While the psycho-pathologies of our President have become frighteningly evident over the last few years, those of the man “who decides what the Decider decides” are still very much cloaked from public view, presumably in an undisclosed location. Susan Douglas explains in Is Cheney Evil or Just a Weasel?, that when we liken Dick Cheney to evil itself (or dress him up in a black robe with a light sabre), we affirm his power as a bully, instead of undermining it.
The Mahablog
Politics. Society. Group Therapy.
More cowbell! That’ll fix him!
Impeach…NOW
“You sit around here and you spin your little webs and you think the whole world revolves around you and your money. Well, it doesn’t, Mr. Potter. In the whole vast configuration of things, I’d say you were nothing but a scurvy little spider.”
More cowbell…
That was priceless. I’ll never hear “Don’t Fear the Reaper” quite the same way ever again. I missed a lot of SNL, due to one of my many TV fasts – which in this case spanned most of the 70s and early 80s.
I only know about the cowbell skit because my kids told me about it.
Does anyone besides me every watch Bush and see the frightened inner child? Through all the faux resolve is someone incapable of empathy. No doubt Unca Dickey knows how to pull all of young Georgie’s psychological strings.
I’ve found myself even feeling sorry for him at times.
Young Bush had a sister that with a disease who was carted about to hospitals until one day Poppy and Babs came home without her. Upon enquiring about her young “W” was told by Babs, “Don’t you ask about that girl anymore.”
Psychiatrist Justin Frank cited a conspicuous familial absence of not only introspection but also grieving. CAN YOU IMAGINE THAT? He was just a child who was dealt that deck. I can’t help but feel sympathy for his “inner child” and almost shed a tear when reading that. He was just a child. Just a child….
Frank concludes as he would for any of his patients, that while Bush badly needs help, that help should not come at the expense of others upon whom damage can be inflicted as long as he remains in office.
No doubt Unca Dickey and others in the Bush inner circle know just how to play him like a fiddle, perhaps even orchestrating his moods. I sometimes wonder what opportunities there are for Bush to get any sense of what the world actually thinks about him. Could he be so controlled and cloistered that he has no sense of it?
Pat (#6),
I’m still at the point, and have been for most of the last six years, where I can’t bring myself to even look at the guy when he’s on TV. His persistent attempts to snow me (and the whole public), including the phony joshing, affect me viscerally, in my gut, even though I know that he’s but a tiny part of this PR effort. My BS detector has been pegged these entire six years – I keep trying to tap the needle loose, but it remains firmly in the “red” – watch out – zone.
And yet I hear what you’re saying. As W’s star continues to fall, and as his own people turn on him, it’s hard not to feel some empathy for the guy. I’ll feel a lot more empathy for him should he ever get real about who he is and what he’s done. I would pay a lot of money to sit in on the 12 step meeting where Georgie finally starts to come clean, but I seriously doubt if anything like this is ever going to happen.
In the meantime, I feel mostly a sickening contempt and a lot of sadness over the wreckage and bloodshed he has helped create.
I hear you moonbat.
I do not view him with any hope. He’s proved himself irredeemable. It is really hard to have sympathy for someone who refuses to acknowledge the damage he’s inflicted on others, primarily the weak and powerless.
Justin Frank’s assessment is that the only way Bush could begin down the road to recovery is to acknowledge that he has hurt others. If he ever reached that point he would have his hands full.
I watch him only in an effort to better understand the mindsets of those who view the same thing and see something that I do not. Bush is a given but the receptivity of the voting public makes Bush’es and Cheney’s possible. That is something that I feel I have a lot to learn about. I’ve made some progress I think and it has taken me to Elias Canetti (Crowds and Power) and also to some research on Terror Management Theory.
There will be other Bushes in the future. Voters and the opposition all need to be better equipped to deal with men like Bush.
At times I experience revulsion but I want to look at this dispassionately and analytically too. If I can do that without letting revulsion and contempt cloud my perceptions then maybe I will be better prepared to preempt his potential effects…to be a more effective voice, albeit one, in opposition.
Bush has inflicted a great deal of damage on others but is a victim himself as well. It is something about the voting public that allowed him the power to inflict such damage on a scale of biblical proportion and allowed the damage done to Bush to be passed on and magnified many million fold.
He is the sum of acts set in motion long ago that continue their momentum, passing through him and onward, encouraged by enablers.
That doesn’t make him less deserving of ceontempt but whatever damaged him is also deserving of contempt and had it been stopped he might not have passed it along.
He also would not have been in the position to do as much damage had there not been so much receptivity to his dysfunction. I wan’t to understand his dysfunction in an effort to understand they dysfunction that made this badly damaged many so powerful…so it won’t happen again, Bush or someone else.
Man has terrible potential and Bush is in some ways only a catalyst. Canetti might consider him a crystal around which a belligerent crowd would form. Canetti also observes another precursor for the formation of a belligerent crowd — the first provocation.
Canetti’s insights are so eloquently stated in crowds and power that I am almost in awe:
But how does a belligerent crowd form? What, from one moment to another creates the uncanny coherence? What is it that suddenly moves men to risk their all? The phenomenon is so mysterious that it must be approached with a measure of caution.
War is an astonishing business. People decide that they are threatened with physical destruction and proclaim the fact publicly to the who world. They say “I can be killed” and secretly add “because I myself want to kill this or that man.” The stress properly belongs on the second half of this sentence. It should run: “I want to kill this or that man, therefore I can be killed myself.” But when it is a question of war starting, of its eruption and the awakening of a bellicose spirit within the nation, the first version will be the only one openly admitted. Even if in fact the aggressor, each side will always attempt to prove that it is threatened.
On both sides those involved usually come together very quickly, whether in physical actuality of in imagination and feeling. The outbreak of a war is primarily an eruption of two crowds. As soon as these crowds have formed, the supreme purpose of each is to preserve its existence through both belief and action. A belligerent crowd always acts as if everything outside it were death. The individual may have survived many wars but, with each new war, he surrenders himself afresh to the same illusion.
As for terror management theory, my thoughts are too wide-ranging for a short little blog but I have made some crude attempts at tying them together in the past, in the form of links tied together by a few comments.
I still have a list of books on mind control to read and have only started on the first, a book on Walter Lippman wo grew very pessimistic on the future of democracy, citing many concerns regarding the media that are now on our radar as never before.
Perhaps others will find it as interesting as I did:
http://boards.billmaher.com/showpost.php?p=561122&postcount=1