by Richard Stern

I just read (in a fine New Yorker profile) that Jasper Johns praised Marcel Duchamps for inserting doubt into the air of the art world. I'd watched the joint Bush-Blair press conference and wondered why the American president had so clearly banished doubt from at least his public self. Was it all those school and post-school years of playing second fiddle to his father and his more scholarly, younger, taller brother, Jeb? Was it the years of business failure and the thousands of nights drowning the self-doubt they engendered in booze? Was it the discovery in his Bible study class that there was an absolute verity and his rebirth--midwifed by AA?--accepting it that banished doubt from his being? If it weren't for the Great Doubter, Abraham Lincoln, one might think doubting an impeachable offense in an American president. In any event, President George W. Bush spoke with the intensity and conviction which one sees in certain gifted liars as well as in knights jousting for their beloved or in passionate, ideological ignoramuses screaming in the streets and even in an occasional saint. Side by side with his more polished and fluent Tweedledee, Tony Blair, whose civil tones suggested that he was capable of doubting, the president vaulted the strictures of the Baker-Hamilton Study Group to drive home to us doubters the latest version of the course first offered to him in his post-9/11 epiphany. It will take more than another 3,000 American deaths, another 20,000 broken American bodies and minds, another 100,000 Iraqi deaths and a broken Iraqi generation, and even a delegation of senior Republican legislators to the Oval Office to derail this inspired, doubt-free president from "the course." And of course, who knows, not this doubter, if in the baffling trickery of History, the one horse shay that is President George W. Bush may turn out to be "right."