(I'm being a blogwhore, sorry, but this needs to be said. I originally posted this on my blog.)
I have said that George Bush does not believe in God, and that is accurate. But the religion of George W. Bush is worse than that: he does not believe in an external, all-powerful, benign creative force in the universe because he believes that he, himself, is that force. George W. Bush thinks that he is God, or more accurately, that he occupies the cosmological space that believers imagine God to occupy.
I come to that conclusion, farther than I've gone before, from
Ron Suskind's profile in the NY Times magazine. Suskind's article is the most important writing about George W. Bush hands-down, a superlative that is not contradicted by the fact that it is wrong in its central argument. Suskind paints a picture of Bush as the idol of a mass of believing Christians who do not doubt that Bush carries out God's will on Earth, a position that Bush uses to maximum political advantage and in fact holds himself. But that is wrong, and I did not use the word 'idol' in the previous sentence randomly. Bush presents himself as the substitute for God, the omnipotent creator who is not 'benevolent' in the sense we normally use that term because his actions forge their own 'good' and are not subject to any other. If I were a conventional Catholic, I would say without a doubt that Bush is the anti-Christ. As it is, I don't know the full import of that term (especially as it seems to foreclose the possibility of any other such figure and guarantee the imminence of the Second Coming), so I won't subscribe to it myself, but he is the ultimate denier of divinity as he replaces God in a purely evil, nihilistic belief system.
Suskind's article is full of downright scary examples of Bush and his supporters confusing the President--by which I mean 'literally unable to differentiate'--with Jesus Christ and the Divine. One activist organized a rally for the President's reelection in Missouri, and Suskind recounts the following from that event:
"Billington said he ''looked to God'' and said what was in his heart. ''The United States is the greatest country in the world,'' he told the rally. ''President Bush is the greatest president I have ever known. I love my president. I love my country. And more important, I love Jesus Christ.'' The crowd went wild, and they went wild again when the president finally arrived and gave his stump speech. There were Bush's periodic stumbles and gaffes, but for the followers of the faith-based president, that was just fine. They got it -- and ''it'' was the faith."
Suskind catches Billington at other moments, such as this:
"''To me, I just believe God controls everything, and God uses the president to keep evil down, to see the darkness and protect this nation,'' Billington told me, voicing an idea shared by millions of Bush supporters. ''Other people will not protect us. God gives people choices to make. God gave us this president to be the man to protect the nation at this time.''"
And after Billington has the chance to speak with the President, he reports to Suskind:
"''He knew what I meant,'' Billington said. ''I believe he's an instrument of God, but I have to be careful about what I say, you know, in public.''"
At a different event in Florida, Suskind records one of the typical 'questions' asked by the audience:
"''I've voted Republican from the very first time I could vote,'' said Gary Walby, a retired jeweler from Destin, Fla., as he stood before the president in a crowded college gym. ''And I also want to say this is the very first time that I have felt that God was in the White House.'' Bush simply said ''thank you'' as a wave of raucous applause rose from the assembled."
Those examples are stark; the declarations of Bush officials are starker. Suskind recounts a conversation with one aide:
"The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''"
Suskind's treatment of this exchange illustrates the fallacy of his line. Suskind means to juxtapose an empiricist, enlightenment-influenced view of truth with a revelatory, medieval-influenced view. But in fact there is nothing revelatory about what this aide says, because an outlook grounded in revelation would never, ever say that human beings can forge new realities, that human beings can spark revelation for other human beings. Creation through action--that notion is not religious but Fascist, and its lineage is long. It seeks to elevate the strong leader to the place of God, to the provider of truth to the expectant and adoring masses. That leader is not subject to any code or truth besides his own; thus, his exaltation is inconsistent with the exaltation of God. In Hitler's Germany and Stalin's USSR, that meant that religion was redundant and vaguely threatening, so it was expunged. In George Bush's America, that means that Bush and God, far from existing side-by-side, are one and the same.
A thought that continually recurred as I read Suskind's profile was "Why?" as in, "Why is this disgusting idea so compelling to so many people?" And I don't know the answer. As I've said before, the conservative/Republican line on fundamentalist Islamic terrorism is terribly anemic, so the idea that Bush is the all-powerful force to defend America from heathens bent on death and destruction does not ring true. At one point in the article, Billington admits that he's deathly afraid of gay marriage, but that's so absurd I simply don't believe him, and not because I have faith in his ability to see through to everyone's shared humanity. The religion of the deeply religious has survived episodes of sin far more clearcut and threatening than rampant, acceptable homosexuality, even on the fundamentalist's understanding. Does the possibility of gay marriage really justify the wholesale sell-out of sincere beliefs to sacrilege? Someone more informed than I would add a cause/reason distinction at this point: gay marriage may not be a sufficient reason to replace God with Bush, but it may nonetheless be the cause of that movement. That formulation is probably flawed, and as I said, I don't know why this has happened. Suskind quotes Mark McKinnon's tired adversarial story, but even that is a process observation rather than a cause:
"And for those who don't get it? That was explained to me in late 2002 by Mark McKinnon, a longtime senior media adviser to Bush, who now runs his own consulting firm and helps the president. He started by challenging me. ''You think he's an idiot, don't you?'' I said, no, I didn't. ''No, you do, all of you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don't care. You see, you're outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don't read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it's good for us. Because you know what those folks don't like? They don't like you!'' In this instance, the final ''you,'' of course, meant the entire reality-based community."
Even if MacKinnon's made-up dichotomy is reflective of the real world (which they don't believe exists), why has it come about? Is that an adequate explanation for the heresy of Bush?
The close of Suskind's article focuses on Bush's interaction with this financial supporters and ideological backers in Washington. One, a Jewish former Ambassador to Switzerland, voices mild discomfort with what Suskind calls "the faith-based Presidency".
"Talk of the faith-based initiative, Gildenhorn said, makes him ''a little uneasy.'' Many conservative evangelicals ''feel they have a direct line from God,'' he said, and feel Bush is divinely chosen. ''I think he's religious, I think he's a born-again, I don't think, though, that he feels that he's been ordained by God to serve the country.'' Gildenhorn paused, then said, ''But you know, I really haven't discussed it with him.''"
Such is the naive tyranny of the "responsible," the utterly inadequate, lazy tendency of those in a position to find out the truth to do nothing in the face of a profoundly heinous idea. The laziness is akin to acquiescence, and that is the position of the media. They are lazy; they acquiesce; they are complicit.
Reading Suskind's article was very, very educational and, as I've said, unfathomably disturbing. This man presumes to take God's place, and many people believe he does so rightly. Something must be done.