The Image Managers' story

President Bush’s image managers are very familiar with a trait of memory that I call “the true definition of hell:” Hell is where you go, after you die, and all the ideas you ever forgot come back to you.

The point is, memory is fickle. You can have a great idea, think about it for a minute, then think about something else, and a minute later you can’t for the life of you remember the great idea. If you don’t write the idea down, you will forget it.

This same fickleness also creates confusion in how and when things happen, even dates you thought you’d never forget, like a first kiss or a wedding anniversary.

It has not even been a week, and already the average memory would find it impossible to reconstruct events of last week in New Orleans. The two strongest memories of that week, in most minds, will be the disaster’s surreal nature, and the outrage over government’s failure to respond. By Thursday, print and broadcast media were bursting with desperate, angry reactions to the failure of the federal government to help these people.

But when did things happen? When did the levees fail? When did anarchy start to appear? When did the Superdome and convention center become so wretched? What day? What sequence of events?

And where, during that sequence, was President Bush? Where was he on Tuesday? Wednesday? Thursday? Which day did he finally visit the region, and what did he do there?

His image managers are well aware of memory’s fragile hold on these details, and how details and sequences can be modified after the fact, like taking a morning-after birth control pill.

For the record, Bush first visited the area, on the ground, last Friday. It was orchestrated away from the worst and messiest scenes in New Orleans, and the visit came just as the first federal trucks rolled into New Orleans with aid.

The image managers know that in the days and weeks to come, that event – the Bush visit and the trucks rolling in – can be skated around in the public memory like moving images around in a picture with Adobe Photoshop, until the picture looks more like you want it to.

They sent President Bush on Saturday morning to Red Cross headquarters in Washington, another image that, as time goes by, can be shuffled into the deck of actual events and made to show up, like the ace of spades appearing by magic out of thin air, where it isn’t supposed to be.

The image managers will load up the national memory this week with images of presidential response and presidential caring. The New York Times reported that the process was already under way by last Thursday. The president was making another visit to New Orleans today, Monday. A week from now, a month from now, it will be suggested strongly by the White House that those are the images that matter, timely images of a president reacting with the proper concern, and leadership, at the height of the crisis, to which the fickle public memory can only present a confused response. And when the image managers have you confused, they've got the picture like they want it.

The only defense that truth has is to write down the events and sequences of last week. The newspapers did that for us, and I’ve got mine clipped and sorted. It’s a crucially important story, just as it happened.