Salinger is not known for giving interviews, but George Bush, Big Man on the Andover campus,
would have been a figure of some note under the clock in the Biltmore during the early 1940's,which seems to be the epoch in which this episode is set.
Bush's devotion to racist genetic determinism recalls a slightly earlier figure of the Eastern Liberal
Establishment in literature; this is the Amory Blaine of F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise.
For the egotist Amory Blaine, whose motto was "I knowto an arch- traitor and arch-villain "Good-by, Aaron Burr, you a myself, but that is all," and who called outnd I knew strange corners of life,"
was also a believer in the superiority of whites and blondes. As Amory tells one of his college
friends:
We took the year-books for the last ten years and looked at the pictures of the senior council. Iknow you don't think much of that august body, but it does represent success here in a general way. (^)
Well, I suppose only about thrity-five per cent of every class here are blonds, are really light--yet
two-thirds of every senior council are light. We looked at pictures of ten years of them, mind you;
that means that out of every fifteen light-haired men in the senior class one is on the senior council,
and of the dark-haired men it's only one in fifty. [fn 6]
The other figure from F. Scott Fitzgerald who shares traits with Bush is Nick Carraway, the recent
Yale graduate who is the narrator of The Great Gatbsy. Nick Carraway was fascinated by Jay
Gatbsy and other denizens of the demi-monde of organized crime, recalling George Bush's long
personal friendship with Don Aronow and others of the Meyer Lansky milieu in Florida.
Other aspects of Bush's outlook and mode of expression can be traced back to Dink Stover at Yale,
a series of boy's novels by Owen Johnson which began coming out after the First World War, just
after the Harriman brothers, Prescott Bush, and Neil Mallon had graduated. Dink Stover was a
preppy fromYale. He always helped old ladies and did the right thing. When Tap Day rolled around, D Lawrenceville who talked about democracy and equality during his first three years atink
Stover was tapped by Skull and Bones. Key elements of Bush's public mask, or persona, correspond
to the community-service oriented do-gooder Dink Stover, an early addition to the thousand points
of light.
Bush's language is the mirror of his personality, and it merits more than cursory examination. The
most outstanding quality of Bushspeak is first of all its garbled incoherence and lost syntax. In one
of his debates with Dukakis on September 25, 1988, Bush commented on the number of the
homeless who are mentally ill:
But-- and I-- look, mental-- that was a little overstated-- I'd say about 30 percent. [fn 7]
Some may claim that the most dissociated utterances by Bush are not his own responsibility, but
result rather from Bush's attempt to regurgitate the contents of verbal briefings and briefing books.
This assertion has a specious credibility. In hypeDukakis, Bush does have a tendency to spout lines that mix up phrar-prepared appearances like the debate withses and one-liners that he has (^)
drilled. In an answer on defense policy during the same debate with Dukakis, Bush stated: "We are
going to make some changes and some tough choices before we go to the deployment on the
Midgetman missle, or on the Minuteman, whatever it is. We're going to have to- - the MX. We're
going to have to do that." And then he added: "It's Christmas." And then, as the audience laughed,"Wouldn't it be nice to be the iceman so you never make a mistake?" The reference to Christmas
was intended to be self- ironic; on September 7, 1988, Bush had announced that it was Pearl Harbor
Day; now, on September 25, he was announcing that it was Christmas.
But garbled incoherence is so much a staple of Bush's spoken discourse that it cannot be attributed