Joe Mahoney — whose weblog I’d missed despite the fact that Joe is an old friend, the most literate amateur I’ve ever met (as opposed to professional professors), an astounding musician, and a role model — and I ended up arguing in email about W’s twisted psychology. Joe has run the correspondence. Although he says I trumped him, his last paragraph, with its Frenchification and Lacan reference, is a thoroughly enjoyable classic of intellectual rug-pulling.

Here’s my “analysis.” It is, as always, highly scientifical.

The family is dominated by Babs. She is a classic bitch-tyrant, passive-aggressive mother. Jeb was the favorite. W was the drunk ne’er-do-well who had to be propped up by his father’s cronies; his only validation, as a “successful businessman” he knows came through his father’s largesse, which he hates because he hates his dependence on it.

Once in office, he has surrounded himself with Dad’s pals because that’s the only way he knows how to succeed, but he resents it and can’t feel like a success (or a man) so long as he does what they say. (But he is afraid not to do what they say). He has to do Poppy’s job better than Poppy did. Why? So he can beat his two rivals – Dad and Jeb – for the approval (= fucking) of his mother. So, it won’t be enough for him to beat Dad at the presidency game. He’s also going to have to do it in the face of the advice of Dad’s Greek chorus that’s been guiding him so far. The defection of elder Republicans from the Bomb Iraq cause only gives W a bigger hard on for it.

He has had two opportunities to beat Poppy. Only two people have ever caused Poppy to fail: Clinton and Saddam. Having beaten Clinton, it’s on to Saddam. W has a love/hate deal going with Saddam because although Saddam humiliated the father who never loved him (and who still has the good graces to appear embarrassed with him), Saddam has also given W the opening he needs to win Mommy. He’s not after revenge. It’s approval he’s after. In support: his overwhelming need to be liked is all too obvious, right down to the juvenile nicknames he gives people. His infantilizing of global politics (Putin is “Pooty-poot,” the comic book rhetoric of “evil doers”) undoubtedly (hah!) goes back to his failure to win approval as an infant. He is stuck there.

The Oedipal nature of the Iraqi threat (or opportunity, as it appears to W) implies that he will penetrate Iraq violently, preferably by inseminating it with sperm sprayed from above . His operative metaphor is probably (i.e., I’m making this up) “shoving a smart bomb up Saddam’s ass” to degrade him (= Poppy) sexually so that the Mama Bush will prefer him. W’s no bush! He’s a bomber!

Your comments on his oral fixation ring true to me (which unfortunately does not mean they’re any more likely to be true) and I assume that the oral sex with Laura – and whatever other Dallas Debbies he did during the Drunk Years – was one-way, brutish and unreciprocated.

So, if we could just persuade Babs to blow him, preferably after Dad’s gone limp while trying to perform his husbandly duties, the world might yet be saved. Why don’t you write to her and suggest that?

Go to Joe’s site to read his concluding comment. Stay for the poetry and the voice and the ideas.

Based on nothing but what I saw this morning on the talk shows (when my family’s away I snap on the TV first thing so I can hear voices I can ignore) the public discussion of Sami Al-Arian isn’t asking the basic question: Is he a good teacher and scholar? If he’s doing illegal things outside of the classroom — and according to Al-Arian, a judge last year declared that the groups for which he participated in fund raising were not supporting terrorism — then the legal system should deal with it and, if convicted, he should be bounced from the university. Otherwise, he should be free to say and do what he wants outside of the classroom.

Now, the nit in the ointment is that the University of South Florida claims he’s in violation of his employment agreement and I don’t know what that agreement says. Oh wait, I just found a copy. Sure enough, right there in Paragraph 32c it says: “Tenured professors can be fired if doing so enables Jeb Bush to look tough.” Too bad, Sami. You shoulda read the fine print.

Categories: Uncategorized dw