1 Boring Old Man

I was a math type in school, but my favorite subjects, in retrospect, were English and History. Maybe that’s why a I ended up in a career as a psychoanalyst. I never could figure out a way to ‘use’ history until I discovered the psychotherapist business. In dealing with people, understanding one’s personal history does inform the present, and can be ‘used.’ I wonder if the same can be true of political history. We all think it can, but it’s sure not so easy as we think it ought to be.

There’s so much on our front pages this last couple of weeks that our heads are swimming. Who can sort it all out? I have a notion that we’re at a turning point, but with history, one can never be sure. That’s the way it is in psychotherapy. Therapist and client work for years on something, then one day, it’s over. The direction of a life is changed. Who ever knows when? or what made the difference? Looking back on the Bush years, I have a sense that we’re getting near the last chapters of The Rise and Fall of George II.

[The events underneath are just markers for orientation, not necessarily intended to imply causality]. The piece of this history that has been missing is the first, DENIAL – not the recent version as in State of Denial, but the kind pointed to by Richard Clarke in Against All Enemies. George II and his Courtiers had all the information they ever needed to know that an attack by bin Laden’s al Qaeda was going to occur. I don’t think the American people really knew that until recently. Clarke and O’Neill had both said it. Tennant didn’t say it. Clinton couldn’t say it. But, for whatever reason, we didn’t really know it until Clinton screamed it at Chris Wallace on Fox News, and Woodward proved it [the July 10, 2001 meeting with Rice].

We all know about the era of DARING. A lot of us thought it was misdirected, thought our own government was lying to us, but we couldn’t be sure, and there weren’t enough of us, and we could be discounted because everyone knew we didn’t like Bush from forever. In retrospect, we suspected that the invasion of Iraq had suspicious motives. At first, we thought it was oil, or establishing a base in the Middle East. Then we thought it was some kind of neoconservative American Dominion Agenda. Now we even wonder if it wasn’t a Saber Rattling attempt to cover-up, make up for, the DENIAL that preceeded it.

The first big event in the period of DOUBT was Joe Wilson’s oped article and the Administration’s reaction to it, but like Clarke’s and O’Neill’s books, it was mostly discounted, as were the Downing Street Memos, as was the 911 Commission Report, as were a lot of things. Only recently has the evidence achieved the weight that it deserves. Now we have Clinton’s temper tantrum, Woodward’s book, and Condi’s blatant lying and we finally seem to be entering the last chapters of the Reign of George II – DEFEAT.

When Shakespeare writes his tragedy, the piece that will be the tragic flaw will not just be the one in George II and his Court, it will be the one in the American Ethos that has had us following this King for such a painfully long period. That’s the history we have to understand. George II is easy. He’s a twerp. Always has been. But there’s been something wrong with us that’s much bigger…