From http://www.wingtv.net/thorn2006/camus.html
George Bush Reads The Stranger by Victor Thorn
During the September 14th broadcast of WING TV, Lisa Guliani and I spoke about a New York Times article which stated that President George Bush was supposedly reading Albert Camus’ novel The Stranger during his vacation at the Crawford Ranch in Texas. Now, why Bush (who is borderline illiterate to begin with) would select one of the most famous existential novels of all-time was beyond us. For those of you not familiar with the story, the climax arrives when the lead character (Mersault) murders an Arab; then feels absolutely no remorse for it. [For a more complete overview of The Stranger, go to the end of this article]Anyway, a WING TV viewer sent us the following e-mail in regard to this news story:
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Wing TV,I have written you before, and feel compelled to write you again after listening to your recent radio program on Bush and his reading of Camus … wow ... I just cannot believe what I heard....!!!! Is he really reading a book about a man who kills a Muslim just for the hell of it, and then says “whatever” … if I die I die..??? Can you not see the “psy-ops” meaning behind this so-called “reading” of a book by the president....?? Like Bush just went out to Barnes and Noble and just happened to pick up this certain book and start reading it … CLEARLY his handlers instructed him to read this book, and allowed it to be mentioned by Tony Snow, like we are supposed to be impressed or something. Can you not see the psychological agents at work telling us that it doesn't matter if we kill Arabs, and that we will die anyways, what the hell....???? To me, it sends the message of … “we‘re gonna kill a bunch or Arabs, and a lot of you may die, but what the hell, you would all die anyways …” Man, that is really scaring the piss out of me. And have you thought about this ... that they know YOU and your e-mail address and what it means, and that this is a cloaked message to you and WING TV that we (the White House) are sending you a hidden message that we will simply waste you ... so what if we kill you, just like the Muslims....???? Hard to believe it‘s just coincidence.....
You may have really stumbled across something here, my friends.....And get this, tonight while watching Letterman I saw Roger Daltry and Pete Townsend sing a song bashing the shit out of catholic bishops and the pope … they were singing about men “wearing purple dresses” ... wow, what a powerful song....!!!! You really need to hear it to believe it......Keep up the good work, and I will be writing you more in the future.....Todd
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Maureen Down: Camus Comes to Crawford (August 16, 2006)Strangely enough, we find two famous men reading Albert Camus’ The Stranger this summer.One is Jean Girard, the villainous gay French race car driver hilariously played by Sacha Baron Cohen (aka 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 One 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 a trios.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 chose 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. “Confident conversation,” he said, extending the administration’s lack of transparency to literature.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 Camus, the apostle of absurdity as a view of life? What can W., the born-again monogamist, spart to in Camus, 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 Mersault 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, it begins to make a sort of wacky sense.The Stranger is about the emotionally detached Mersault, who makes a lot of bad decisions and preemptively 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. Hezbolla, 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. Chavez 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 absurdity of life, it’s that the president is reading him.
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The Stranger by Albert Camus – overviewMeursault, a young Algerian pied-noir, hears news of his mother's death. He receives this news with mild annoyance. He must now ask his boss for two days leave to attend the funeral. It is the custom, where he is from, for the bereaved to sit all night in vigil by the coffin of their departed loved one. At the vigil and at the funeral the following day he shows no grief, sadness or even regret. He only feels the physical inconvenience of the vigil and the heat of the sun during the funeral procession to the cemetery. At the funeral he makes mental notes of the physical objects that strike his eye; shining screws in the walnut coffin, the colours on the dresses of the nurses and the large bellies of the elderly mourners.The following day, back in Algiers, Meursault goes swimming in the sea and meets a girl, Marie, whom he knows vaguely. That evening they go to the cinema together to see a comedy, afterwards they go back to Meursault's and have sex. A relationship, of sorts, develops during which Meursault shows no more feeling or affection towards Marie than his displayed at his mother's funeral. One day she asks Meursault to marry her and he accepts advising her that it's all the same to him whether they marry or not.He works in an office in Algiers, taking little interest in his career and receiving with disinterest the news of a prospective promotion and the transfer to Paris that accompanied such a rise in position. He is more interested in the physical sensations to be found at work.
He enjoys feeling the cool freshness of the hand-towels at mid-day and comparing this feeling to the warm clamminess of the same towels by the end of the day.At home, as well as his relationship with Marie, he develops a relationship with his unsavoury neighbour, Raymond Sintes, a gangster who beats his girlfriend. Meursault is as disinterested in the friendship with Sintes and he is with his romance with Marie. One day, this friendship leads him to a beach where he kills an Arab with five shots of Sintes' revolver. The two men had come across the Arab and his friends earlier in the day and a fight had broken out, one of the Arabs had a knife. Later on Meursault is walking alone on the beach and comes across one of the Arabs. Meursault has Sintes' gun. The sun on his head and the flash on that sun on the blade of the Arab's knife somehow results in Meursault killing the man with a single shot and then firing four more bullets into the inert body. So ends the first part of the book. The second half of The Stranger is concerned with Meursault's trial and subsequent execution for the murder of the Arab. Throughout his trial and imprisonment, until the day before his execution, Meursault maintains the same detached indifference we saw in the first half of the book. He exhibits the same preoccupation with his own physical sensations and the same reluctance to pretend to have emotions he does not feel.Much to the chagrin of the lawyers, he will not plead self-defence in the face of his murder charge. Neither will he express emotion or remorse for his victim. He is warned by his lawyer that the prosecution will make use of his unusual behaviour at his mother's funeral but in the same way Meursault refuses to express histrionic remorse over the Arab he won't make a show of weeping over his mother during the trial. The only explanation for killing the Arab Meursault will, or can, offer is “because of the sun.”During the trial Meursault shows the same disinterested attitude he has displayed throughout the book. He drifts in and out of what the prosecution and his defence are saying. To him, although he is aware that he is the subject of conversation, it is like they are talking about someone else.
He is more interested in the different colours of the fans used by the jury-members or the sunlight and noise coming through the court-room window.From his arrest to his execution, Meursault spends his the time he is not in court in prison. Once he has come to terms with his loss of freedom he learns to adapt to his environment. He develops his memory and spends his time mentally cataloguing the items of furniture in his former room. He realises that even if a person were to live only for one day, he would amass enough memories to last in a hundred years in prison without getting bored. He thinks that even if he were made to live out his life in the base of a hollow tree-trunk with only the sight of the sky above him for entertainment he could find enough interest in the flight-patterns of the birds and the shapes of the clouds above him. He would wait for these patterns in the same way that in his former lifer he waited for Saturday to take Marie into his arms.After these reflections Meursault is ready to confront the prison Chaplain who attempts to take his confession and read him his rites. He throws the cleric out of his cell, stung by his promises of ‘another life' after this one, and convinced that this life alone is certain and the inevitability of death removes all significance. After the Chaplain had gone, Meursault is, for the first time, filled with the “tender indifference of the world.” Meursault now realises that he has been happy in his life and would like to live it all over again. He hopes “in order that all may be fulfilled” that there will be many people attending his execution and that they all greet him with cries of hatred.
Source: The Albert Camus Society UK
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