Ever since I visited the Ronald Reagan post-presidential library, a truly cheesy house of cardboard propaganda, the phenomenon of presidential libraries, each more imperial and more expensive than the last, has fascinated me. Now, Thomas Frank has done my work for me. Hes visited three of them and, in his latest Salon piece, considers their essential weirdness. Heres his summary on Ws entry in the presidential library race -- with Obama already planning his version of imperial cheese-its. What I am saying is that this is a museum whose entire objective is to get one man off the hook for his egregious misrule. Maybe all presidential libraries do this; maybe it’s only more noticeable here since Iraq is still in flames and Wall Street banks are still fleecing the world and Bush’s free-market wrecking crew actually has a chance of resuming their experiment in good government any day now. Tom Unfortunately, presidential libraries and historical scrutiny are not the same thing. They aren’t even in the same category, really. I visited three of the most recently built presidential museums a few weeks ago—the Bill Clinton Presidential Center plus two museums commemorating the administrations of men named George Bush—and found them to be, by and large, institutions of bald propaganda, buildings on which hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent to cast, literally, in stone, a given individual’s personal war with reality. All of the presidential museums I visited have certain things in common. They each contain a replica of the Oval Office as it was decorated when the museum’s subject worked there. They each display lots of formal White House dinner settings and gifts the president received from foreign leaders. They usually feature a presidential limousine or some other mode of official conveyance. Their object is always the same: to make you, the visitor, love and esteem the politician in question. This is closer to advertising than it is to scholarship. It can be persuasive. In fact, all three museums I visited were successful, to a certain degree, at convincing me to admire their subjects. I walked into each as the most skeptical possible visitor, ready to find fault and argue with the text. I didn’t particularly like any of the three presidents in question, although I voted for Bill Clinton and I once gave a lecture at the University of Arkansas’ nearby Clinton School of Public Service. But I left all three of these presidential shrines thinking the same thing of the man in question: Dang, he seems like a good guy. Despite all his screw-ups, he must have meant well. Sometimes this warm feeling would stick to me all the way back to my hotel room, where I would finally wash it away with a cold six-pack. salon/2014/07/13/the_animatronic_presidency_how_presidential_museums_become_propaganda_palaces_whitewashing_bushs_disasters_and_clintons_failings/
Posted on: Mon, 14 Jul 2014 12:30:00 +0000
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