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Sore Winners: (And the Rest of Us) in George Bush's America [Secure Mobipocket/Microsoft Reader/eReader (recommended)]
eBook by John Powers
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eBook Category: Politics/Government/General Nonfiction
eBook Description:  The dollars are green. The terror level is orange. And everybody's seeing red. Welcome to Bush World. Rich, scary, and insanely polarized, America is living through one of the wildest eras in its history. In this delicious hybrid of pop mythology and political commentary, John Powers offers an irreverent guided tour of what he dubs "Bush World"--with its terror attacks and obsession with Martha Stewart, its preemptive wars and celebrations of shopping. Sore Winners takes a fresh new look at the multiple personas of the Real Slim Shady, George W. Bush, the gloating Social Darwinism of shows like Survivor and The Apprentice, and the right-wing triumph of Fox News and the ranting "Id Conservatives." Whether pondering our two greatest white rappers, Eminem and Donald Rumsfeld, or the amazing rise of Gubna Schwarzenegger, the book paints a freewheeling portrait of a society in which racial politics are symbolized by the "Colin and Condi Show," gay-marriage opponents battle with Queer Eye's Fab Five, and religious fundamentalism is everywhere--from Mel Gibson's Passion to America's bogeyman, Osama bin Laden. As he charts the sometimes comic tale of the left's attempts to escape from Bush World--Michael Moore and Paul Krugman leading the charge--Powers explores the need for liberals to reclaim virtue from sanctimonious conservatives and take back the political agenda. Witty and wide-ranging rather than narrowly political, Sore Winners is one of the smartest, most enjoyable books on American culture in years.
eBook Publisher: Random House, Inc./Doubleday
Fictionwise Release Date: August 2004
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Available eBook Formats [Secure Mobipocket/Microsoft Reader/eReader (recommended) - What's this?]: SECURE MOBIPOCKET FORMAT [761 KB], SECURE MICROSOFT READER FORMAT [678 KB] - Requires Microsoft Reader 2.1.1 for PCs, or Microsoft Reader 2.2.2 on Pocket PC 2002 handheld devices. Some older Pocket PCs can be upgraded. Learn More., SECURE EREADER (RECOMMENDED) FORMAT [477 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [804 KB]
All formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED
Microsoft Reader ISBN: 9780307275097
Adobe Reader ISBN: 9780307275097
Mobipocket Reader ISBN: 9780307275097
eReader ISBN: 9780385513425
GEOGRAPHIC RESTRICTIONS: Available to customers in: US, CA What's this?
 
"Powers’s Sore Winners is surreally comprehensive, laserously observant, 85 percent correct, and refreshingly unshrill." -- David Foster Wallace
"It’s so hard, these days, to cut through the noise and nonsense and get it right. The polymath Powers has done it, with this grand confection of wit, insight and blazing, level-headed honesty. Delicious!" -- Ron Suskind, author of A Hope in the Unseen and The Price of Loyalty "A disturbing trip down memory lane that places the last four years in true, horrible relief. John Powers takes us into the funhouse – and then shows us a way out." -- Colson Whitehead, author of John Henry Days and The Colossus of New York "John Powers’s Sore Winners is an angry but astonishingly good-humored and generous account of the degraded political and media culture of the Bush era. Powers has read everything, watched everything, and come out of his obsession with his sanity and sense of proportion intact. A true populist intellectual, he has a sharp eye for elitism, the cant of the powerful, and the paralyzing dullness of his own side. I can’t imagine a better guide for anyone trying to get his head screwed on right and mount a free-swinging attack on the worst president and the crassest popular culture in recent American history." -- David Denby, New Yorker film critic and author of American Sucker "While reading this funny and engaging book, I felt the hair I had torn out reading David Brooks start to grow back." -- David Rees, author of Get Your War On "Here’s a uniquely tart, perceptive, penetrating assessment of George W. Bush’s unreal White House. It’s taken more than three years, but American writers are finally gaining the measure of how and why this Administration rules the way it does. John Powers gets it – and his passionate, serious, and at times hilarious book will make you wiser, even as it makes you wince at the state of the Union." -- Sean Wilentz, Dayton-Stockton Professor of History, Director of American Studies, Princeton University
The Six Faces of George W. Bush
Will the Real Slim Shady please stand up
Please stand up, Please stand up
–Eminem
On June 4, 2002, President George W. Bush held a diplomatic summit with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinean Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas at a palace in Aqaba, a small coastal city best known for the Hollywood-fed myth that it had once been captured by Lawrence of Arabia. After the day's discussions, the leaders strolled together toward the world’s cameras, crossing a bridge built over a swimming pool. It was the kind of culminating image, fat with metaphor–the bridging of divided peoples, the President acting as a uniter–that the Bush White House likes to call “the money shot,” perhaps oblivious of its porn-world associations. The President’s advance team hadn’t just mapped out the leaders’ path, as earlier White House staffs might have done. They had asked the Jordanians to build a bridge over the pool so that Bush and the others could walk over water on their way to the banks of cameras. When the first bridge proved too narrow to accommodate the men side by side, the Bush people had it torn down and a new one built that was wide enough. They were well aware that this visual iconography would matter far more to American TV viewers than anything the President would actually say.
Ever since Parson Weems cooked up the story of George Washington and the cherry tree, our presidents have come robed in mythology, much of it consciously crafted. In the 1920s, the founding father of American advertising, Edward L. Bernays, was asked to help Calvin Coolidge fight the perception that he was icy and remote. Bernays brought Al Jolson and a cohort of his fellow vaudevilleans to breakfast at the White House, an event that prompted the humanizing headline “President Nearly Laughs”–and opened the gate for events staged by media advisors (or pseudo-events, as Daniel Boorstin termed them). Just as advertising has grown more sophisticated in the last eighty years, so has presidential image making. If it was by serendipity that the musical Camelot opened less than one month after John F. Kennedy was elected president, it was his widow Jackie who, in her sole interview after his assassination, planted the idea of America happy-ever-aftering in that fantasy of JFK’s White House.
Spooked by the power of Kennedy’s dashing image, Richard Nixon put himself in the hands of media advisors in 1968, and, as Joe McGinnis famously chronicled in The Selling of the President, they pulled off an extraordinary feat. Tricky Dick was repackaged as The New Nixon, a changed man whose painfully forced smile was something a divided nation could believe in. Small wonder that the Nixon team’s techniques were studied and refined by Ronald Reagan, who invested every manipulated scenario with enormous charisma, and Bill Clinton, who knew all the tricks in The Gipper’s playbook–it wasn’t for nothing that the boy from racy Hot Springs, Arkansas, sold himself as The Man from Hope.
The current White House has scrutinized these precedents and more. No president has controlled his PR more tightly than Bush, who watched aghast as his father lost control of his persona–going from sturdy Cold Warrior to vomiting babbler–and plummeted from 89 percent approval ratings in the summer of 1991 to 37.7 percent of the vote in the 1992 election....
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