From Norman Rockwell to Abu Ghraib

To understand how Bush justifies a torture policy that is the bane of our nation, consider the sentimental cowboy art that decks his Oval Office walls.

Editor's note: Parts of this article will be published in different form by the Nexus Institute of Amsterdam, which held a conference on kitsch that the author attended in November 2006.

By Sidney Blumenthal

Read more: George W. Bush, Texas, Politics, Sidney Blumenthal, Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein, CIA, Opinion, Torture, Abu Ghraib, Alberto Gonzales, Tribeca Film Festival

April 26, 2007 | Having written extensively on the Bush administration's torture policy for Salon, I concluded, in light of the shocking photographs from Abu Ghraib, that the visual medium is the most powerful and penetrating way to communicate the policy. More than two years ago, I brought the idea of making a documentary on the Bush policy to Alex Gibney, the director of "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Alex shared my sense of urgency, and "Taxi to the Dark Side" will premiere April 27 at the Tribeca Film Festival. (Alex is the director; I am executive producer.)

Through the film runs the story of an Afghan taxi driver, known only as Dilawar, completely innocent of any ties to terrorism, who was tortured to death by interrogators in the U.S. prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. "Taxi to the Dark Side" traces the evolution of the Bush policy from Bagram (Dilawar's interrogators speak in the film) to Guantánamo (we filmed the official happy tour) to Abu Ghraib; its roots in sensory deprivation experiments decades ago that guided the CIA in understanding torture; the opposition within the administration from the military and other significant figures (the former general counsel of the Navy, Alberto Mora, and former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, Lawrence Wilkerson, explain how that internal debate went, while John Yoo, one of its architects, defends it); the congressional battle to restore the standard of the Geneva Convention that forbids torture (centered on John McCain's tragic compromise); and the sudden popularity of the Fox TV show "24" in translating torture into entertainment by means of repetitious formulations of the bogus ticking-time-bomb scenario.

Yet "Taxi to the Dark Side" is more than an exposé of policy. Its irrefutable images are the counterpoint to the peculiar aesthetics propagated in the age of George W. Bush, in which, through the contradictory styles of softening nostalgia and hardening cruelty, the president and his followers seek to justify their actions not only to the public but also to themselves.

The notion that there might be an aesthetic that informs the Bush presidency would seem to be an unfair and artificial imposition on a man who prizes his intuition ("I'm a gut player") and openly derides complication ("I don't do nuance") -- that is, if Bush himself did not insist on the connection. Indeed, he appears on the official White House Web site, conducting a tour of the art and artifacts he has chosen to decorate the Oval Office, assuming the duty of docent himself. He holds forth on the large windows and the rug with rays of the sun emanating from the seal of the president and the provenance of his desk before getting to the artwork. (On April 19, Bush recounted to a crowd in Tipp City, Ohio, a story he has told many times, of how he commissioned his wife, Laura, to design the rug and then in defense of his Iraq policy simply remarked, "Remember the rug?")

"Each president can put whatever paintings he wants on the wall. I've chosen some paintings that kind of reflect my nature," Bush says in his video tour. He points to portraits of Abraham Lincoln ("The job of the president is to set big goals for the country") and George Washington ("You couldn't have the Oval Office without George Washington on the wall") and pats busts of Lincoln ("You can tell he's one of my favorites"), Dwight Eisenhower ("steady") and Winston Churchill ("gift of the British prime minister ... Churchill was a war leader ... resolute, tough").

Bush takes special pride in pointing out two paintings he has hung that highlight his motives and legacy. He consciously placed these pictures in the Oval Office at the beginning of his tenure to serve as prescient cultural markers. "The Texas paintings are on the wall because that's where I'm from and where I'm going," he says.

One of them, by little-known painter and illustrator William Henry Dethlef Koerner, titled "A Charge to Keep," depicts a hatless cowboy followed by two other riders galloping up a hill. Their faces are intent as they pursue some quarry in the distance that cannot be seen by others. Or are they being chased? "I love it," Bush said, further explaining his intimate feeling for the painting to reporters and editors of the Washington Times, a conservative newspaper. He offered his interpretation: "He's a determined horseman, a very difficult trail. And you know at least two people are following him, and maybe a thousand." Bush added that the painting is "based" on an old hymn. "And the hymn talks about serving the Almighty. So it speaks to me personally." When he was governor of Texas and the painting hung in his office, Bush wrote a note of explanation to his staff: "This is us."

W.H.D. Koerner, born in 1878, was a German immigrant who settled with his family in Iowa. After an early stint as a rapid-hand illustrator for the Chicago Tribune before photographs became commonplace in newspapers, he studied at the Howard Pyle School of Art, in Delaware, led by the leading illustrator in the country. Koerner then became a regular illustrator for the Saturday Evening Post, a mass magazine that appealed to small-town sentimentality and mythology in an age before the spread of radio. The magazine's trademark was its hundreds of covers produced by Norman Rockwell, a commercial artist whose ubiquitous work in advertising and his glossy but homey kitsch for the Saturday Evening Post gained him a reputation as one of the definers of everyday Americana.

The magazine used Koerner especially to provide pictures to accompany short stories about cowboys. In 1912, it gave Koerner the choice assignment of illustrating Zane Grey's "Riders of the Purple Sage." The Koerner painting that now hangs in the Oval Office first appeared as an illustration for a cowboy story called "The Slipper Tongue" in the June 3, 1916, issue. The next year, the magazine reprinted the illustration to accompany another cowboy story, "Ways That Are Dark." (Both of the writers of these short stories were forgettable figures in the western pulp fiction tradition, originated in the late 19th century by Ned Buntline, inventive publisher of Wild West dime novels and mythologizer of "Buffalo Bill" Cody and "Wild Bill" Hickok, who in the process became the wealthiest author of his time.) Two years after his illustration was first printed, Koerner resold it to Country Gentleman magazine, to go with another western called "A Charge to Keep." The editors of Country Gentleman didn't seem to mind that the picture had been used twice before by another publication.

In 1995, at Bush's inaugural as governor of Texas, his wife, Laura, selected an 18th century Methodist hymn, written by Charles Wesley, titled "A Charge to Keep." Its words in part are:

A charge to keep I have,
A God to glorify,
A never-dying soul to save,
And fit it for the sky.

To serve the present age,
My calling to fulfill:
O may it all my powers engage
To do my master's will!

After the ceremony, one of Bush's childhood friends, Joseph I. "Spider" O'Neill, managing partner of his family's oil and investment company, told him that he owned a painting, remarkably enough titled "A Charge to Keep," and that he would happily lend it to the governor. O'Neill and his wife, who attended Southern Methodist University with Laura, as it happened had also played Cupid in arranging the first date between George and Laura. Presented with the cowboy painting, Bush enthusiastically displayed it at the Governor's Mansion and now the White House.

The idea of Bush as a Christian cowboy, dashing upward and onward to fulfill the Lord's commandments, inspired him to title his campaign autobiography (written by his then communications advisor, Karen Hughes) "A Charge to Keep: My Journey to the White House." Sample: "I could not be governor if I did not believe in a divine plan that supersedes all human plans."

Next page: Studying the racing cowboy, Bush gleans a moral lesson to stay the course