Edbauer Rice - Executive

It is a scary thought that "Bush's popular image" as "The Dumb Jock" is "hardly a source of source of shame" (p. 2). It is even scarier that "Bush's miscommunications are more than rhetorical blunderings" (p. 2). As is argued in the Edbauer Rice piece "Executive Overspill: Affective Bodies, Intensity. and Bush-in-Relation," these attributes and faults have worked to our former president's advantage. As posited in the piece, these characteristics present problems for "cultural theory, as well as the political left" (p. 2). This is an effective iteration of the issues associated with Bush's presidency as a reflection on the American public, as well as a legitimate basis for questioning the public's ability to sustain a proper democracy.

"Executive Overspill" attempts to explain the counterintuitive functionality of Bush's idocracy via affect. The author states:

"I can think of no better exemplar than Bush, who is certainly not describable only in terms of qualification. (Has one ever seen a more unqualified executive body?) Calling on this body, then, I want to extend Massumi's call for the creation of a cultural vocabulary of affect by tracing three lines, three key terms, of the affective body: relational intensity, the sensation of involvement, and thought-impingement. I argue that we must begin to develop a cultural-theoretical vocabulary of and for affective bodies beyond those existing vocabularies of signification. Not only can such vocabularies bring both halves of the event into focus, but this exploration also offers a material re/description of the (political) body as an effect of affect. Moreover, this reading does not apply merely to President Bush's decomposing body, but to cultural theory as such. In other words, a bodily theory of affect can become a launching pad for a more complete response to cultural-political scenes. What follows is a thus a double gesture of analysis: I want to generate an affective vocabulary via the spectacle of Bush's decomposing body, as well as a reading of this body across our developing vocabulary of affect. I suggest that such vocabularies can only be generated in a simultaneous co-emergence with(in) sites of cultural analysis. They emerge, that is, through unqualified exemplars" (p. 6).

I feel that this proposal comes from a position that relies far to heavily on an inaccurate understanding of the American public. The complex nature of this proposal incorporates elements of explanation and resolution that is rooted in a higher level of thinking that cannot be understood or utilized by the masses. This also seems to be logic which, in my opinion, complicates the understanding of Bush's bizarrely successful embrace of the role of "the village idiot." Is it that Rice wants to understand the issue at hands in terms only accessible to the intellectual elite? I fail to see the value of the "creation of a cultural vocabulary" as anything more than a means of unnecessary description. A good analogy for this would be the technology divide that exists between the rich and the poor. Society has a incredibly uneven distribution of   access to new technologies. I feel that there is a simliar problem associated with education, and there would be a similar problem with Rice's "cultural vocabulary." It would not be something that most people would be able to relate to or understand, most American's already have a poor vocabulary already.