As soon as I read the President was reading Albert Camus's The Stranger, I had a good laugh. Color me skeptical. Is there going to be a book report? (update, Louis Bayard imagines what the book report might be like)
MoDo agrees.
“The Stranger (Vintage International)” (Albert Camus)
Maureen Dowd: Camus Comes to Crawford
If there was ever a confirmation of Albert Camus's sense of the absurdity of life, it's that the president is reading him.Strangely enough, we find two famous men reading Albert Camus’s “The Stranger” this summer.
One is Jean Girard, the villainous gay French race car driver hilariously played by Sacha Baron Cohen (a k a Ali G and Borat) — the sinuous rival to Will Ferrell’s stocky Ricky Bobby in “Talladega Nights.”
Girard, a jazz-loving, white-silk-scarf-wearing, America-disdaining Formula Un driver sponsored by Perrier, is so smooth he can sip macchiato from a china cup, smoke Gitanes and read “L’Etranger” behind the wheel and still lead the Nascar pack.
Frenchie contemptuously informs “cowboy” Bobby that America merely gave the world George Bush, Cheerios and the ThighMaster while France invented democracy, existentialism and the ménage à trois.
The other guy kindling to Camus is none other than the aforementioned George Bush, who read “The Stranger” in English on his Crawford vacation and, Tony Snow told me, “liked it.” Name-dropping existentialists is good for picking up girls, as Woody Allen’s schlemiels found, or getting through the clove-cigarette fog of Humanities 101. But it does seem odd that W., who once mocked NBC’s David Gregory as “intercontinental” for posing a question in French to the French president in France, would choose Camus over Grisham.
Camus is not beach reading — or brush reading. How on earth did this book make it into the hands of our proudly anti-intellectual president?
“I don’t know how ‘L’Etranger’ made it onto his list,” Mr. Snow said. “I must confess, I read ‘L’Etranger’ 25 years ago.” The rest of W.’s reading list was presidentially correct: two books on Lincoln and the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Polio: An American Story,” by David Oshinsky. (Not a word by Merleau-Ponty.)
Debunking the theory that W. had a sports section or Mad magazine’s “Spy vs. Spy” tucked inside the 1946 classic of angst, Mr. Snow noted that he and the president had “a brief conversation on the origins of French existentialism, Camus and Sartre.” Pressed for more details by an astonished columnist having trouble envisioning Waco as the Left Bank, the press secretary laughed. “Confidential conversation,” he said, extending the administration’s lack of transparency to literature.
uhh, yeah right. Please don't mind me, I'm just giggling. Maybe the Cure got loaded on the President's iPod?
You know, the song,
Killing An Arab from the album, Boys Don't Cry
Or, maybe Mr. Bush happened upon the music video during one of his afternoon YouTube excursions.
(direct link here)
MoDo goes on....
He brushed off suggestions that the supremely unself-reflective W. was going through a Carteresque malaise-in-the-gorge moment: “He doesn’t feel like an existentialist trapped in Algeria during the unpleasantness.”It takes a while to adjust to the idea of W., who has created chaos trying to impose moral order on the globe, perusing Camus, who wrote about the eternal frustration of moral order in human affairs. What does W., the archenemy of absurdity as a view of life, kindle to in C., the apostle of absurdity as a view of life? What can W., the born-again monogamist, spark to in C., the amorous atheist? In some ways, Mr. Bush is supremely not a Camus man. Camus hated the blindness caused by ideology, and Mr. Bush wallows in it. Camus celebrated lucidity while the president keeps seeing only what he wants to see.
Mr. Bush’s life has been premised on his confidence that he will always be insulated from the consequences and the cruelties of existence, unlike Meursault. W. or his people always work to change fate, whether it’s an election or the Middle East.
If you think about it long enough, though, it begins to make a sort of wacky sense.
“The Stranger” is about the emotionally detached Meursault, who makes a lot of bad decisions and pre-emptively kills an Arab in the sand. Get it? Camus’s protagonist moves through an opaque, obscure and violent world that is indifferent to his beliefs and desires. Get it?
If there was ever a moment when this president could regard the unanticipated consequences of his actions, behold the world littered with the very opposite of what he intended for it and appreciate the gritty stoicism of the philosophy of absurdism, this is it. Iraq in civil war. Al Qaeda metastasizing and plotting. Hezbollah, Iran and Syria knitting closer, celebrating a “victory” in standing up to Israel, the U.S. and Britain, and mocking W.’s plan for a “new Middle East.” The North Koreans luxuriating in their nuclear capability. Chávez becoming the new Castro on a global scale.
Maybe next the president should pick up Camus’s other classic, “The Myth of Sisyphus.” Was there ever a national enterprise more Sisyphean than the war in Iraq?
If there was ever a confirmation of Camus’s sense of the absurdity of life, it’s that the president is reading him.
The question really is, how deeply is the President reading the novel? Enough to question any part of his famously rigid, black and white universe? Or just as a means to turn the page?
Apparently Bush said it was a "quick read".
My take HERE.
"In his early twenties, Camus was expelled from the Algerian Communist Party because he supported the nationalist aspirations of down-trodden native Algerians. At the same age, George W. Bush was busy going AWOL from the National Guard.
In his early thirties, Camus wrote and edited Combat, the underground newspaper of the French Resistance in WWII. By this time, Camus was already becoming famous beyond the intellectual classes. At the same age, George W. Bush was busy snorting cocaine and being arrested for DUI.
In his early forties, during the Algerian War of Independence, Camus argued for peaceful coexistence and called for a truce to spare civilians, which both warring sides regarded as foolish. He worked clandestinely for imprisoned Algerians facing the death penalty..."