Bush reads Camus's 'The Stranger'
Oh, I'm sure the anti-war crowd is going to have a field day with this: White House spokesman Tony Snow said Friday that Bush, here on his Texas ranch enjoying a 10-day vacation from Washington, had made quick work of the Algerian-born writer's 1946 novel -- in English.
The US president, often spoofed as an intellectual lightweight, quoted Camus in a February 21, 2005 speech in Brussels praising the US-Europe alliance and urging other nations to help Washington spread democracy in the world.
'We know there are many obstacles, and we know the road is long. Albert Camus said that 'freedom is a long-distance race.' We're in that race for the duration,' Bush said in those remarks. I've written about Camus' The Stranger before: The Stranger, for those unfamiliar with the book, is a novel centering around a man who murders, yet feels no remorse. While on trial, the jury is less concerned with his crime, but more concerned with the perpetrator's ability to feel remorse for either the previous death of his mother or the man whom he killed, or more accurately his lack of any visible remorse whatsoever. On the question of freedom, Camus' idea of freedom isn't exactly what most people would call freedom -- most would call it license.
Of course, for those of you who read this blog regularly and have read my rants on the differences between freedom as liberty vs. freedom as license, I'll spare you the rhetoric, if only to say that Camus is not what I would consider the best philosopher to look to for moral guidance.
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James Atticus Bowden 
7 Comments:
Interesting reading, but not a rock to build your house on.
Still, imagine yourself in the position of the anti-war reader, having read The Stranger yourself, and reading this morning how the vicious, vile, evil, monkey-looking Shrub the President is reading a book where murder is trivialized and the object of remorse is the focus of moral right and wrong.
Existentialism is the enemy. Like Jim says, interesting reading, but....
Let us not forget that Woodrow Wilson entered the United States into World War One on the precept of "making the world safe for Democracy", and let us also not forget that his closest advisor was a known communist named Col. Edward Mandel House, who wrote that wonderfully communistic book, "Philip Drew: Adminisrator".
I wouldn't say Camus advocated suicide. It was much more complicated than that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Sisyphus
Reguardless of if Camus is or isn't a good role model, Meursault (the character in The Stranger) is not.
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