Beauty is Imperfection

(Originally posted Saturday, December 20, 2008 )

Washington, D.C. (API) Portraits of George W. Bush and his wife Laura were unveiled today in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Almost immediately after the pictures were unveiled, however, the image of Bush began to wither and turn into a nightmarish, decrepit gothic monstrosity that caused the assembled photographers and reporters to shudder in terror and pee blood.

President Bush hoped to make a speech after the unveiling, but quickly trailed off: ‘This is just a really cool thing and …

‘Hey, wait, something’s horribly wrong!’

He soon broke up into choked sobs at the deteriorating image.

‘What’s happening to my face? Is this for real? Mother of J. Christ, what’s happening to me here? My youth. My beauty. It’s all dying in seconds!’

The image, as captured by portraitist Robert Anderson, had begun as a simple rustic painting capturing the hale and pink-cheeked president’s Western values and rugged individualism. Almost immediately, however, the face began to sneer with the wanton cruelty of a bitter aged man, and within minutes his figure dissolved into that of a green and ashen gargoyle, much of whose visage was covered in large, suppurating, pus-squirting boils.

‘I’ve never seen anything like this,’ said Bob Woodward, the Washington Post veteran reporter who attended the unveiling. ‘I couldn’t possibly tell you what just happened here. It’s like the president one moment was just a good-old boy you’d like to have a beer with and the next he turned into a wrinkled, blood-shitting fetus right in front of our eyes on the canvas. Oh, the humanity!’

The painting caused much vomiting and gagging among attending journalists, some of whom reported bleeding ears and swelling lymph nodes.

Scientists and art historians were at a loss to describe the event, which some of them suggested was definitely supernatural in nature, though none of them wanted to be quoted directly for fear of sounding totally undone by the existential horror that the perverted figure of the 43rd president engendered in their cold, cold loins.

‘I’m an empiricist,’ said journalist Christopher Hitchens. ‘All I can tell you for sure is that President Bush looked like a commanding figure for a moment there, but soon turned into a sort of miscarried, agued misbegotten moon-calf with bleeding shingles.’

Bush had planned to use the portrait unveiling as a way to say goodbye to his staff and to Americans. He hoped to also once again trumpet his foreign policy achievements, including the liberation of Iraq.

Instead, the focus shifted into a lengthy discussion about the stains that power, debauchery and sin can paint on the immaculate young soul, each perverse act reflected in the unclosing wounds and sallow waxy skin of a body that looks like the living embalmed.

‘Over the centuries, painters have sought in painting Greek ideals of symmetry, perfection and beauty,’ according to art critic Robert Stapleton. ‘It is said that as time goes by, the real picture of a leader becomes more resolved and easier to see. However, looking at Bush’s picture right now just makes me want to scratch out my eyes and feed them to dogs. The horror. The horror.’

The figure as unveiled originally showed the president looking relaxed and full of good humor and wisdom during a period of tumult–war, financial collapse and environmental catastrophe. But because that picture was so quickly eclipsed by the scaly, molting prehensile-tongue-sporting personage that came next, few people were able to even remember the original representation.

“This is incredible. Terrifying,” said the painter Robert Anderson. “You try in these paintings not only to represent the subject, but capture his soul. But I’ve never seen one of my subjects twist into an abject, ghoulish disfigurement of a man. I feel like I should run from this painting immediately and never look at it again.”