Letters to the Editor
sebringdl2
Published Letters: 15 Editor's Choice: 5
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Disappearing Act
[Read the article: Bush's presidential quagmire]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Pull together a group of psychologists, cultural anthropolgists, and sociologists, and they could talk about this President ad nausem. The guy is fascinating – not just as George Bush the man, but as the embodiment of so many complex, divergent, elements within our individual and collective lives. The press conference yesterday was “entertaining”, as one of your readers noted, but more in the realm of Greek tragedy than side show. Bush is at once despotic, recklessly grandiose, and interpersonally loathsome, while also being charming, clueless, vulnerable and pathetic. Yesterday he was all of these. Put this many powerful and contradictory elements together in one person and usually what you’re looking at is someone who is, at the core, empty. Patholigcal narcissism isn’t so much the love of self as it is the absence of self. Such a Commander in Chief, in the hands of a frighteningly powerful and insulated cadre of family and supporters, spells big trouble for the rest of us. What I believe has happened over the past few days, is that the President who, through the will and brilliance of his handlers, fomented fear to exquisite heights in the course of running his agenda, is now, himself, terrified. He looked in the mirror - was forced to by the midterm elections – and saw nothing. Nothing. Without sufficiently persuasive feedback from his neocon handlers, whose voices were finally drowned out, The President disappeared. That is…until he found another persona to ingest, and it looks to me like that’s what we’re seeing in dubya’s flight towards his father’s entourage. In a larger context, this isn’t just the tortured narrative of the can’t-ever-seem-to-get-it-right son. It’s also about where we are as a country in the dynamic struggle with our own collective identity, particularly the tension between what is dark and what is good within each of us. In writing an account of any ‘Presidency” one must include the interwoven narratives of the individual, a multiplicity of cultures, and the dynamic among them. I for one can’t wait to start reading the sure to be endless versions.
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Fed Up
[Read the article: Souls on ice]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Two points: First - I am SO sick of this kind of self-indulgent, ineffectual excuse for journalism. I probably basically agree with much of Ms. Dickerson is trying to point out but it’s so hard to wade through all the gratuitous vitriol that you end up feeling like a target yourself. I hear over and over again that to be truly persuasive, a message should be able to stand on the power of it own logic and rightness. Instead, what we all read with growing frequency are pieces that seem focused primarily on demonstrating the author’s virtuosity with sarcasm. Being able to pen facile screeds doesn’t make you smart, articulate, or right. If Salon wants to give space to thinkers who keep a light focused on critical issues like this one, it would help to find writers whose frontal lobes aren’t high-jacked by their rage.
Second - the hypocrisy in fundamentalist Christianity – regardless of the racial breakdown of the choir – is reprehensible. At the core, Christ was a Progressive who talked relentlessly about compassion and grace – and actually never said a word about homosexuality. This issue is discussed thoroughly and brilliantly in Peter Gomes’ “The Good Book.” The GOP is just jumping on a big bandwagon rolled out long ago and supported by organized religion for centuries to maintain white male power. They didn’t invent homophobia or racism; they just cleverly foment it.
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the terrorism of his own mistakes
[Read the article: Trashing Maliki, or when a leak becomes a flood]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]There’s been lots of speculation about how and why the Hadley memo on Maliki surfaced when it did in the NY Times. The most compelling framing to me emphasized the strategic value of the White House obliquely but very publicly warning the Prime Minister that tolerance for his perceived half-stepping had run out and he’d better cowboy up. Makes sense.
But why is there always so little discussion of the fact that along with all the other explanatory factors in such events - diplomatic, military, political – are psychological ones. Without getting into a defensive rant regarding the gross misperception that psychology is either about “touchy feely” Dr. Phil hooey or stigmatizing craziness, let me say that if we don’t include this dimension in our dissection of what’s going on geopolitically, our understanding will be incomplete at best. We analyze phenomena like war and international diplomacy in myopically macroscopic terms, with key players seen almost exclusively within defined roles. But the reality is that these players, every one of them, also function on the level of individual human beings, running on the same basic intrapsychic operating system as the rest of us. And none of us leaves this stuff at the breakfast table.
So here’s a theory on the psychosocial component of why that memo was leaked. Right now, in the eyes of much of America and most of the Middle East, George W. Bush looks like a recklessly incompetent leader. The mid-term elections decimated not only his “political capital” but the credibility (and therefore clout) he takes into this crucial meeting in Jordan. One way to level the playing field with Maliki on an interpersonal level is to very publicly question the Iraqi Prime Minister’s own competence. The “leaked” memo accomplished just that. It also seemed choreographed to provide a pathetic distraction from the emerging and devastating reality that neither leader truly has the power or resources needed to reach jointly envisioned goals. For a moment, everyone gets to hide behind a pissing contest, back turned (i.e. anxiety avoided) on the horrific debacle now taking on a life of its own.
It’s also very likely not just “stubbornness” or dogmatism that drove the President’s incredible refrain Tuesday about “staying until the job was done.” Psychologically, it plays as a man struggling against the almost unbearable specter of facing both global humiliation and the personal terrorism of his own catastrophic mistakes.