Out of Touch

More than 230 years ago, the great American patriot, Thomas Paine, pointed out something in his pamphlet, Common Sense, that has been amply proven over the last seven years. Paine said: "Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions."

George W. Bush is by no means the only contemporary U.S. politician raised in a rarefied world of great wealth and privilege. Nor is he the only person in Washington D.C. woefully ignorant of the needs and interests of the vast nation that lies beyond the Beltway. He suffers from all of the same drawbacks that Paine pointed out, with one additional, fatal flaw. He has let himself be persuaded that he's a regular guy, chosen by God to lead the world's only superpower.

While this seems absurd to the rest of us, there is a strange sort of internal logic at work here. Even through the fog of alcohol and drugs, young George W. Bush must have come to the realization that he was not a particularly gifted politician or a competent, let alone shrewd, man of business. His election to the governorship of Texas must have come as something of a shock, intelligible to him only in terms of a divine second chance given to the newly sober, "born again"

George W. Bush. The success of his father's cronies (like James Baker) in converting his narrow defeat at the hands of Al Gore, into installation in power by the Supreme Court, may well have been interpreted by Dubya as "the Big Guy Upstairs" fixing the people's mistake.

Tragically, in order to establish his independence from the Eastern Establishment milieu from which he had sprung, Dubya allowed a handful of opportunistic neocon nutjobs to hijack the government. Before long, even James Baker's advice counted for nothing, as did Colin Powell's, or anyone else's beyond the limited circle of Cheney-approved water carriers. To the pure, all things are pure, and Cheney, Rove, and the others surrounding Dubya became masters of constructing their own reality. No need to listen to all that confusing criticism from around the world, across the street, or at your Daddy's dinner table-- you're the Decider Guy! Limiting access to the President serves two purposes: 1)hiding the administration's misdeeds from the public, and 2) hiding the public's outrage from the President.

Thus, when Bush's handlers see the possibility that he might be faced with the reality that their "vision" is not shared by anyone else, they seek to sharply limit his exposure to the outside world. Talk to the NAACP? Why bother? Listen to diplomats, career military, senior republicans with misgivings about the war? No time, the President is too busy speaking before an audience of young officers-in-training, under strict orders to applaud his remarks.

It may be too late for any of us to pierce the bubble and get George W. Bush's attention. This makes it all the more crucial to step up the activism. It's great that more than seven out of ten Americans now realize that Dubya doesn't live in our world. Let's make enough noise that the whole world understands that the U.S. public rejects the Cheney/Bush agenda.