Mostly I write to please myself. To vent. And as an expression of frustration, I'm sure, but there's always the chance you will stumble onto something, an instance of insight, and I think I have.
The hardest thing to grasp, for me and my like-minded friends, is the lack of a conscience in our antagonists. The apparent indifference to suffering and death and the attendant obliviousness to all the systems that are supposed to make a society work.
Such as enjoying your freedom in ways that don't interfere with the ability of others to do the same. And we see this lack in people with whom we identify, to a degree. And who say, in fact, that they embody the ideal, the model of citizenship. Say it all the time.
While they don't seem to be channeling Charles Manson, exactly, they fall short of the standards we are supposed to share, in the estimation of myself and my friends. In reaching for understanding in such a situation I often look for limiting cases, the purest examples, extremes.
Then I interpolate. Move toward the middle. Use what's obvious in extreme cases to understand those less extreme. I posit George Bush as an extreme case. And Jesus, his avowed master and model, but possibly his antithesis. A foil, for our purposes. What does Bush most uniquely embody? What are his defining traits and characteristics?
In relation to Jesus, especially. And I speculate: boyishness. The worst of adolescent destructiveness and self centeredness. A lack of the understanding of connectedness and consequences. No social conscience. No sense of responsibility. Dependency. Defensiveness. Possibly the enjoyment of cruelty.
Not Jesus. But we elected this guy, twice, to the presidency, the office most likely to have elements of form associated with it in relation to the national ideal, in the second instance after he had proved to be stunningly incompetent and offensively aggressive, on the military front.
So maybe we, the electorate, embody some of the same traits, a generational case of arrested development. I wouldn't wish my fifteen year-old self on anybody, and I would have done a much better job of running things than Bush, as I was at fifteen.
But fifteen year-olds are supposed to be fifteen, fifty-somethings are not. So you are immediately in the arena of a Paul Ryan, an unintegrated self, ripe for supplanting with the ego or ideals of someone else. Borrowed integrity. Borrowed identity. Ayn Rand, in the case of Ryan.
Probably Dick Cheney, in the case of Bush, though, ostensibly, Jesus. And the void offered room for others at the same time. Rove, maybe. Bush's brain, reputedly. And Rumsfeld. A poker party of a personality. "I raise you an invasion." "Deregulate and call." "You can't do that!" "I just did."
A HOME ALONE situation in the White House with a delinquent kid in charge, and his criminal cohorts. A delinquent kid with nukes, operating out of a framework of decision-by-committee in which no one knows the other's intent, because they don't know it themselves. Not really.
A recipe for sociopathy. Their own motivations are a mystery to them, out of arrestedness and a lack of personal development. Something resonates with me here in relation to THE WIZARD OF OZ, a personality in pieces due to a lack of the development of its parts: courage, caring, sense.
A person unrealized in all aspects, in the case of Bush. Maybe that was the attraction to the powerful men behind the scenes. He's a clean slate of a human, someone without a hint of character or self-awareness. Suddenly, writing this, I feel fortunate. It could have been worse. He could have done even more harm.
No comments:
Post a Comment