Bubbly Goodness

B is for Bubble:

HANOI, Vietnam: President Bush likes speed golf and speed tourism - this is the man who did the treasures of Red Square in less than 20 minutes - but here in the lake-studded capital of a nation desperately eager to connect with America, he set a record.

…On Saturday, Mr. Bush's national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, conceded that the president had not come into direct contact with ordinary Vietnamese, but said that they connected anyway.

"If you'd been part of the president's motorcade as we've shuttled back and forth," he said, reporters would have seen that "the president has been doing a lot of waving and getting a lot of waving and smiles."

In other words, "ordinary Vietnamese" got precisely the same treatment as "ordinary Americans" from our president. Hadley says Bush got "a real sense of the warmth of the Vietnamese people" from all his blowing by them in his car and exchanging waves with them—which is, of course, the important thing. Sure, it might have been nice for the president to understand the Vietnamese culture a little bit, but does that really matter as long as he believes that they like him? I think not.

The hat tip goes to Steve Benen, who reminisces about some of Bush’s other trips abroad:

When Bush visited India this year, he visited no museums, no cultural or historical landmarks, had no meaningful interaction with the Indian people, and skipped the Taj Mahal.

Similarly, in November 2005, Bush took a week-long trip through East Asia. As he barnstormed through Japan, South Korea and China, the president "visited no museums, tried no restaurants, bought no souvenirs and made no effort to meet ordinary local people."

Steve wonders why on earth Bush ever wanted to be a world leader "despite having little to no interest in the world," something about which I’ve professed deep and abiding perplexity on many occasions myself. His indifference, sometimes spilling to outright contempt, for "the world" is not limited just to cultures different from his own (including the vast and wonderful myriad subcultures in America), but certainly appears to encompass an apathy toward people to whom he cannot immediately relate, either. He’s so resolutely incurious that difference, that intangible thing that drives most people to passionate inquisitiveness or zealous hatred, doesn’t interest him at all.

When Kanye West famously muttered, "George Bush doesn’t care about black people," he was more right than he knew. It’s not that he hates black people—or other people unlike himself—as many people misconstrued West’s statement to imply; he just doesn’t care about them. He is the most disinterested, disengaged man imaginable, so laughably reluctant to venture outside his comfort zone he would prefer to go to Outback Steakhouse (twice) while in South Korea than sample the local cuisine.

The words I don’t get it don’t even begin to convey my thorough bewilderment at a man who has an incomparably spectacular opportunity to experience the world and its peoples and chooses instead to sit in his car and wave as he passes it by. He’s a world-class squanderer of opportunities, but this one is just about unforgivable.