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by Troutfishing
Sat Feb 03, 2007 at 09:20:29 PM PST
In a famous essay of modern philosophy Thomas Nagel asked "What is it like to be a bat ?". His conclusion : we can never know. The experiential realms of humans and bats are too far apart.
Can we imagine what it is like to be George W. Bush ?
Imagine that you felt you had the means, the ability, the right, to play with and use the fates of average humans, Americans or the citizens of almost any country in the world, to advance your personal agenda and your needs, and those of your chosen friends and allies.
Imagine that you could instigate war, almost as a game, to suit your political needs and psychological fancy but that you didn’t see it in those terms at all and, instead, rationalized such power by calling it responsibility.
Imagine, also, you felt touched by divine providence, called by God to lead.
Imagine this felt quite sensible, because you had learned, as a part of your familial cultural inheritance, a whole range of subtle techniques by which the lives and fates of millions and the course of entire nations could be altered.
Imagine you’re George W. Bush.
Imagine that you’d thought - or, more likely, discussed with similar, like minded individuals - about the political and personal utility of a war against Iraq.
Imagine that you’d pondered the utility of such a war, that it would be useful for a range of reasons, not the least of which for the ability of war to magnify presidential power and - beyond even that - the opportunities such a war would afford for gradually polarizing and infuriating the sensibilities of people in a major religious tradition encompassing a substantial portion of the world’s population, Islam, so that by setting the stage for conditions that would so stress, brutalize, deprive and degrade American soldiers fighting in your manufactured war that you could be assured a predictable level of human rights abuses and atrocities, because the means by which average humans can be conditioned to commit mass killing and atrocities had been well researched.
Imagine you had the means of engineering and provoking repeated human rights abuses, wholesale slaughter, and symbolic affronts maximally offensive to the Islamic religious tradition, and that you could more or less assume at some point the incessant goading and outrages would in the end provoke terrorist strikes against the United States and US interests that would, in turn, enable you to consolidate your presidential authority and your base of domestic political support, crush political dissent, and initiate yet another war that would have all the same political benefits and allow you, of course, to repeat the same process all over again.
Would you be George W. Bush ?
Prior to the European Enlightenment and the subsequent, widespread belief that individual humans posses certain inherent and inalienable rights, a belief that laid the foundation for the rise of the democratic political tradition, kings, queens, and potentates were commonly assumed to have the right to steal from or torture, rape or impale, incinerate or enslave, imprison or butcher their subjects, singly or en masse - by the millions even, if desired, at will. That is the manner in which many kings and tyrants once thought. Occasional benevolent rulers would, as exceptions, emerge from time to time but the rule was this : common subjects of monarch were as ants.
Imagine yourself, as George W. Bush, able to initiate events that could lead to the deaths or hundreds of thousands, millions even. Imagine that you felt no special empathy for the fate of your victims, that it was nothing personal really, just business. Or, maybe, that you could do such things because you felt God approved.
The notion that political leaders have the right to order mass killing or initiate events likely to lead to mass death, is still retained in the modern American democratic tradition but it is closely circumscribed. US presidents can typically only make such awful decisions during wartime, and for clear reason. Such powers are sometimes abused but in principle, at least, there remain checks on the ability of US presidents to order, with impunity, mass killing or mass violations of the rights of American or international citizens.
In principle.
But, such checks on the abuse of presidential authority assume that presidents actually care for the common good, and with the Bush Administration push to expand the slaughterhouse that the US occupation of Iraq has become, so that the killing mushrooms out to engulf Iran and perhaps continues to spread from there, that assumption is now in question.
To begin with, as a backdrop, a great deal of evidence point towards the fact that United States government has been commandeered by interests, by agendas, that go beyond the realm of common imagination on what the motives of the political elites driving US policy could be.
Endless words have been written, endless debates fought, about the real, underlying intent of the Bush Administration’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, and in the years since US troops rolled into Bhagdad a lot has been made clear - so that what was once seen as an amorphous, sinister conspiracy of a neoconservative cabal has resolved into a profile of convergent interest. There were in fact so many in the Washington DC power structure with strategically dubious, cynical, and self interested motivations for the US invasion and occupation of Iraq it’s surprising the venture wasn’t tried years ago.
Many reasonably straightforward underlying motivations of the cheerleaders who rooted for the Iraq war, many of whom are now clamoring for the Iran war, are now generally agreed on : Machiavellian geopolitical considerations revolving around oil, desires for personal profit, US defense industry financial interests, and the objective of increasing US military involvement in the Mideast for the benefit of Israel. Some even, no doubt, clamored for war out of misplaced patriotism.
In the background, too, seismic shifts in American economic class structure surely underlie, in part, the Iraq debacle :
Income disparities in the United States have long been widening, and the interests of a tiny economic elite - who control an inordinate proportion of the national wealth - has been decoupling from that of the common masses ; political commenters, such as William Greider, have for over a decade and a half now been writing about the extent to which American government no longer represents the interests of average Americans but, more and more, advances elite economic and business interests. Indeed, with genetic engineering and advances in science and medicine that are beginning to enable those who can pay to buy supernatural levels of health, beauty, and intelligence even, we can even see the long term specter of the human race decoupling, as in H.G. Wells "The Time Machine", into two or more separate species.
These are factors that arguably fed the push for war in some way - all, even if ugly, are comprehensible.
But, the second level of explanation leads more clearly to the motivations and psychology of George W. Bush :
George W. Bush grew up in a family that began it’s march towards wealth and political power with the arms industry that sprung up to supply the US war effort in World War One. Prior to World War Two, George Bush’s grandfather, Prescott Bush, helped to channel financial investment that rebuilt German as an industrial power and built up an advanced German arms industry. Prescott Bush narrowly escaped prosecution, after the US declaration of war against the Axis, for "trading with the enemy", moving financial assets around ( hiding actually ) for the German industrial magnate Fritz Thyssen whose empire accounted for a considerable fraction of German industrial production. Prescott Bush’s activities seem, however, to have more than anything, less to do with Nazi ideology and more to do with business, sans moral or nationalist considerations. George Herbert Walker Bush was in turn director of the CIA, and much could be said about his activities and alleged involvement, but key to the Bush family cultural legacy, more than anything, may be the apparent belief of the Bushes that they live outside of, and probably above, the normal strictures of law and nationalist loyalty, and the political and social methods - both sophisticated and brutal but usually quiet, deployed and practiced in the shadows, by which they have acquired and maintained the power and wealth of the dynasty. They are a family bent, with a single-minded fixation, on power.
What is it like to be a Bush ?
Imagine having the ability to determine and mold the fates of millions.
Imagine that this power is your birthright, and imagine humans, those outside your social and political circles, as ants.
Imagine that you really do not care about public opinion because you neither care for, nor empathize with, average Americans.
Imagine you don’t think about outcomes insofar as they effect Americans in general, Iraqis, Iranians, or the world at large but simply in terms of how your actions help you and your allies extend and consolidate power and gain profit.
Imagine you’re bent on attacking Iran because you think it is useful, at least in part, for expected terrorist blowback - attacks in the United States and elsewhere, for creating pretext for further extension of your presidential powers.
Imagine you hear of mass death you probably have caused, feel little to nothing, and simply shrug it off.
<center>Now, imagine that’s all true</center>
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