The secret to W.'s success, says Joshua Wolf Shenk in Mother Jones, is good storytelling - a talent liberals lack.

Our "primitive, reptilian brains" are captivated by the Bush narrative, Shenk writes, and it goes like this:

The right wing has an elemental and appealing narrative--the ideological equivalent of a Jerry Bruckheimer film or a Tom Clancy novel, the sort that’s hard to turn away from, even if you suspect you’re being suckered. Stories operate on our primitive, reptilian brains....

According to Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh, & Co., the president of the United States of America is a great gentle warrior, the scion of a noble line: He’s a Texas cowboy descended from George Washington descended from the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock. He’s a man of God and family. Truly, the story goes, he’s a simple man--wanting only to care for his own, tend to his plot of land, and go to church on Sunday.

But this man is besieged--on all sides--by the rabid armies of the Godless and the cowardly. By terrorists and evil-doers. By bureaucrats who want to run his life. By liberals who want to tax him. By drug dealers, welfare mothers, and atheists. What is he to do? He would dearly love not to fight. But his enemies are climbing the walls of his castle. The killer has got a knife to his little girl’s throat. Not fight? Fight he must.

Bush as comic-book action hero. Kerry as............?

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at May 15, 2004 09:23 AM

---

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.rosenblog.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/294

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Tell Us Another One:

---

» GEORGE WASHINGTON from The Biography Place
George Washington was a surveyor, farmer and soldier who became the first president of the United States of America. After commanding the colonial forces in the Revolutionary War, he retired to his farm in 1783. A popular general in the war, in 1789 W... [Read More]

Tracked on July 15, 2005 09:44 AM

---