Columnists and cartoonists quickly got a lot of mileage out of the First Lady’s literal whitewashing of American literature. There is, God knows, much nutritious if slightly hard-to-digest food for thought in such a superficial, anti-intellectual—oh, come on, let’s not pull punches here—lame-brain view of culture.

Why bother? If Ms. Bush wants to cherish The Scarlet Letter as merely a vivid 19^th century soap opera, or Uncle Tom’s Cabin as proof that slavery wasn’t all bad, or Huckleberry Finn as only a prank-filled tale of Edenic American childhood, or The Great Gatsby as a densely worked tapestry of tout Long Island, The Grapes of Wrath as a Route 66 travelogue, so be it.

Reliable comfort and solace being in such short supply on this planet, why deprive such a mind of a bit of ease that comes from reducing works writ in blood to adult fairy tales?

But, you say, to leave Laura to eighth-grade heaven is to let the Philistines rule.

Not exactly. A statement such as hers is on its face so idiotic that it really needs no response except from those who make their living by minute-to-minute jousting at the windmills of the illiterati.

Talent—and whatever odd truth talent is heir to—will out. The sieve of time is merciless and on the whole quite accurate. Not all good work survives (oops, there goes the library at Alexandria!), but very, very little bad work makes it. The good work that survives does so whole, intact, undamaged by small tongues in free-flutter.

What’s worrisome here is 1) that Laura truly believe she’s right, and 2) she speaks as the wife of the president.

With beleaguered presidents the question is often both what they knew and when they knew it.

With this particular first lady, we already know what she knows—she’s told us herself. When she knew it is really not important. What is important is: How does she know what she knows?

I can see two ways that would lead her to this knowledge:
    1. She heard it expounded by teachers, and/or
    2. She came to it herself from reading American literature.

It’s hard to say which possibility is more disturbing, because each represents the most (WARNING: SAT word!) jejune reading of the works in question.

Is this what Laura heard on those lovely fall afternoons between football games at SMU? Or is this what Laura concluded from poring over the wrenching pages of Wise Blood as sandstorm after sandstorm pelted her windows in Midland?

There is a third possibility, and that is that what Laura Bush means by "politics" is not what you and I and the dictionaries think she means.

Think about it. "Politics," after all, to Laura Bush means what she has experienced with George as governor and president. "Politics" to Laura Bush is what you do and experience as helpmeet to assist your partner to become governor/president and then what happens after your partner has become it.

Ah. We may be onto something.

In George’s first run for governor, Laura stood by and watched Karl and Karen and other handlers smear Ann Richards but good as a left-wing tool of racial minorities, labor unions, and sexual orientationists.

A few years later she stood by and watched—with the rest of the world—and her husband’s helpers stole a presidential election, an experience that surely was even more traumatic to a sensitive, intelligent person inside the circle that it was to those of us on the outside.

We’re really getting somewhere now.

Put yourselves in this person’s shoes. Loving books, loving to read, understanding how important reading is for children, she wants to do something pro-reading. It would be a good first-lady thing. So she starts having an occasional literary salon in the White House, invites people whose writing she’s enjoyed, and at some point she sits for interviews about her salons. Somebody—thinking about her husband’s quirky politics—asks her about how she chooses writers.

In her answer she frankly and honestly says, "Politics has nothing to do with American literature." And lo, given her experience of politics, she’s right! Because nobody in the canon of American literature has even come close to what she knows as "politics." You have to get way, way out in the literary left field—Vidal, Pynchon, Vonnegut—before you encounter the warped reality that Laura Bush has lived as a modern Republican politician’s wife.

So. Surprise, surprise. By Laura Bush’s very understandable—if also very regrettable—lights, she’s right. She knows she’s right because she’s lived this knowledge—good old-fashioned American pragmatism.