Reading The Bush Dyslexicon is a threat to your mental health. It induces helpless despair. It will also cause you to weep for democracy, will renew your disgust with Al Gore, and make those of you who supported Ralph Nader reconsider your purity in the light of its price. Consisting of a few hundred pages of the shallow thoughts and illiterate speech of George W. Bush punctuated by the author's often brilliant interpretations of this mind-resistant flood, The Bush Dyslexicon raises a disturbing question. How can a man who says things like, "Laura and I don't realize how bright our children is sometimes until we get an objective analysis"; "My education message will resignate amongst all parents"; "I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family"; and "I want a foreign-handed foreign policy"—how can this verbal sloven be President of the United States? Yet he is President, and the aura of office has already begun to rub off on him. His recent televised speech on stem-cell research was clear and reasoned, written by other hands but read by the President as if the words reflected his own thinking. Bush, as Mark Crispin Miller, the author of The Bush Dyslexicon, points out, is not stupid. But on the evidence of the three hundred pages of Bush-speak included in The Bush Dyslexicon, he has the kind of difficulty with language, syntax, and coherence that, had he been born George Smith rather than George Bush, would likely have consigned him to a low-status job—speech being a cruel marker of class disadvantage. An encouraging thought: Bush's ascent is a sign to intelligent people with poor educations that they can overcome the social stigma attached to bad grammar. The fact that we almost always know what Bush means—an even-handed foreign policy, an education message that will resonate—bears out common experience. People with Bush-like problems get their point across all the time.
Explanations of Bush's penchant for barbarisms begin with the obvious: inheritance. W's father, only slightly better-spoken than his son, was a bad role model. In father and son alike poor speech betrays a certain weightlessness of character, reflects lives so gilded that neither man ever had to worry about how he came across. Bush-speak—"Is our children learning?"—sounds low class, but what it really betrays is the psychology of the aristocratic slacker: a "Grand daddy earned the money, I don't even have to try" contempt for earnest striving. As Miller writes in a sentence that deserves to follow Bush into the history books, "When he comments on how many hands he's 'shaked,' or frets that quotas 'vulcanize' society he is, of course, flaunting not his costly education but his disdain for it—much as some feckless prince, with a crowd of beggars watching from the street, might take a few bites from the feast laid out before him, then let the servants throw the rest away."