Beating the Bushes Front Cover

Paperback / softback
ISBN: 9780889226470
Pages: 160
Pub. Date: October 1 2010
Dimensions: 8.5" x 5.5" x 0.4375"
Rights: Available: WORLD
Categories
Non-Fiction / ART015020

  • ART / American / General

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Beating the Bushes

By Steven Bush

Steven Bush is a man on a mission—to confront the skeletons in his family closet. Did his very own cousins rule a country that, even today, after electing its ?rst African American president, still seems bent on world domination? What can he, a distant relation of the “Bushes” (so the story goes), do to end the madness and redeem the family name?

Ever since the bloodless coup that felled the Republic (the controversial American election of 2000), Steven Bush has been hard at work to prove—or disprove—his blood ties to those bad Bushes in the White House. Drawing on documents related to the Iran Contra scandal and other drugs, money, guns and oil shenanigans of the CIA, as well as bizarre stories from Bush ancestral lore, he presents the American Empire created by George Bush Sr. and George Bush Jr. as a clear and present danger to us all.

Steven Bush’s one-man stand-up comedy, rant, political protest and call for the war-crimes trials of both George H.W. and George W. Bush is a brash theatrical tour de force that dares his audiences to accompany him on a personal quest for evidence of honesty, decency and complicity in a world of damning facts and murky conspiracy theories.

Meticulously researched, including two pages of bibliography and twenty pages of footnotes to substantiate every wild allegation made during the show, and with a Postscript to the Reader that asks some sticky questions of America’s newest president, Barack Obama, this may well not be an attempt to ?ush the “Bushes” from their cover at all, but rather what Bembo Davies calls in his Afterword “an installation of self ” in a world gone mad—an installation that asks what “we the people” are going to do about regaining our collective sanity.

“The breadth of Steven’s talent as a theatre practitioner is quite simply remarkable. He has the uncommon gift of artistry and intellect … What is most exciting is that his work appears to come from a different place than that of most other theatre artists.”
—Djanet Sears

“Spalding Gray meets Noam Chomsky, this is less satire than entertaining polemic, leavened by memoir … Bush’s broadside does have its lighter moments.”
Globe & Mail