1 Boring Old Man

As a psychotherapist, I learned that even the most difficult of people came by their problems honestly. There are limits. I can’t find any point of empathy with murderers or rapists [but they don’t show up in therapists offices]. So it’sa been kind of discordant for me to be so frustrated with what Bush and Cheney have done, and yet be able to find no reason for it that I can connect with.

This morning, I was browsing the news. I read again with amazement about the plane that landed in the Hudson River, and like all of us, marvelled at the pilot’s quick thinking. New York was due a miracle, and this story fit the bill. And then I ran across a video of a roundtable of Washington Post reporters with Eugene Robinson, Bob Woodward, and Barton Gellman [author of "Angler" and recent Pulitzer Prize winner]. So I watched. I’d recommend it to anyone. It’s filled with thoughtful commentary from first to last.

Bush came across as he always does – an impatient guy who doesn’t go into things very deeply, a person who thinks his job is making decisions – missing the point that his job should be assembling and managing a team of people who bring their expertise to bear on their piece of the puzzle. Cheney came across as a micromanager, the opposite of his [sort of] boss. But neither had the big picture, or at least a big picture that was any bigger than their own thoughts. But as they talked, Robinson, Woodward, and Gellman, I had my first ever real connection with Bush and Cheney. After 9/11, they never got out of the bunker.

 
^{September 11th, 2001}

We all remember Bush’s freezing up in that schoolroom in Florida – paralyzed. Less well recalled was Cheney’s evacuation to a White House bunker. They were as stunned as we were, but they had to do something about it. And they well knew what we didn’t know, that they had ignored the warnings that it was coming. Both Woodward and Gellman remind us that Bush and Cheney had no idea in those moments where it was going to stop – would Chicago dissolve in a mushroom shaped cloud? Would Smallpox destroy life on the Eastern Seaboard? They didn’t know, and we didn’t know. And, again, they had to do something about the threat.

From that day forward, that’s all they’ve thought about. They made a lot of decisions in the days that followed that most of us wish they hadn’t made – torture, suspending the Geneva Conventions, Domestic Wiretapping, Invading Iraq, and they never backed down on any of it. The rest of government went by the wayside [except for Rove’s electioneering]. Cheney micromanaged the DoD, the CIA, the new Homeland Security, the NSA, even the DoJ. Central Command from the White House bunker never stopped [until next Tuesday]. In their exit speeches, that’s almost all they talk about – no more 9/11’s, ergo what they did was right. And they wonder why we’re so up in arms.

My area of expertise is Psychologic Trauma. One of the pieces of wisdom about traumatized people is that they spend their lives trying to "prevent the past." They’ve experienced something that overwhelmed them, something they couldn’t do anything about, and the consequences were disastrous. Trauma destroys intuition because the traumatized person knows that worst case scenarios can occur. The only thing that corrects a trauma is that it never happened in the first place – so "prevention" becomes paramount [needless to say, you cannot prevent the past].