(Re)enacting frontier justice: The bush administration's tactical narration of the old west fantasy after September 11

Quarterly Journal of Speech

Volumn 92, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 379-412

  West, Mark ^a,b,c   Carey, Chris ^d,e,f  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON   (United States)

^b NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^c USAID Judicial Strengthening Initiative ^*

^d SOUTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^e PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^f ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Fantasy; Frontier; Myth; Narrative; Presidential address

Indexed keywords

EID: 34547745921     PISSN: 00335630     EISSN: 14795779     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00335630601076326     Document Type: Article

References (156)

1. George W. Bush, "Guard and Reserves 'Define Spirit of America": Remarks by the President to Employees at the Pentagon," The White House website, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010917-3. html (accessed 27 September 2001).
2. William F. Lewis, "Telling America's Story: Narrative Form and the Reagan Presidency," Quarterly Journal of Speech 73 (1987): 280-302.
3. For a review of the descriptions of the President's use of epideictic rhetoric in response to September 11 see Bostdorff's discussion of Bush's appeal to Puritan roots, and Murphy's review of Bush's various uses of virtuous narration to place himself as the synecdoche for the American people. Denise Bostdorff, "George W. Bush's Post-September 11 Rhetoric of Covenant Renewal: Upholding the Faith of the Greatest Generation," Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (2003): 293-319;
4. and John M. Murphy, "'Our Mission and Our Moment': George W. Bush and September 11," Rhetoric and Public Affairs 6 (2003): 607-32.
5. Bostdorff, "George W. Bush's Post-September 11 Rhetoric," 294.
6. Murphy, "Our Mission and Our Moment," 620.
7. In her introductory paragraph, Bostdorff describes the "dead or alive" standard as an "offhand remark," 293. Murphy hints at the Old West master strategy in his inquiry, but only briefly, when discussing the virility of the Todd Beamer reference during Bush's 2002 State of the Union Address. Murphy notes the Reaganesque move of visual rhetoric, but stops short of exploring this as a specific and ongoing synecdochic vehicle: [Through the] sight of Lisa Beamer, the applause, followed by the amplification of common televisual experience... the action the nation should take was clear, acts compelled by the pictures we saw and the pregnant grieving widow whom the president displayed. A western sheriff, in the tradition of Ronald Reagan, knew what justice meant for men who made pregnant wives widows. (619-20)
8. Ernest G. Bormann has defended symbolic convergence theory (SCT) in the context of the postmodern critique by Joshua Gunn, explaining how the rhetorical process can create symbolic realities through conscious imaginations, thus allowing for seemingly contradictory interweaving of messages. Gunn responds that fantasy chains are more likely the work of the unconscious, and that the scholar whose work was foundational for Bormann - Robert Freed Bales-would agree that the process is unconscious, best understood through a Freudian psychoanalytic approach. Whether unconscious or conscious, the presidential narrators of the frontier myth evidently expect a fantasy chain, or in-rush of memory, that comes from witnessing this defining cultural myth, especially as applied to a war effort aimed in large part at revenge. Bormann, "Defending Symbolic Convergence Theory from an Imaginary Gunn," Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (2003): 366-72;
9. Gunn, "Refiguring Fantasy: Imagination and Its Decline in U.S. Rhetorical Studies," Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (2003): 41-59;
10. and Gunn, "Refitting Fantasy: Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, and Talking to the Dead," Quarterly Journal of Speech, 90 (2004): 1-23.
11. See LeRoy G. Dorsey, "The Frontier Myth in Presidential Rhetoric," Western Journal of Communication 59 (1995): 1-19;
12. LeRoy G. Dorsey, "The Myth of War and Peace in Presidential Discourse: John F. Kennedy and the Peace Corps," Southern Communication Journal 62 (1996): 42-55;
13. Janice Hocker Rushing, "Ronald Reagan's 'Star Wars' Address," Quarterly Journal of Speech 72 (1986): 415-33.
14. George W. Bush, President Bush's address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People ("Justice Will Be Done"), September 20, 2001, http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/ gwbush911jointsessionspeech.htm (accessed January 24, 2003).
15. Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1985).
16. Walter R. Fisher, "The Narrative Paradigm: An Elaboration," Communication Monographs 52 (1985): 347-57.
17. Ernest G. Bormann, "Fantasy and Rhetorical Vision: the Rhetorical Criticism of Social Reality," Quarterly Journal of Speech 58 (1972): 401. As this essay does not seek to provide evidence of audience effects, but only to look at the deployment of a narrative tactic, fantasy theme analysis can help explain why Bush and Cheney may have repeatedly chosen the frontier narrative to create a symbolic reality (the Reagan mantle placed on Bush's actions) with key audiences. In the context of political communication and the presidency, fantasy theme analysis can be "a tool for evaluating a rhetorical discourse, which focuses on the message."
18. William L. Benoitt, Andrew A. Klyukovski, John P. McHale, and David Aime, "A Fantasy Theme Analysis of Political Cartoons on the Clinton-Lewinsky-Starr Affair," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 18 (2001): 379.
19. Walter R. Fisher, "Romantic Democracy, Ronald Reagan, and Presidential Heroes," Western Journal of Speech Communication 46 (1982): 299-310;
20. Janice Hocker Rushing, "Mythic Evolution of 'The New Frontier' in Mass Mediated Rhetoric," Critical Studies in Media Communication 3 (1986): 265-96.
21. Lewis, "Telling America's Story," 282.
22. Bormann, "Fantasy and Rhetorical Vision," 401.
23. The Wall Street Journal Harris Poll shows President Bush's job approval rating for February through August at 56, 49, 59, 50, 56, and 52 percentage points respectively (no poll was taken in April), http://online.wsj.com/public/article/sb112481890611420718-
24. Janice Hocker Rushing, "Frontierism and the Materialism of the Psyche," Southern Journal of Communication 56 (1991): 270;
25. LeRoy G. Dorsey, "We Want Americans Pure and Simple," Rhetoric and Public Affairs 6 (2003): 55-78.
26. Rushing, "Mythic Evolution," 1.
27. Edward Everett Dale, "The Speech of the Frontier," Quarterly Journal of Speech 27 (1941): 354.
28. Robert D. Clark, "The Influence of the Frontier on American Political Oratory," Quarterly Journal of Speech 28 (1942): 283.
29. Scholars of rhetoric have long traced these first-hand narrative imprints on the national political narrative, from analyses of frontier speech codes in disputes over statehood to the canonizing of Old West lawmen and the revisionist history of media accounts bringing frontier heroines back into the public mind. See: Frances Lea McCurdy, "Invective in Frontier Missouri," Quarterly Journal of Speech 46 (1960): 54-8;
30. Albert Lewis, "Diamond-back Jack: A Study in Frontier Justice," Quarterly Journal of Speech 56 (1970): 456-7;
31. and Carol Lomicky, "Frontier Feminism," Journalism History 28 (1992): 102.
32. Gary C. Woodward, "Reagan as Roosevelt: The Elasticity of Pseudo-Populist Appeals," Central States Speech Journal 34 (1983): 53-8.
33. Dorsey, "The Frontier Myth."
34. Dorsey, "We Want Americans."
35. The rhetorical narration of this defining cultural myth reaches across both sides of the aisle, so that even a Massachusetts liberal like John F. Kennedy could attempt to embody the Western hero and in turn bless his new and controversial policies. Kennedy's promotion of the Peace Corps relied heavily on portraying the world as a widened frontier, and the need for the United States to spread its values of peace and democracy through the efforts of volunteer American heroes who would convert swords into plowshares. See Leroy G. Dorsey, "The Myth of War and Peace in Presidential Discourse: John F. Kennedy and the Peace Corps," Southern Communication Journal 62 (1996): 42-55.
36. At the same time, with a new conflict brewing in a faraway land, Kennedy sought to lionize the U.S. soldiers sent to Vietnam to begin what would become nearly 15 years of war. His narrative choice was to paint the Green Berets as frontier heroes - a parallel to the rare pro-Vietnam War Hollywood film that was released a few years later, called Green Berets (1968),
37. and starring none other than John Wayne. See Justin Gustanis, "JFK and the Green Berets," Communication Studies 40 (1989): 41-53.
38. Lewis, "Telling America's Story," 295.
39. Fisher, "Romantic Democracy," 299-310; Woodward, "Reagan as Roosevelt," 44.
40. Lewis, "Telling America's Story," 299.
41. William L. Benoit, "Reagan, Republican 1984," in Texts of Television Spots: 1984-1996, http://www.missouri.edu/~commwlb/html/84-96. html (accessed March 1, 2004).
42. Ibid.
43. In 1989 Bush told Time magazine, "My biggest liability in Texas is the question, 'What's the boy ever done?' He could be riding on Daddy's name."
44. Alan Ramsey, The Sydney Morning Herald, February 15, 2003, http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/02/14/1044927799034.html (accessed April 16, 2004).
45. Long before Bush first referenced the "crusade" on September 16, the concept of the coming "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West had begun to develop in political circles. The lightning-quick response to the president's war/crusade rhetoric was likely due to the 1990s debate about Samuel Huntington's alliterative phrase. See Dana L. Cloud, "'To Veil the Threat of Terror': Afghan Women and the 〈Clash of Civilizations〉 in the Imagery of the U.S. War on Terrorism," Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 285-306.
46. George W. Bush, The White House website, "President: Today We Mourned, Tomorrow We Work," http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/ 09/20010916-2.html (accessed April 14, 2004).
47. Murphy, "Our Mission and Our Moment."
48. Ibid.
49. Todd Gitlin, "Grasping Ruins," openDemocracy, September 25, 2001, http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/article-2-47-211.jsp (accessed January 4, 2002).
50. Gitlin, "Grasping Ruins," 31-6.
51. Other scholars have compared this rhetorical strategy of the president to "calling out the demons" in relation to religious exorcisms. Joshua Gunn again, "The Rhetoric of Exorcism: George W. Bush and the Return of Political Demonology," Western Journal of Speech Communication 68 (2004): 1-23.
52. Rushing, "Mythic." See also Scott Ritter, Frontier Justice (New York: Context Books, 2003): 17.
53. George Acorn, Michael Riley, and Richard Kremmer, "America the Avenging Angel," Sydney Morning Herald on the Web, November 15, 2001, http://newsstore.f2.com.au/apps/newssearch.ac?sysmh (accessed December 12, 2001).
54. "War in Iraq: Pentagon's Deck of Most Wanted Iraqis," CNN.com, http://www.cnn.com/2003/world/meast/06/05/iraqi.captured/index/ html (accessed November 15, 2003).
55. "Bush: We're Hunting Him Down," Newsmax.com, November 20, 2001, http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/11/19/185825.shtml (accessed April 16, 2004).
56. George W. Bush, "President Bush Addresses the Nation," The White House website, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/03/ 20030319-17.html (accessed January 4, 2006).
57. George W. Bush, "President Bush Announces Major Combat Operations Have Ended," The White House website, http://www.whitehouse.gov/ news/releases/2003/05/20030501-15.html (accessed January 4, 2006).
58. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company: 2000), 1249.
59. See also the world wide web search engine Google.com, which lists seven of the top ten hits for the word "outlaw" as Old West references, http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=outlaw (accessed January 20, 2006).
60. Former U.N. Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter picked up the "outlaw" connotation: "Justice needed to be served, frontier justice, through a war ostensibly waged to preserve democracy and the American way of life from the threat of an outlaw regime." Frontier Justice, 48. As did Village Voice author Erik Baard, who noted that the President "branded Saddam Hussein's Iraq 'an outlaw regime' and took the vanquished dictator's pistol as a trophy." "George W. Bush Ain't No Cowboy," September 28, 2004, http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0439,baard,57117,1.html (accessed October 18, 2004).
61. The masters of these rituals are also paid to recall that, later in the 19th century, Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt left his cushy Washington job to fight on horseback with the Rough Riders in the Battle of San Juan Hill during the Spanish-American War. While Secretary Roosevelt may not have been positioning himself as a Western hero for his later presidential run, the 1898 performance in Cuba likely didn't hurt matters.
62. Margaret T. Drewal, "Embodied Practice/Embodied History: Mastery of Metaphor in the Performances of Diviner Ositola," in The Yoruba Artist: New Theoretical Perspectives on African Arts, ed. Rowland Abiodun, Henry J. Drewal, and John Pemberton III (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 2003): 171. Drewal's research among the Yoruba casts a helpful light on the machinations of presidential press conferences. Just as the Yoruba performers indicate different narratives with their various tropes - such as placing white ash atop the shaven head of a young man performing his coming of age ritual, to represent the white color of the birth caul - the president indicates different narratives with his own choices: faith v. an axis of evil, a firefighter hero atop a vehicle at Ground Zero, and the "wanted poster" indicating himself as a frontier sheriff.
63. Ibid.
64. American newspapers were filled with frontier references following the President's remarks in Fall 2001. USA Today, a national paper reaching a cross-section of middle American audiences, featured 34 articles with "dead or alive" references in the first three months after Bush's September 17 comment.
65. See the newspaper's archive at http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/usatoday/. Student newspaper columnist David Weigel wrote in an October 2001 edition of the Northwestern Chronicle about his experience researching fellow students' reactions to the President's use of the cowboy metaphor.
66. Weigel, who had been sitting with classmates watching a televised presidential address, noted: "And then the President said, 'We're gonna smoke them out.' A girl to my left laughed and said, 'Yee-haw cowboy!'" David Weigel, Northwestern Chronicle, October 19, 2001, 1.
67. This connection made by an audience member shows the possibility of an expanded fantasy structure based on a single frontier reference. The instantaneous nature of the student's remark further highlights the quick and lasting effects of the fantasy theme. President Bush chose to enact one part of the Old West myth (the cattleman), invited his viewers to fill in their own parts, and the student did just that. She performed a response in parody that exceeded the initial reference, adding laughter, a horse-rider's cry, and the actual word "cowboy." These multiple layers of reference - the historical frontier, and the myth embodied by Reagan, used by Bush, then parodied by the viewer - evince the thick and lasting layers of this narrative. Even the parody in this context refuels the frontier reference, traversing and binding several layers of text to a simple reference to the hunting of vermin. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York: Methuen Press, 1985).
68. Scott Ritter, a U.S. Marine veteran of the first Gulf War, and U.N. weapons inspector for seven years, described Bush's March 19, 2003 call to battle ((Frontier Justice, 48): The President could very well have been a frontier sheriff, explaining to the assembled town folk why he was taking their men out on a posse, to hunt down a dangerous criminal element. The (outlaw) regime of Saddam Hussein was threatening the edges of civilized society, and the frontier was at risk. Justice needed to be served, frontier justice, through a war ostensibly waged to preserve democracy and the American way of life from the threat of an outlaw regime possessing illegal weapons of mass destruction. "Chain-out" is a phrase from Bormann discussed by Gunn: "Refitting Fantasy," 5.
69. George W. Bush, "Remarks by the President to the Greater Portland Chambers of Commerce Meeting," The White House website, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/03/20010323.html (accessed October 25, 2005).
70. George W. Bush, "Remarks by the President to YMCA Picnic," The White House website, http://www.whitehouse.gov/kids,connection/ 20010814-4.html (accessed October 25, 2005).
71. The White House provides a complete library of the President Bush's public addresses, catalogued on its website in full text: http://www.whitehouse. gov.
72. Ibid.
73. For a discussion of the primacy effect see Ralph Rosnow, "Whatever Happened to the 'Law of Primacy'?" Journal of Communication 16 (1966): 10-31,
74. and Ralph Rosnow and Edward J. Robinson, Experiments in Persuasion (New York: Academic Press: 1967).
75. George W. Bush, "President Celebrates Independence Day," The White House website, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/07/ 20040704.html (accessed January 5, 2006),
76. and "President's Remarks in Greeley, Colorado," The White House website, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/10/20041025-4. html (accessed January 5, 2006).
77. George W. Bush, "President's Remarks at Ask President Bush Event," The White House website, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/ releases/2004/09/20040910-16.html (accessed January 5, 2006).
78. George W. Bush, "President's Remarks on Healthy Forests," The White House website, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/08/ 20030821-4.html (accessed October 30, 2005).
79. George W. Bush, "Remarks by the President at Bush-Cheney 2004 Reception," The White House website, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/ releases/2003/11/20031125-15.html (accessed April 1, 2004).
80. George W. Bush, "President Bush Meets with First-Time Homebuyers in NM and AZ," The White House website, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/ releases/2004/03/20040326-9.html (accessed November 1, 2005).
81. George W. Bush, "President's Remarks at Victory 2004 Reception," The White House website, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/ releases/2004/06/20040601-15.html (accessed November 1, 2004).
82. George W. Bush, "President's Remarks in Sioux City, Iowa," The White House website, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/11/ 20041101-20.html (accessed November 12, 2005).
83. George W. Bush, "President Discusses Strengthening Social Security in Montana," The White House website, http://www.whitehouse.gov/ news/releases/2005/02/20050203-13.html (accessed January 8, 2006).
84. Jay DeFoore, "Reagan's Death Returns Photographer to the Limelight," Photo District News, June 10, 2004, http://www. pdnonline.com/pdn/search/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000529649 (accessed January 5, 2006).
85. Bill Alman, "Ask the White House," The White House Website, http://www.whitehouse.gov/ask/20030605.html (accessed on January 20, 2006).
86. Twice prior to September 11 Cheney referred to Wyoming in the introductions to his speeches, but the context included the subject of Wyoming. One took place in the state of Wyoming: Dick Cheney, "Remarks of the Vice President at the Transfer of the JY Ranch," The White House website, http://www.whitehouse.gov/vicepresident/news-speeches/speeches/vp20010526.html (accessed November 7, 2004).
87. The other was during a speech to honor the recipient of the National Park Ranger Award: Dick Cheney, "Remarks by the Vice President - Presentation of the Harry Yount National Park Ranger Award," The White House website, http://www.whitehouse.gov/vicepresident/news-speeches/speeches/ vp20010427.html (accessed November 7, 2004).
88. Like the corpus of President Bush, the total number of the Vice President's speeches referencing the frontier was taken from the official White House archive, in the section that collects all formal public addresses of the Vice President: http://www.whitehouse.gov/vicepresident/news-speeches/.
89. Mrs. Cheney tells a story from their youth, demonstrating her husband's work ethic and cowboy credentials. Two examples of the same anecdote are placed in speech introductions from late in the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign. First, on September 10, 2004, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin: "He used to dig ditches at the Central Wyoming Fair and Rodeo Grounds." Lynne Cheney, "Vice President and Mrs. Cheney's Remarks and Q&A at a Town Hall Meeting," The White House website, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/ releases/2004/09/20040913-2.html - 78.5KB (accessed November 7, 2004).
90. Second, on September 29, 2004, in Duluth, Minnesota: "I've known him since he was digging ditches at the Central Wyoming Fair and Rodeo Grounds." Lynne Cheney, "Vice President and Mrs. Cheney's Remarks and Q&A at a Town Hall Meeting in Duluth, Minnesota," The White House website, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/09/20040929-7.html - 79.5KB (accessed November 7, 2004).
91. Although Vice President Cheney's references began earlier than the President's, the remarks prior to the beginning of the Iraq war were limited to a very few instances. These involved placement of Western references in introductory paragraphs: naming himself as a "fellow Westerner" and speaking of Texas at a pair of Republican events in Washington in late October 2001; and the phrase "back home in Wyoming" at another Washington event four months later in February 2002.
92. Dick Cheney, "Remarks by the Vice President at Bush-Cheney '04 Luncheon," The White House website, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/ releases/2003/09/20030922-6.html (accessed November 7, 2004).
93. Dick Cheney, "Vice President's Remarks at Reception," The White House website, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/08/ 20030812-1.html (accessed November 7, 2004).
94. Dick Cheney, "Remarks by the Vice President at the Bush-Cheney 2004 Reception," The White House website, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/ releases/2003/06/20030630-9.html (accessed November 7, 2004).
95. Dick Cheney, "Remarks by the Vice President at a Luncheon for Congressman Steve Pearce," The White House website, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/03/20040316-4.html (accessed November 7, 2004).
96. Lewis, 296.
97. Cheney, "Remarks," The White House website, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/06/20030630-9.html.
98. Cheney delivered the line "I saw the conviction and moral courage of Ronald Reagan" in the conclusions of his speeches on the following dates: June 30; July 15; August 6 and 12; September 5, 12, 15, and 22; October 24, 29, and 31; November 6, 17, 17 (two speeches), 18, 24, and 24 (two speeches); December 5 and 12; and January 13 and 15. On August 7, 2003 Cheney also referenced Reagan in the conclusion of his speech, but used a different alliterative phrase: "decisive, determined leader." See the Vice President's speeches at: http://www.whitehouse.gov/vicepresident/news-speeches/.
99. Ibid.
100. President Bush's cowboy credentials themselves are open to question. He was born in Connecticut and summered in Maine. His blueblood education began at the most exclusive of Boston boarding schools, Phillips-Andover Academy; then he went to Yale, then Harvard. Yes, his family moved to Midland, Texas, where he would later set up a career. And yes, Bush would become part-owner of the Rangers, then Governor of Texas. But these are just words - "Rangers," "Texas" - and when seen through the discursivity of space, one must remember that the words come with city jobs. The reality for a Midland man raised with a silver spoon in his mouth doesn't appear to match the Old West archetype. Native rural Texan and cowboy scholar Dian Malouf sees a disconnect: "Wearing boots doesn't make you a cowboy." She explains, "I'm in Midland lots, and I haven't seen a Midland cowboy yet.... Bush and Cheney are not cowboys by any stretch of the imagination. Cowboys are silent types, remote but genuine, with serious integrity and caring. They are a bit rough and work hard, and they don't want to call attention to themselves the way George W. Bush kind of does. I know and admire cowboys." Erik Baard, "George W. Bush Ain't No Cowboy," The Village Voice, September 28, 2004, http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0439,baard,57117,1.html (accessed October 18, 2004).
101. Staff Writer, "Major Events in U.S. Presidential Campaign 2000," Reuters News Service, Center for Voting and Democracy website, http://www.fairvote.org/e_news/pres_campaign_events_2000.htm (accessed June 18, 2003).
102. Steve Schifferes, "Bush Keeps Promise to Stay Out of Son's Way," Topeka Capital-Journal Website, June 10, 2000, http://www.cjonline.com/stories/o61000/new_bush.shtml (accessed April 16, 2004).
103. Donal Carbaugh, '"Just Listen': 'Listening' and Landscape Among the Blackfeet," Western Journal of Communication 63 (1999): 250-70.
104. Kenneth Burke's dramatic pentad serves as a useful starting point for appreciating the rhetorical force of place in a campaign of persuasion. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1945). The pentad reminds us to focus on the scene of a rhetorical act. Investigations of a defining cultural myth might also do well to borrow from its neighbors in the field of visual anthropology. In his recent survey of the early decades of that discipline, Jay Ruby struck a similar chord to Burke when he wrote: "Culture is conceived of as manifesting itself in scripts with plots involving actors and actresses with lines, costumes, props, and settings."
105. Jay Ruby, "The Professionalization of Visual Anthropology in the United States: The 1960s and 1970s," Visual Anthropology Review 17 (2000-2001): 10-11. In this instance the actor is a president, the lines include "dead or alive," the costume is a hat and boots, and the props feature a wanted poster and the most sophisticated army in the world. What these pieces need is an Old West setting, and that is provided to the audience by the Crawford, Texas ranch.
106. Visual landscape can provide a crucial link to the audience: it is a place large enough for the audience to join the rhetor, a place where it can receive an invitation to participate in a defining cultural myth. J. Anthony Blair explains in "The Rhetoric of Visual Arguments," in Defining Visual Rhetorics, ed. Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 2004), 59: What is the setting [and what] visual imagery will the audience understand and respond to? What historical and cultural modes of visual understanding does the audience bring to the situation? Visual arguers will answer these questions in creating their visual enthymemes, thus drawing the viewer to participate.
107. Eric O'Keefe, "The Bush Ranch," Cowboys and Indians, December 2002, http://www.cowboysindians.com/articles/archives/1202/bush.html (accessed April 17, 2004): The ranch retreat is a presidential tradition that dates back long before Camp David. Ronald Reagan's Rancho del Cielo, and LBJ's Pedernales spread, are only the most recent incarnations of a Western connection to the White House that began with Teddy Roosevelt. It was 1883 when a 24-year-old TR first set foot in Little Missouri, a soon-to-be-forgotten cow town in the Dakota Territory. Intent on overcoming his physical frailties, Roosevelt spent two weeks in the region on his first foray. By the time he left, he had bagged not only a bison but also a stake in the Maltese Cross Ranch.
108. Ibid.
109. Dick Cheney, "Vice President Honors Veterans of Korean War," The White House website, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/08/ 20020829-5.html (accessed April 20, 2004).
110. "President Bush, Prime Minister Blair Hold Press Conference," The White House website, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/04/ images/20020406-3-600h.html (accessed November 7, 2004).
111. Richard Benedetto and Bill Nichols, "Bush Rewards Backers of Iraq War," USA Today, May 18, 2003, http://www.usatoday.com/news/ washington/2003-05-18-retribution-usat_x.htm (accessed May 20, 2003).
112. The Asian press put significant focus on the weeks of mid-May 2003 when Prime Minister Koizumi had another warm meeting with Bush, this time in Crawford, and President Roh was not welcomed to Texas: "[U]nlike Japan's Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, he has not been invited to the more intimate setting of Camp David or the President's Crawford, Texas, ranch." "Uphill task for South Korean leader," BBC Online, May 14, 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3028283.stm (accessed June 2, 2003).
113. Byoung Yoo, PhD Fellow at Stanford University, explained that shame rather than pride was the reaction to the White House visit back home in Seoul: "He wasn't invited to the ranch." Interview by first author, personal interview.
114. "The Daily Show," Comedy Central Network, May 14, 2003.
115. "Bush, Koizumi Discuss Baseball, Role Model Cooper in 'High Noon,'" Japan Today, May 23, 2003, http://www.japantoday.com/gidx/ news260851.html (accessed November 7, 2004).
116. Kyodo News International, "Bush Presents 'High Noon' Poster to Koizumi," Japan Policy and Politics, October 1, 2001, http://www.kyodonews.com/ (accessed January 5, 2006).
117. Japan Today, "Bush, Koizumi Discuss."
118. Takashi Oka, "Japan's Economic High Noon," Christian Science Monitor, January 7, 2002, http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0107/p9s1-coop.html (accessed January 10, 2006).
119. Japan Today, "Bush, Koizumi discuss." For a photo of the two leaders watching the horseback yabusame performance in Japan, see http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/02/20020218.html.
120. George W. Bush, "Bush Outlines Path for Lasting Prosperity in Wednesday Speech," The White House website, http://www.whitehouse. gov/news/releases/2004/04/20040421-5.html (accessed January 7, 2006).
121. George W. Bush, "President's Remarks at Ask Bush Event," The White House website, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/09/ 20040910-16.html (accessed January 7, 2006).
122. Rushing, "Mythic"; Rushing, "Reagan"; Rushing, "Frontierism"; Janice Hocker Rushing, "Alien" Quarterly Journal of Speech 75 (1989): 1-24.
123. Rushing, "Mythic," 15.
124. Ibid.
125. Wayne J. McCullen, "Reconstruction of the Frontier Myth in Witness," Southern Communication Journal 62 (1996): 31-41.
126. Ibid.
127. Rushing, "Mythic," 15.
128. The Wall Street Journal Harris Polls list President Bush's job approval rating for October 2001 through December 2002 at 88, 86, 82, 79, 79, 77, 75, 74, 70, 62, 63, 68, 64, 65, and 64 percentage points respectively.
129. See the discussion in Note 7.
130. Joshua Gunn, "Refitting Fantasy," 4.
131. Robert Ivie, "Metaphor and the Rhetorical Invention of Cold War 'Idealists,'" Communication Monographs 54 (1987): 167.
132. Bush senior's difficulty with the press and "the wimp factor" is pertinent to fantasy theme analysis, both from the conscious (Bormann, SCT) perspective and the unconscious (Gunn, psychoanalytic) perspective on imagination. Gunn ("Refitting Fantasy," 6) explains that the intersection of these two views resides in the question of motive:
133. Once these two senses of motive are understood, it becomes easier to distinguish between fantasy theme analysis as the description of conscious fantasies and their deployment, and psychoanalytic criticism as the interpretation of fantasies as symptoms or traces of unconscious desires.
134. This aspect of the fantasy chain in the Bush story is explained by Norman Soloman in "The Wimp Factor: Goading to Shed Blood," Media Beat on the Web, http://www.fair.org/media-beat/010928.html (accessed April 17, 2004): Back in 1988, the father of our current president was bedeviled by what media outlets called "the wimp factor." After eight years as vice president, George Bush was making a run for the Oval Office. But quite a few journalists kept asking whether he was a tough enough man for the job. Newsweek even headlined the "wimp" epithet in a cover story about him. That image problem faded in late December of 1989, when U.S. troops invaded Panama. The commander-in-chief drew blood - proving to some journalists that he had the right stuff. A New York Times reporter, R. W. Apple, wrote that the assault on Panama was Bush's "presidential initiation rite" - as though military intervention in a Third World nation was mandatory evidence of leadership mettle. But even later, while still ensconced in the White House, the senior Bush remained notably stung by the epithet. He couldn't always keep the pain of it under wraps. "You're talking to the 'wimp,'" President Bush commented on June 16, 1991. "You're talking to the guy that had a cover of a national magazine, that I'll never forgive, put that label on me."
135. Alan Ramsey, "Tom's Bleating about Bush Goes back a Way," The Sydney Morning Herald, February 15, 2003, http://www.smh.com.au/ articles/2003/02/14/1044927799034.html (accessed April 16, 2004).
136. John King, "Bush Calls Saddam the Guy Who Tried to Kill My Dad," CNN.com, September 27, 2002, http://archives.cnn.com/2002/ allpolitics/09/27/bush.war.talk/index.html (accessed January 10, 2006). The BBC describes the particularly potent father-son relationship when it writes: "George W. Bush is a man who has lived in the shadow of his father, former president George Bush, all his life": "
137. George W. Bush, Out of His Father's Shadow," BBC News, November 8, 2000, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/americas/2000/ us_elections/profiles/576504.stm (accessed on January 10, 2006).
138. Gunn, "Refitting Fantasy," 9.
139. See "Online News Hour," PBS, http://www.pbs.org/ newshour/vote2004/candidates/can_bush-political.html (accessed November 8, 2004).
140. The poststructuralist semiotic notion of intertextuality helps in revealing the heightened potency of signs as they reference each other, as an inrush of memories, through a fantasy chain. Just as a text connects reader and author, texts can reach to other texts - or in the case of President Bush, a speech can facilitate an inrush of "frontier heroes" while simultaneously generating an inrush of "Reagan's frontier heroes." For more discussion of the rhetorical force of intertextuality, see Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980).
141. Richard A. Maynard, The American West on Film: Myth and Reality (Rochelle Park: Hayden Book Company, 1974): 125.
142. Fisher, "Romantic Democracy," 305; Lewis, "Telling America's Story," 281; Gary C. Woodward, "Reagan as Roosevelt."
143. Martha Ann Martin, "Ideologues, Ideographs, and 'The Best Men': From Carter to Reagan," Southern Speech Communication Journal 49 (1983): 23.
144. Bush, "Guard and Reserves."
145. Rushing, "Mythic," 15.
146. It is precisely the mix of virtue and vice that appeals to the consumer of the cowboy motif. James P. McDaniel, "Figures for New Frontiers," Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 91-111.
147. David E. Rosenbaum, "Foreign Policy and a Forlorn Senate," International Herald Tribune, May 3, 2004, 1.
148. Ibid.
149. Michael Conlon, "Lawyers Group Slams Bush on Eavesdropping," Reuters, http://go.reuters.com/newsarticle.jhtml?type= topnews&storyid=111974668§ion=news (accessed February 15, 2006).
150. On April 13, the President in his first press conference in several months responded to a reporter's inquiry regarding the dominance of US troops in the coalition. From NYTimes.com, April 13, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/ 2004/04/13/politics/13cndbtex.html?ex=10839888008&en=09073c9d97f87b6f& ei=5070 (accessed April 15, 2004): QUESTION: Mr. President, thank you. You mentioned that 17 of the 26 NATO members providing some help on the ground in Iraq. But if you look at the numbers - 135,000 U.S. troops, 10,000 or 12,000 British troops. Then the next largest, perhaps even the second-largest contingent of guns on the ground are private contractors, literally hired guns. Your critics, including your Democratic opponents, say that's proof to them your coalition is window dressing. How would you answer those critics...? BUSH: Yes, John, my response is I don't think people ought to demean the contributions of our friends into Iraq. People are sacrificing their lives in Iraq from different countries. We ought to honor that, and we ought to welcome that.... I'm proud of the coalition that is there.... I think that one of the things you're seeing is more involvement by the United Nations, in terms of the political process. That's helpful. I'd like to get another U.N. Security Council resolution out that will help other nations to decide to participate.
151. Ritter, 17.
152. Lewis, 296.
153. Lewis, 282.
154. Gunn, "Refitting Fantasy," 4.
155. Lewis, 297.
156. Lewis, 282.