Hugh Miller's Final Reply

Monica All the Time is one of those pieces that until now was never sent to a journal for publication. It may have needed more work, but I am not certain why it became a forgotten manuscript. In retro spect, what we were saying seems on target. The free play of signifiers was, we conceded, overpowering public policy discourse. Our hopes for strategies such as warrants for discourse were dimming, and the pros pects for the deterioration of American culture were rising. In Postmodern Public Administration Fox and I lamented political consult ant Lee Atwater's political trope, Willie Horton, deployed in the first Bush's presidential campaign against Michael Dukakis. The Clinton years saw the image-manipulations blossom. Since then, Atwater's dis ciple Karl Rove has managed the symbolizations for the Republicans. Hyperreality remains on the ascendancy in the realm of public policy. The abject treachery of the Bush presidency has, with hard leather boots, ground this point into the concrete. George W. Bush continues to draw links between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks?links that did not exist until he invented them in order to transpose the righteous anger over 9/11 into political resources for a different war agenda. If such invention is poetry, I hate poetry. But why call it poetry? Let's call it deceit. I suspect Bush of violating the sincerity warrant. He took the country to war on false premises: Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction (not). The public conversa tion leading up to the Iraq war is an example of inauthentic communi cation, and the results have been death and destruction, and severe diminution of American credibility in the world. Now, is this a defini tive assessment? I do not even wish for that. In the democracy I envi sion, assessments tend to be contestable rather than definitive. So when McSwite writes, To demand that people be sincere is to blame the vic tim in a very real sense I am taken aback. By busting George W. Bush for violating the sincerity warrant, am I blaming the victim? No, I don't think so

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• The Ideographic Individual

  Hugh T Miller•Administrative Theory & Praxis•2004

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