: “I received daily intelligence briefings at the secure trailer across the street … . We had just moved the West Wing twelve hundred miles father west” (313).

28 He does report, after the distance of at least eight years, his marveling at just this scene of September 11: “In the distance I saw smoke rising from the Pentagon. The symbol of our military might was smoldering” (Decision Points 137).

29 A move that he repeats in his memoir, when he recalls the pathos of the Pentagon scene on September 12: “The experience of the Pentagon convinced me I needed to go to New York as soon as possible” (Decision Points 143).

30 This point was made explicitly in the first speech, “A Great People”: “Federal agencies in Washington which had to be evacuated today are reopening for essential personnel tonight and will be open for business tomorrow.”

31 In his essay “New York: The Day After” Eliot Weinberger writes, “[This essay] is written from a geographical limbo, for where I live in New York … is not the ruined war zone that is appearing on television, but a kind of quarantine zone” (17). Weinberger actively resists the news portrayal of a ruined and abandoned city when he cites his son's response to the CNN headline “MANHATTAN VIRTUALLY DESERTED”: “ ‘Hey, we're still here!’” (29).

32 By the time he writes his memoir, this has only cemented in his imagination: “I still see the Pentagon smoldering, the towers in flames, and that pile of twisted steel” (Decision Points 150).

33 Bush continues the FDR comparisons in his memoir: “Karl Rove reminded me that the only other president to pick up seats in both the House and Senate in his first midterm election was Franklin Roosevelt (Decision Points 157); “Roosevelt had Eisenhower and Bradley. I found David Petraeus and Ray Odierno” (389).

34 According to Murphy, “Bush also believed that his generation had lost its way”; this parallels nicely with “the story of his redemption, the frat-boy drinker turned born-again President” (623).

35 In his analysis of Bush's use of visuals in this same speech, Murphy maintains that the president “fashioned these images into what Burke terms a qualitative progression in form—a movement in mood. Bush not only reported on the union, he crafted our feelings about it” (619). Though I won't disagree with Murphy here, I find this argument secondary to the syllogistic form that allows Bush to construct and order images of 9/11 in the first place.

36 David Zarefsky justly refutes the problem of this war metaphor: “What took place on September 11 had some of the characteristics of war. … Yet other components of war were missing. The attack was not military; it did not come from another state; no country declared war on us, nor did we on any other nation” (140).

37 Despite Bush's imaginative parallels between his and FDR's presidency, this notion of a legalistic president constantly making compromise most closely describes FDR.

38 And yet, on the very same day the commander-in-chief would admit: “I was not a military tactician. I recognize that. I was going to have to rely on the advice and counsel of Rumsfeld, Shelton, Myers and Tenet” (Woodward 37).This again speaks to the parallels between Bush and Hitler: both auditioned political theory without any practical planning as to how to manifest their goals.