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January 26, 2008
A Charge to Keep, A Horse to Steal
On this week's broadcast of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me they opened the show with what I thought was a joke about a painting owned by President Bush. But it wasn't a joke.
Here's the story. For years, President Bush has owned a painting he's referred to as "A Charge to Keep," in reference to the Methodist hymn by Charles Wesley. Here's a picture of the painting:
According to Bush, the picture shows a man on horseback trailed by a group of followers - in other words, a Methodist evangelist spreading the Good News across the American West with his flock. The painting has been so influential on Bush he's even used it as a name for one of his books.
White House commentator David Gergen wrote about the painting and its symbolism in a 2003 article:
As Bush recalls in his memoir of the same title, he then sent a memorandum to his staff: "When you come into my office, please take a look at the beautiful painting of a horseman determinedly charging up what appears to be a steep and rough trail. This is us. What adds complete life to the painting for me is the message of Charles Wesley that we serve One greater than ourselves."Bush's personal identification with the painting, which now hangs in the Oval Office, reveals a good deal about his sense of himself as a political leader--who he thinks he is, the role he plays, and the centrality of his religious faith. But the way we respond also reveals a good deal about us, his intended followers, and about the effectiveness of his leadership style.
His followers today tend to see in Bush what he sees in the painting: a brave, daring leader riding fearlessly into the unknown, striking out against unseen enemies, pulling his team behind him, seeking, in the words of Wesley's hymn, "to do my Master's will." They see him as a straight shooter and a straight talker. They take comfort in his religious faith and think he is leading us toward a mountaintop.
His critics can look at the same painting and see something very different: a lone, arrogant cowboy plunging recklessly ahead, paying little heed to danger, looking neither left nor right, listening to no voice other than his own. They think he is careless, even deceptive, and often says one thing while doing another. That he believes he is doing the Lord's work only increases their apprehension. He's not taking us up a mountain, they fear, but over a cliff. Indeed, some believe he is the most dangerous president in a century or more.
It turns out, though, that the story behind the painting isn't exactly correct. In his new book on the Bush White House, Jacob Weisberg conducted research on the painting's provenance.
[Bush] came to believe that the picture depicted the circuit-riders who spread Methodism across the Alleghenies in the nineteenth century. In other words, the cowboy who looked like Bush was a missionary of his own denomination.Only that is not the title, message, or meaning of the painting. The artist, W.H.D. Koerner, executed it to illustrate a Western short story entitled "The Slipper Tongue," published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1916. The story is about a smooth-talking horse thief who is caught, and then escapes a lynch mob in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. The illustration depicts the thief fleeing his captors. In the magazine, the illustration bears the caption: "Had His Start Been Fifteen Minutes Longer He Would Not Have Been Caught."
You can't make this stuff up. Read more in Slate and the Carpetbagger Report. -andy
Tags: A Charge to Keep | art | Charles Wesley | George W. Bush | horse thief | irony | paintings | provenance | White House
Posted by acarvin at January 26, 2008 12:13 PM
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