Is He Still President?
But the brazenness of Bush’s alternative-reality history is itself revelatory. The audacity of its hype helps clear up the mystery of how someone so slight could inflict so much damage. So do his many print and television exit interviews.
The man who emerges is a narcissist with no self-awareness whatsoever. It’s that arrogance that allowed him to tune out even the most calamitous of realities, freeing him to compound them without missing a step. The president who famously couldn’t name a single mistake of his presidency at a press conference in 2004 still can’t.
He can, however, blame everyone else. Asked (by Charles Gibson) if he feels any responsibility for the economic meltdown, Bush says, “People will realize a lot of the decisions that were made on Wall Street took place over a decade or so, before I arrived.” Asked if the 2008 election was a repudiation of his administration, he says “it was a repudiation of Republicans.”
[Frank Rich, "A President Forgotten but Not Gone", New York Times, 3 January 2009.]
Back in the Reagan years I kept a small clipping, perhaps only 250 words long, from a newspaper on the door to my laboratory. It was a short piece about that president's recent surgery to remove a cancerous tumor.
As part of an interview the journalist asked about the cancer he had had removed. "Oh no," Reagan explained, "I didn't have cancer. I had something inside of me that had cancer, and that was taken out." For me that summarized virtually all the weirdness, out-of-touchness, denial and plausible deniability of the Reagan administration.
The way it sounds to me, now, is something even stranger: "I was not repudiated. Republicans were repudiated, and I am a Republican."
Maybe Republicans just have their own special form of denial. Maybe that's what lets them do all the crazy stuff they do and still think they're doing what's best for the country rather than, say, merely looting the national economy.
Perhaps–to speak in my atheistic voice for a moment–this is a negative effect of fundamentalist popular-theology. We all are good, but we all have sin inside us, and that sin can be manipulated by Satan. We're not responsible for our own bad ways: the devil makes us do it. No–wait! Satan didn't make me do it, he made something inside of me do it and I'm not responsible for that.
There are a number of things done in the name of religion that we atheists would like to blame on religion, like religious wars, sectarian massacre, persecutions and burnings, etc., but in fact I tend to believe that those are mostly things that people just want to do anyway and their religion is as ready an excuse as any.
On the other hand, I think this notion that "good", religious people (their terminology, not mine) are not actually responsible for the bad things they do flows from their religious notions and peculiar theologies. I also think that might be source for the continued attitude, at least in this country (not often expressed explicitly but heartily believed in), that people who become ill or live in poverty are morally responsible for their own condition. Really, it doesn't seem to take much more than a mild belief that prayer actually does something, whence flows the logical consequence that untoward happenstance must result from inadequate prayer.
The trouble with the proposition is that not only do the political oppressors use it as an excuse to cut government assistance to those in need, the flip side serves quite nicely as justification for looting the economy, "prosperity gospel" and "we must have been good to deserve all this" and "we were put in a position to do the looting so it must be Providence", and all the rest.
But, in the end, what's worse is that the oppressed believe the argument too. It's what their religion teaches them; it's what their religion has taught them since the days of the divine rights of kings.
Ah, if only I were younger and more energetic I might set about to rouse some rabble.
2 Responses
Subscribe to comments via RSS
Subscribe to comments via RSS
Leave a Reply
To thwart spam, comments by new people are held for moderation; give me a bit of time and your comment will show up.
I welcome comments -- even dissent -- but I will delete without notice irrelevant, rude, psychotic, or incomprehensible comments, particularly those that I deem homophobic, unless they are amusing. The same goes for commercial comments and trackbacks. Sorry, but it's my blog and my decisions are final.
on Thursday, 8 January 2009 at 03.13
Permalink
Very interesting. You take the religious angle, and I can't argue with the plausibility of what you have to say.
Regarding Bush, I'd be more inclined to simply plumb the extremely shallow psychological depths of someone utterly sheltered, spoiled and selfish, possessed of a sense of entitlement and privilege that easily eclipses whoever is second-worst in this regard, all of it girded with a certain underlying perverse meanness.
As for rousing rabble, first you'd have to lure them away from their Playstations, Media Center PC's and 96-inch HiDef TV's with surround sound. Good luck.
on Thursday, 8 January 2009 at 12.33
Permalink
It's a thought about W as you say, but I also think he might be predictable just from observing that 1) he's not at all an intelligent man, who 2) hates it when people think he's stupid. Coupled with the privileged, sheltered lifestyle it's dangerous. And it all gets worse when he realizes that he wasn't president because of anything to do with him except his lack of intelligence, which his key supporters & promoters were certainly would let them manipulate him. He becomes the diversionary tactic while the looters dig their tunnel and raid the vaults. That can't make him feel any better about himself. The one thing he might have done in mitigation was have the integrity and spine to say "no"–but he lacked even that.