Stuff About Self-Delusion
Sat Jun 25, 2005 at 06:03:31 PM PDT
Cross-posted from
Moral Questions Weblog.
What's so facinating about the current trajectory of the Bush administration is the psychodrama that is playing out before our eyes. Today, Annie Lamott does a pretty good job of explaining where the whole crowd is at.
The White House and the war machine are collapsing, and their only hope would be to hit a bottom, like alcoholics and addicts have to do before they have a prayer of finding a solution. Until then, drunks keep lowering the bottom, justifying everything, lying even to themselves--or at any rate, that's what I did, until 19 years ago next week, when I was basically drinking just to keep all the flies going in one direction. That's where a lot of senators find themselves now.
I think that many in the majority party are finding themselves in the same psychic shape as alcoholics a few months before they finally seek sobriety, except for George Bush, who apparently does not have a clue. With alcoholism, other people can see that the alkie is, to quote one of my friends, in a state of pitiful and incomprehensible demoralization; but it takes what it takes for the alcoholic to realize that. This is why we have Karl Rove saying that when liberals saw the savagery of 9-11, we wanted to give the terrorists aid, comfort, and aromatherapy. So if the disease model of addiction holds true for this administration, there is something SO stinky and bad that has not quite yet had the light shined on it, that is the rock bottom truth of their madness, and that, tragically, even worse stuff than we already know will be revealed.
Rove's behavior this week reminds me of three things, besides my own sorry alcoholic collapse: one is what my very wise friend Gil says-and Gil has been sober since before God-that there are three stages in the disease: fun, fun and trouble, and trouble. Fun, for the White House, was the fall of Baghdad and Mission Accomplished. Fun and Trouble held, up until a month or so ago: you had huge body counts, grave global dismay, etc, but you also had the elections here and in Iraq, with all that courage and the purple fingertips. Now?
Well, I don't see where the fun is anymore: I think we are now leaving the fun and trouble stage.
The words both Rove and his idiot child George Bush spoke this week remind me of a day not long ago when I was tearing around town before a long weekend, assault-driving, making lists with my free hand, when my brakes started going out. It was quite scary. I called my mechanic, and described the problem, and he said he could not fix the car until Monday. I explained that I had a million things to do. There was silence at the other end. Then I asked, rather imperiously, "It's okay to keep driving it, isn't it, if I'm careful?"
There was a long pause. And he said, "Not without BRAKES!"
The Republican Guard is driving the war in Iraq without brakes. There is nothing they will not do or say to get those American bases built so soldiers can protect our sources of oil. But nothing is going to stop them until the damage to our forces in Iraq is so catastrophic that it forces the members of Congress to rethink their own re-elections. Some sort of symbolic threshold has to be reached in terms of dead Americans, before politicians really have to try to save their own careers.
We're not there yet. I thought briefly that all the women dying in the suicide attack today might shake Bush up, because Americans love big numbers, and that seems to me to be a lot of dead young American women. But I am in the mountains, at 6,500 feet, and the air is thin.
As Bush's second term unfolds, you come to understand two things. First, just how deeply connected and unhealthy is the relationship between the President and his chief advisor is. And that connection leads you to the second observation, which is the self-delusion and group-think that Bush and Rove have purpetrate upon themselves, perhaps almost as great as the thinking behind the Iraq War itself, the single most self-destructive act of George Bush's life.
Literally, the day after his reelection, it was clear that they had long since swallowed their own propaganda and misread their mandate. During the reelection campaign they really quite ruthlessly leveraged the fear that resulted from the 9/11 attacks against any thought Americans might have had to change leadership. They came up with the slimmest of mandates--bearly over 50%--based solely Americans' skepticism of changing commander-in-chief in the middle of a war, and instead interpreted it to mean a national shift toward their radical brand of Conservatism.
And the oddest thing is that on some level, they are aware that their policies
aren't as popular as they should be if America had suddenly become more conservative. Otherwise, why pretend that there is some huge coalition of countries in Iraq with us, why use Orwellian names like the Clean Air Act to roll back emissions standards, why lie about who gets most of the benefits from their tax breaks. Its sheer cognitive dissonance, on a grand scale.
And this gets to the most salient point of Lamott's piece for me today, which is that people are just people. Bush and Rove are just like everyone else. We all, at one time or another, do incredibly stupid things with their lives. We pretend reality isn't what it is, and live partly in the reality that is and what we would like it to be--and we screw things up big time in the process.
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