something about dynasties and Great Men

A few months ago, former President George W. Bush delivered a speech during an elbow-rubber’s wine-and-cheese event held at his presidential library in Dallas. The occasion should have gone by unnoticed, but W's remarks drew unexpected attention because of a Freudian slip. Intending to condemn Russian President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine, W instead decried "a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq." In 2003, of course, W invaded Iraq on the claim that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's regime had weapons of mass destruction and was pursuing a nuclear weapon. The claim proved untrue.

But the part of W's remarks that got me came just before that nauseating gaffe, when W noted that “the Ukrainian people elected Volodymyr Zelenskyy, with whom I Zoomed the other day, by the way—cool little guy—the Churchill of the 21st century."

President George W. Bush gave people nicknames and made little jokes that sometimes, like this “cool little guy” quip, showed how removed rather than how normal W was. After all, he was a Bush, and a Bush is not like other people. To W, Zelensky, a little man with broken English from a strange land, is just another amusing accident of history. Not like a Bush.

Note: Would a Bush have stayed in Kyiv while most of the world was saying the Russians would conquer in a few days?

and quotes something about movie stars

Marc Maron had George Clooney on his podcast not too long ago and tried to ask Clooney about being the movie-star-style leading man, like a Cary Grant or Humphrey Bogart—actors who are always kind of the same in each role. Clooney says he is always still Clooney-ish in his roles because he lacks the talent to lose himself in a character. Clooney's humility, which Maron called out as bullshit, often produced unsatisfying conversation. (But how do you describe star quality? A star is born.) The unsatisfying interview moved me to reread Truman Capote's short sketch of Humphrey Bogart.

If one listens attentively to any man’s vocabulary, it will be noticed that certain key-to-character words recur. With Bogart, whose pungent personal thesaurus was by and large unspeakably unprintable, “bum” and “professional” were two such verbal signposts. A most moral—by a bit exaggerating you might say “prim”—man, he employed “professional” as a platinum medal to be distributed among persons whose behavior he sanctioned; “bum,” the reverse of an accolade, conveyed, when spoken by him, almost scarifying displeasure. “My old man,” he once remarked of his father, who had been a reputable New York doctor, “died ten thousand dollars in debt, and I had to pay off every cent. A guy who doesn’t leave his wife and kids provided for, he’s a bum.” Bums, too, were guys who cheated on their wives, cheated on their taxes, and all whiners, gossipists, most politicians, most writers, women who Drank, women who were scornful of men who Drank; but the bum true-blue was any fellow who shirked his job, was not, in meticulous style, a “pro” in his work. God knows he was. Never mind that he might play poker until dawn and swallow a brandy before breakfast; he was always on time on the set, in make-up and letter-perfect in his part (forever the same part, to be sure, still there is nothing more difficult to interestingly sustain than repetition). No, there was never a mite of bum-hokum about Bogart; he was an actor without theories (well, one: that he should be highly paid), without temper but not without temperament; and because he understood that discipline was the better part of artistic survival, he lasted, he left his mark.