The Bush Dyslexicon
July 12, 2001
Book review by Olaf the White

The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder
by Mark Crispin Miller
304 pages (May 29, 2001) W.W. Norton & Company
Buy it!

The Bush Dyslexicon is the most comprehensive book on the subject of Resident shrub, the forces that made his selection possible and the resident's disturbingly vacant mental landscape. Most of the books that have addressed selection 2000 have addressed one aspect of the phenomenon such as the Supreme Kangaroo Court decision, the resident's vacuity, or the resident's corruption. In some cases an author has focused on one while noting another.

In The Bush Dyslexicon, Mark Crispin Miller tackles all of these issues as well as the phenomenon of the making of the resident by TV, the historical forces which have shaped the contemporary GOP with a special review of the Nixon legacy in which Bush Sr. participated, and in many cases provides the context for some of the more notorious shrubisms.

It's this last enterprise that most clearly sets this book apart as a serious treatment of the national affliction that the Supreme Kangaroo Court willed to the American People on December 12, 2000. Most authors are content to take the numerous shrubisms and present them for laughs as if the comic value of the Bush family's butchery of the English language was the silver lining to the cloud of their participation in politics. In this book the shrubisms are presented, and in many cases they are still good for a laugh, but in many others they cease to be funny when they are put into their proper context.

This book treats the shrub phenomenon as symptomatic of a national disorder that afflicts the body politic. It is a must read for anyone who wants to participate in the cure.

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