What it all Means
Now that George W. Bush has discovered Albert Camus it’s safe to say that a new megatrend may be underway. Megatrends were popular in the Eighties as a kind of intellectual cosmetic surgery, smoothing out the wrinkles and frown lines of trickle down economics. If you were a child of the Eighties you may remember trickling down, the Laffer Curve, The Mad Greed is Good with fleeting glimpses of Walter Mondale, and the demise of organized labor. Anyway there were plenty of megatrends to worry about including the incipient collapse of capitalism, the fall of the dollar, and the beginning of conglomerization. Big companies swallowed little ones: check the publishing industry where hundreds of imprints became five conglomerates.
Bush may be reading Camus in search of one of the archetypes of Post WW11 philosophy wherein the failures of ideology became the groundwork for rejecting over achievers. The argument could be made that the antihero enjoyed a Renaissance from the scattered shards of existensialism; Camus rejected the institutions that support rational society, but couldn’t quite find a viable alternative outside the realm of theory. He was not a Sartre disciple when he died, he was not a Communist, nor an anarchist. His intellectual journey ended just a few years after Camus became a Nobel Laureate.
Bush has made a presidency out of heroic imagery. The fact that he’s reading Camus might indicate some realization on his part that archetypes and symbols of power have their limitations. His Mission Accomplished moment looks absurd now. Is this the end of anti-intellectualism? Probably not. I never thought of THE STRANGER as a beach book, but I guess that depends on where you’ve been beached and how fast the tide is running.