President Bush's Demons

Take this for what it's worth.

This is from a book review of Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President by Justin Frank. I don't buy everything I read in this article, but this section seems pretty plausible to me.

While the conventional wisdom might suggest that Bush fears being unmasked as a dolt, Frank believes that Bush's rigidity -- also manifest in his ironclad daily routine -- protects him from inadvertently revealing the darker emotions he's never come to terms with. In addition to the fear of not living up to his father's example, there's the anger at being expected to, and the fear of the destructive power of that anger should it ever be unleashed. The primitive moral vision Bush subscribes to -- in which the world is divided into the good, "freedom-loving" people of America and "evildoers" like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein -- is another inflexible schema that imposes order on the internal chaos that's always threatening to rise up and swamp him. Maintaining such control takes a considerable amount of energy, according to Frank, which may be one reason why Bush needs so much sleep and finds it so hard to concentrate.

Bush's born-again Christianity, an anomaly in his patrician East Coast clan, serves a similar function. For Bush, faith is less about the joyful worship of God in a community of believers (as Frank points out, he seldom attends church) than it is about forcing a structure on both the world and his own life without the risks inherent in a genuine attempt to understand either one. As Frank shrewdly observes, unlike your garden variety AA member, the born-again Christian need not ever examine his pre-conversion past; it can be partitioned off and dispensed with as irrelevant, which is just what Bush has done. The rowdy George W. who drank too much and, when soused, actually owned up to his wrath at his father and his own lot in life, now no longer exists.

But wait, I hear you saying. How can President Bush both learn that he is pretty well invulnerable to failure and also learn that he has a terrible dark side that must be kept under control? It's a matter of transference, in my opinion. When he fails, such failings are projected onto others. It's not that the policy in Iraq is struggling or even failing; the real problem is that the media is reporting such struggles or failings.

But like I said, take it for what it's worth. Here is another review of Mr. Frank's work, one from the Guardian UK.