THERE IS NO "I" IN "AMERICA":

The Perpendicular Pronoun (MAUREEN DOWD, 3/19/03, NY Times)

Sometimes I feel as if I've spent half my adult life covering a President Bush as he squares off against Saddam Hussein, an evil dictator who invades his neighbors and gasses his own people.

But while on the surface this seems like Groundhog War, the father-and-son duels in the sun with Saddam are breathtakingly different. The philosophical gulf between 41's gulf war and 43's gulf war is profound and cataclysmic--it has sent the whole world into a frenzy--yet it can be summed up in a single pronoun.

"The big I," as Bush senior calls it.

The first President Bush was often teased about his loopy syntax. But it was a way of speaking that signified the modesty and self-effacement his mother had insisted upon. He was so afraid to sound arrogant if he used the first person singular that he often just dropped the subject of a sentence and went straight to the verb.

"Mother always lectured us--in a kinder, gentler way--against using the big I," Poppy Bush said. He is so shy of "I" that he has never written a personal memoir.

For once, and only in this brief section of her column, Ms Dowd is absolutely correct. Bill Clinton always used to do the same thing, announcing actions of the United States by saying "I", and it drove me crazy. Nothing else Mr. Bush does or has done--with the exception of signing Campaign Finance Reform into law--disturbs more than the continual use of "I". It is unbecoming and in some sense disrespectful to the rest of the folks in his government, if not to the American people as a whole. He oughtta stop. Posted by Orrin Judd at March 19, 2003 7:59 AM