.
So George, how do you feel about your mom and dad?
Psychologist Oliver James analyses the behaviour of the American
president
Oliver James
Monday September 01 2003
The Guardian
As the alcoholic George Bush approached his 40th birthday in 1986, he
had achieved nothing he could call his own. He was all too aware that
none of his educational and professional accomplishments would have
occured without his father. He felt so low that he did not care if he
lived or died. Taking a friend out for a flight in a Cessna aeroplane,
it only became apparent he had not flown one before when they nearly
crashed on take-off. Narrowly avoiding stalling a few times, they
crash-landed and the friend breathed a sigh of relief - only for Bush to
rev up the engine and take off again.
Not long afterwards, staring at his vomit-spattered face in the mirror,
this dangerously self-destructive man fell to his knees and implored God
to help him and became a teetotalling, fundamentalist Christian. David
Frum, his speechwriter, described the change: "Sigmund Freud
imported the Latin pronoun id to describe the impulsive, carnal, unruly
elements of the human personality. [In his youth] Bush's id seems to
have been every bit as powerful and destructive as Clinton's id. But
sometime in Bush's middle years, his id was captured, shackled and
manacled, and locked away."
One of the jailers was his father. His grandfather, uncles and many
cousins attended both his secondary school, Andover, and his university,
Yale, but the longest shadow was cast by his father's exceptional
careers there.
On the wall of his school house at Andover, there was a large
black-and-white photograph of his father in full sporting regalia. He
had been one of the most successful student athletes in the school's
100-year history and was similarly remembered at Yale, where his
grandfather was a trustee. His younger brother, Jeb, summed the problem
up when he said, "A lot of people who have fathers like this feel a
sense that they have failed." Such a titanic figure created mixed
feelings. On the one hand, Bush worshipped and aspired to emulate him.
Peter Neumann, an Andover roommate, recalls that, "He idolised his
father, he was going to be just like his dad." At Yale, a friend
remembered a "deep respect" for his father and when he later
set up in the oil business, another friend said, "He was focused to
prove himself to his dad."
On the other hand, deep down, Bush had a profound loathing for this
perfect model of American citizenship whose very success made the son
feel a failure. Rebelliousness was an unconscious attack on him and a
desperate attempt to carve out something of his own. Far from paternal
emulation, Bush described his goal at school as "to instil a sense
of frivolity". Contemporaries at Yale say he was like the John
Belushi character in the film Animal House, a drink-fuelled funseeker.
He was aggressively anti-intellectual and hostile to east-coast preppy
types like his father, sometimes cruelly so. On one occasion he walked
up to a matronly woman at a smart cocktail party and asked, "So,
what's sex like after 50, anyway?"
A direct and loutish challenge to his father's posh sensibility came
aged 25, after he had drunkenly crashed a car. "I hear you're
looking for me," he sneered at his father, "do you want to go
mano a mano, right here?"
As he grew older, the fury towards his father was increasingly directed
against himself in depressive drinking. But it was not all his father's
fault. There was also his insensitive and domineering mother.
Barbara Bush is described by her closest intimates as prone to
"withering stares" and "sharply crystalline"
retorts. She is also extremely tough. When he was seven, Bush's younger
sister, Robin, died of leukaemia and several independent witnesses say
he was very upset by this loss. Barbara claims its effect was
exaggerated but nobody could accuse her of overreacting: the day after
the funeral, she and her husband were on the golf course.
She was the main authority-figure in the home. Jeb describes it as
having been, "A kind of matriarchy... when we were growing up, dad
wasn't at home. Mom was the one to hand out the goodies and the
discipline." A childhood friend recalls that,"She was the one
who instilled fear", while Bush put it like this: "Every
mother has her own style. Mine was a little like an army drill
sergeant's... my mother's always been a very outspoken person who vents
very well - she'll just let rip if she's got something on her
mind." According to his uncle, the "letting rip" often
included slaps and hits. Countless studies show that boys with such
mothers are at much higher risk of becoming wild, alcoholic or
antisocial.
On top of that, Barbara added substantially to the pressure from his
father to be a high achiever by creating a highly competitive family
culture. All the children's games, be they tiddlywinks or baseball, were
intensely competitive - an actual "family league table" was
kept of performance in various pursuits. At least this prepared him for
life at Andover, where emotional literacy was definitely not part of the
curriculum. Soon after arriving, he was asked to write an essay on a
soul-stirring experience in his life to date and he chose the death of
his sister. His mother had drilled it into him that it was wrong when
writing to repeat words already used. Having employed "tears"
once in the essay, he sought a substitute from a thesaurus she had given
him and wrote "the lacerates ran down my cheeks". The essay
received a fail grade, accompanied by derogatory comments such as
"disgraceful".
This incident may be an insight into Bush's strange tendency to find the
wrong words in making public pronouncements. "Is our children
learning?" he once famously asked. On responding to critics of his
intellect he claimed that they had "misunderestimated" him.
Perhaps these verbal faux-pas are a barely unconscious way of winding up
his bullying mother and waving two fingers at his cultured father's
sensibility.
The outcome of this childhood was what psychologists call an
authoritarian personality. Authoritarianism was identified shortly after
the second world war as part of research to discover the causes of
fascism. As the name suggests, authoritarians impose the strictest
possible discipline on themselves and others - the sort of regime found
in today's White House, where prayers precede daily business,
appointments are scheduled in five-minute blocks, women's skirts must be
below the knee and Bush rises at 5.45am, invariably fitting in a
21-minute, three-mile jog before lunch.
Authoritarian personalities are organised around rabid hostility to
"legitimate" targets, often ones nominated by their parents'
prejudices. Intensely moralistic, they direct it towards despised social
groups. As people, they avoid introspection or loving displays,
preferring toughness and cynicism. They regard others with suspicion,
attributing ulterior motives to the most innocent behaviour. They are
liable to be superstitious. All these traits have been described in Bush
many times, by friends or colleagues.
His moralism is all-encompassing and as passionate as can be. He plans
to replace state welfare provision with faith-based charitable
organisations that would impose Christian family values.
The commonest targets of authoritarians have been Jews, blacks and
homosexuals. Bush is anti-abortion and his fundamentalist interpretation
of the Bible would mean that gay practices are evil. But perhaps the
group he reserves his strongest contempt for are those who have adopted
the values of the 60s. He says he loathes "people who felt guilty
about their lot in life because others were suffering".
He has always rejected any kind of introspection. Everyone who knows him
well says how hard he is to get to know, that he lives behind what one
friend calls a "facile, personable" facade. Frum comments
that, "He is relentlessly disciplined and very slow to trust. Even
when his mouth seems to be smiling at you, you can feel his eyes
watching you."
His deepest beliefs amount to superstition. "Life takes its own
turns," he says, "writes its own story and along the way we
start to realise that we are not the author." God's will, not his
own, explains his life.
Most fundamentalist Christians have authoritarian personalities. Two
core beliefs separate fundamentalists from mere evangelists
("happy-clappy" Christians) or the mainstream Presbyterians
among whom Bush first learned religion every Sunday with his parents:
fundamentalists take the Bible absolutely literally as the word of God
and believe that human history will come to an end in the near future,
preceded by a terrible, apocaplytic battle on Earth between the forces
of good and evil, which only the righteous shall survive. According to
Frum when Bush talks of an "axis of evil" he is identifying
his enemies as literally satanic, possessed by the devil. Whether he
specifically sees the battle with Iraq and other "evil"
nations as being part of the end-time, the apocalypse preceding the day
of judgment, is not known. Nor is it known whether Tony Blair shares
these particular religious ideas.
However, it is certain that however much Bush may sometimes seem like a
buffoon, he is also powered by massive, suppressed anger towards anyone
who challenges the extreme, fanatical beliefs shared by him and a
significant slice of his citizens - in surveys, half of them also agree
with the statement "the Bible is the actual word of God and is to
be taken literally, word for word".
Bush's deep hatred, as well as love, for both his parents explains how
he became a reckless rebel with a death wish. He hated his father for
putting his whole life in the shade and for emotionally blackmailing
him. He hated his mother for physically and mentally badgering him to
fulfil her wishes. But the hatred also explains his radical
transformation into an authoritarian fundamentalist. By totally
identifying with an extreme version of their strict, religion-fuelled
beliefs, he jailed his rebellious self. From now on, his unconscious
hatred for them was channelled into a fanatical moral crusade to rid the
world of evil.
As Frum put it: "Id-control is the basis of Bush's presidency but
Bush is a man of fierce anger." That anger now rules the world.
· Oliver James's book They F*** You Up - How to survive family
life is published by Bloomsbury, priced £7.99.
Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited
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