The Wimp Factor returns: Bush, Icarus & Oedipus

(cross-posted at fouroboros)

Hey, it's the Classic Comics version of Greek Tragedy. While some may not enjoy swami-like conjectures and observational suppositions, it is nice to be proven competent at one's vocation from time to time...

21 Things we will learn in the next 6 to 18 months

(snip)

• How many times Tony Blair had to talk George Bush down off the ledge.
  
• How much DoD money was given to Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkey, Jordan, Syria
  
• How deeply known, and how high, was the WMD McGuffin known as such and, how surprisingly early.

and last but not least:

How many of Bush's notable business and political supporters were "truly and deeply" concerned about his volatile imbalances and decision-making, but were "afraid to say anything."

That was October last year. Icarus and Oedipus and Leo Strauss are shaking their heads...

Now, after all the John Wayne-ism and big swinging d*cks, we're down to four females. Three with long-standing prior enabling or controlling  relationships with the Big Guy, and one who owes her position to assiduously playing catch-up to the other three--a  single, workaholic yet merely adequate thinker Secretary of State who once splipped Freudian  at a dinner party, referring to the Man as"my husband."  Some may be Muses, some Harridans. But Poppy Bush, in the role of Agamemnon, well, he's nowhere's-ville.

They say the Gods on Olympus were jealous of man's mortality, that the fact of finite life between birth and death was the essence of human drama. As Gods, they had it all, and they had nothing; they were prisoners of both immortality and their own PR.  We were their entertainment, and, in all but the rarest cases, every show was a rerun.

Or a sequel.

In this administration, the irony pie just keeps getting taller.  Cheney, Wolfowitz, Libby, Rummy, William Bennett and the whole Neocon crew owe gobs of intellectual debt to a huge fan of ancient Greece and its mythological lessons. That fan would be the late Leo Strauss, of the University of Chicago. Strauss and his pals from the Rand Institute such as Albert Wohlstetter and Irving Kristol really fell in love with the heroic ideals of the poets and thinkers of the Agoran Cultural Elite.

Yes, Cultural Elites are fine if they're peddling your particular neurosis. Strauss figured Plato, Socrates, Homer, Virgil all had something meta to say about that human drama thingy. And he, and others, thought they were a fine antidote to the institutional rot and uncertainty they perceived in Feminism, Labor Movements, and a general culture of self-gratification--the products of a looming post-industrial revolution droopiness and its result: a rudderless society. Just like the Federalist Society and its Constitution in Exile fanatics, he thought that the fancy language of the Constitution was sorta soft, and its vagueness had allowed us to veer terribly off course from our original noble founding intent. To lose our "balls."  That is how he and others, I'm sure, would phrase it, with similar pompous certitude. And no irony whatsoever.

So I wonder  what Strauss would think of his erstwhile Icarus, once floating high on 90% approval ratings and hubris now brought crashing to Earth, to 36%, aided by that self-same hubrisand deafness to warnings from wiser souls.  Aided by the very same grandiosity Strauss himself thought would be the saving grace of  what he saw as a country made victim  by its own feminization and the banishment of respect for all things masculine. Victimized by the Feminine. By the lure of the Harridan. Or the insanity of the Muse. And that will be the excuse, once more, absent any irony or honor or valor. Mission unaccomplished, yet again, it is time: George now withdraws to four surrogate mothers.

This is the end of his term as far as his Neo- and Christo- base is concerned. The wimp factor returns. The acorn never falls far from the tree. And there is nothing new under the Son.