Topics: George W. Bush, Life News
On Memorial Day, President Bush paid tribute to the troops and their families at Arlington National Cemetery. Of the men and women buried there, President Bush declared, “They’re an awesome bunch of people, and the United States is blessed to have such citizens.”
What else is awesome? Just about everything. “Thank you, Your Holiness,” the president publicly said to Pope Benedict XVI in mid-April when he became only the second pope in history to visit the White House. “Awesome speech.”
Not that it wasn’t, but really. Awesome speech, Mr. Pope? It’s one thing to hear Ellen Page, the young and radiant star of “Juno,” saying, as she did in a December New York Times piece: “I always want to dress up like an animal or something really obscure, like a carrot or a wrench. That would be awesome.” But it’s quite another to hear the president of the United States use the word. With the freaking pope.
In the waning days of George W. Bush’s regime, it’s worthwhile to examine his legacy: a devastating war, a ruined economy, soaring oil prices. But one way he has triumphed is by continuing to spread a certain word across this great land of ours. You can barely swing a Republican by the tail these days without hitting something, or someone, described as “awesome.”
That’s awesome.
There have been many “awesome” moments in Bush speech history. It has become the verbal equivalent of Bush’s chest bump. Back in August 2004, in a campaign appearance in Dallas, Bush summed up a meeting with the Roman Catholic Church’s most powerful cardinals by saying, “It was an awesome experience.” He has called graduates and teachers “awesome,” and said of another speaker’s remarks, at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington last February, “Those were awesome,” adding, “I guess that’s a presidential word.”
As (awesome!) “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart has quipped, “It didn’t used to be.”
The word was once reserved for use by a younger generation. Now it seems as if everyone is in on this awesome action. The words “trendsetter” and “George W. Bush” may never have been uttered in the same breath, but our president’s verbal influence begs to be noted. If 2001 was the time of Shock and Awe, as the president decreed, then 2008 is the Year of Shock and Awesome.
Let’s listen to what the people are saying. And by people, I mean people who matter — celebrities.
“I hope you all had an awesome time tonight,” Miley Cyrus told the crowd at a Disney-sponsored concert in Orlando, Fla., after performing onstage.
And not only is Jessica Alba living an awesome life with an awesome brand-new baby daughter, Honor Marie, but the pregnancy itself was “awesome” as well, she told People magazine, adding, “It’s the best time ever.”
Kim Kardashian had just about the best time ever, too, at Jessica’s baby shower. As this “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” and sex tape star told E! News: “It was awesome!”
Awesomeology.org — a Web site devoted to “The Science of Awesomeology” (which includes “titties, nunchucks, Voltron and a fight between Abraham Lincoln and a Cyclops” — defines “Molecular Awesome” as “Jessica Alba.”
The gloriously cranky Dr. Gregory House, aka 49-year-old English actor Hugh Laurie, on the Fox show “House” has, in addition to his mighty addiction to Vicodin, an equally compelling addiction to the soap opera “Passion Prescription,” calling it, yes, “awesome.”
We could keep going, but that would not be … wait, what’s the adjective I’m looking for?
Even Sen. Barack Obama is getting into the spirit of the thing, ahead of time; at the 2004 Democratic convention, he emphasized with pride that blue-state Americans, too, “worship an awesome God.”
But somehow that doesn’t sound so foolish. And there’s a reason for that.
“Obama has a much better command of the language than Bush,” says Jesse Sheidlower, editor at large for the Oxford English Dictionary. “He’s using ‘awesome’ in the correct sense. When Bush uses the word ‘awesome,’ I don’t think he’s trying to transmit anything other than approval. It’s appropriate to say, ‘That football game was awesome.’ But it’s obviously not appropriate to call dead soldiers an ‘awesome bunch.’ Bush does not realize or appreciate how colloquial the word is.”
Read it on Salon
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