Hello Everyone!!
Although the Bush era is technically over, I'd like to raise some issues about why George W. Bush and Dick Cheney could do the sorts of things they did. And for over eight years now, I've seen much made of two things:
1) They both came from very affluent families.
2) Neither of them were in Vietnam.
But personally, I don't think either of the above go all that far in explaining either of their behavior. To blame wealth or some "missed Vietnam Syndrome" for their willingness to inflict the kind of damage on other human being that they did, is a cold hard slap in the face to the moral reasoning and intelligence of ordinary human beings. That they did these things without losing a night's sleep for it, as far as anyone seems to know, reveals something far more sinister than simple ignorance.
Admittedly both of these views get on my nerves. In fact, I think they are such poor explanations for their behavior that it almost negates the severity of what they've done. Personally, I expect normal teenagers and even normal third graders to be able to understand why telling lies that result in the deaths of thousands of people is wrong.
Therefore, to say that those men acted as they did because they missed Vietnam, gives them an excuse. An unflattering excuse perhaps, but an excuse nonetheless. An excuse that they flat out do not deserve. And that has been backhandedly given to them, at the expense of many other people who were their age and were not in the Vietnam, but were very dedicated to protesting the war then and still are now.
I don't feel that growing up wealthy and having never seen combat can explain the sheer callousness towards other human being required to start a war on false premises and cause the deaths of an unknown number of people. And in fact, we don't know how many Iraqi civilians were killed, but even the most conservative estimates make it dwarf the number of US fatalities. Historically nearly every US President and Vice President who orchestrated a war suffered immense amounts of doubt and anguish over the sheer amount of suffering that their actions were causing. Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson all experienced massive amounts of remorse and sorrow over it. And there is no solid evidence that Roosevelt (He had a stroke while doing it!!), who in fact did grow up wealthy and never served in the military, was drastically different from Abraham Lincoln who grew up in poverty and who was a veteran of the Black Hawk War. And it got to Johnson, despite the fact that he was known for being a fairly ruthless individual, whose sense of ethics are not universally remembered as above question.
So if the conventional explanations for these guys' behavior don't hold water, where does that leave us?
I'm not a diagnostician and don't think that we know everything there is to know about why people are the way they are. 40 years ago, the conventional wisdom had it that people are basically pure products of their environment, primarily their relationships to their parents during the first five years. When I was a biology student in the 90's the conventional wisdom was summed up by, "It's all in the genes." Nowadays there's a common idea that people are the result of both nature and nurture. Of course, there are competing ideas such as the notions children are mostly socialized by peers, or that birth order mostly determines one's politics. My personal opinion, is that it's too complex for any one unifying theory to "explain it all".
But regardless of who's wrong or right, it's clear that both Bush and Cheney both show an extreme lack of concern for the effects of their actions on other people.
It's been reported that Bush used to blow up frogs as a child, something that most psychologists agree is a bad sign in a kid. Other people looking to Bush's childhood for clues, have looked at the fact his three year old sister died when he was seven. As a reason that a person might lack empathy, that strikes me as more credible than "missing Vietnam" or coming from a wealthy family. But at the same time, a lot of people have lost siblings and still find the things Bush and Cheney have done appalling. One psychoanalyst suggested the difference between Bush's reaction to his sister's death, vs. a peace activist who claimed to be influenced in that direction by the early loss of a sibling may lie in the Bush family's unwillingness to talk openly about such things. However, it's also reasonable to argue that W, inherited his lack of compassion much more directly from his family members, including Dear Old Dad. His father had a Machiavellian history that involved a war of political expedience, and his actions as head of the CIA. And his grandfather made money off the rise of the Nazi War Machine.
In the final analysis that sort of debate goes into a realm, where we simply don't have all the answers. But either way, Bush's lack apparent lack of a conscience started before most Americans could locate Vietnam on a map. By the time Bush was a young man the pattern was awfully clear. During his much ballyhooed fraternity days, Bush was actually involved in a scandal where he defended his frat, Delta Kappa Epsilon's, practice of hazing new pledges by burning them with coat hangers. Torture and interrogation practices? Complete denial of wrongdoing, anyone?
And if finding Jesus didn't install a basic sense of right and wrong, I'm not going to take it as a given that a year of combat would have.
Dick Cheney has not received the same level of public psychoanalysis. However, one incident stands out in my mind as an indicator of just how ruthless and unconcerned for other people Cheney truly is. Namely the time he shot his own friend in a hunting accident and did not seem to doubt his role in the Iraq War because of it. In a human being with anything resembling a normal conscience, one would expect the experience of accidentally harming and potentially killing a friend would prompt some re-evaluation or inventory of one's life, especially if that happened to include promoting a war. But all the evidence indicates that he didn't. And in the post Bush era, he has continued to support Bush era policies and has suggested that he actually pressured Bush to be even more extreme.
Of course, I didn't say as much about the fact that both men grew up relatively wealthy. But then again so did Ted Kennedy, may he rest in peace. And as a Senator he did not display the same indifference to other people, that permeated everything Bush and Cheney did.
Say Goodnight Readers.
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