Adventures on the Internet

whitehouse.gov I have to admit that I was stunned that the White House has a website and was extremely eager to see what I might find on it: a diverse (hah!) collection of encouraging and dispiriting results. After I typed the address and pressed enter, I immediately saw a photograph of Laura Bush, taken today, speaking to the public at a Preserve America congregation, an engaging sight. Just a few hours ago, I was talking to my mom about Lady Bird’s time as a First Lady. She told me that she had a lot to do with Johnson’s presidency, “A la Eleanor Roosevelt,” she said. “A la Hillary Clinton,” I added. Then I asked her how many First Ladies she thought held a stable crutch to their husband’s body and she said that she figured almost every woman had one thing or another to do with her corresponding man. I bring this up because I’ve just finished reading the constitution which states that the President will become such when he gets elected and so on. If there were an internet over two hundred years ago, I’m sure our founding fathers would not be thrilled to see the First Lady on the main page, nevertheless to see that she has been speaking at assemblies.

To the right of the daily goings-on, the news can be found; it’s an extremely optimistic twist on reality as we know it to be, glorifying the War on Terror and downsizing the battle for global warming. Toward the bottom of the page, I found a link for photo essays (an odd link for such an official website), covering everything from “Tee-Ball on the South Lawn” to “Hurricane Relief.” The thing that stood out the most to me was to cover links of the photo essays. On one titled “White House at Work” showed a photograph taken outside the White House, showing a festival going on in the front, with a marching band and many people. Another called “War on Terror” was a picture of Bush speaking on a shiny, very large podium that says Plan for Victory on it with a light shining into the camera, as it was taken from an angle cutting from the floor into the ceiling kitty-corner from it; I find both of these photographs to be immensely ironic and utterly symbolic on so many levels. Many of the pictures found in these essays contradicted what we see and hear from our local news. I also saw a link for an application to practice a non-career job in the White House and I was very curious to see what types of questions are asked on such an application, but I couldn’t get past the first page without submitting personal information and I automatically got scared that someone might get mad at me if I were to make up an identity just to get further in the document so alas, I left the site. And I still have many questions: if the White House has a website, then does George Bush have a myspace?