In February 2008, President Bush went on a five country tour of Africa. The six-day trip/media event was reproduced as a home-style, slide show, assembled and narrated by the president himself. President Bush spoke to members of the Leon H. Sullivan Foundation while flipping through the visuals of his experience. The Sullivan Foundation works with the African diaspora, friends of Africa, and international corporations to empower Africa. Bush’s slide show has a personal, “I’m-just-telling-my-friends-about-the-good-times-I-had-in-Africa” feel. The President likes the times he had in Benin, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ghana and Liberia. He notes that “America is on a mission of mercy” and that he very much enjoys the drumming and the dancing and the colorful garb. There are visits to AIDS clinics, signings of investment treaties, and skit watching—about sexual abstinence. What seeps out of the slides, though, is not the good times, but rather the American self. The slide show becomes an example of manufactured memory and political narcissism. Every stop on the trip is reinvented as something that basically emanates from the U.S. It’s an attempt to tame and reframe. Take for example a meeting with Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. The first female president of a post-colonial African state, Johnson-Sirleaf was once of part of the African diaspora, earning several degrees in American universities. President Bush is proud of her achievements and even more so of the fact that she is made in America: “I'm pretty certain the President was educated at the University of Pennsylvania. The more people who come to be educated in the United States from abroad, the better off our country will be. (Applause.)” (Actually, Johnson-Sirleaf received a B.A from Madison Business College in Wisconsin, a diploma from the Economics Institute at the University of Colorado, and a Masters of Public Administration from Harvard.) Why does a U.S. President have to claim her fame? Is the American state leery of the potential power of “exilic energies” (Edward Said)—those migrant forces that transcend consolidation, appearance and constraint? Is a home-style, slide show an attempt to subsume, as one, those “hybrid counter-energies” that flow beyond devouring notions of an American me, my and mine? It appears that the United States is more local than most are willing to admit. It is a state incapable of meeting the global, and so it must in-picture itself in everything. [See, http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/africa/trip2008/, for the full show.]