Gut Bomb

Rob Salkowitz over at Emphasis Added on the psychology of Bush supporters:

One area where there’s an undeniable fissure between our hopes of simplicity and the reality of complexity is in government.

The promise of democracy is that people are free to govern themselves. They don’t need to rely on kings, aristocrats or clergy. In America, we have abstracted this even further into the myth that government is practically an amateur activity, simple enough that farmers and shopkeepers could work as part-time legislators. It’s been apparent for nearly 100 years that this model is not sufficient for an increasingly complex and interconnected world. Grudgingly and in fits and starts, Americans have relinquished their fantasies of absolute self-sufficiency and moved inexorably toward a greater dependence on specialization and expertise in policy-making. The reward for this compromise has been global supremacy, a standard of living that’s the envy of the world, and a society that remains free where it really counts, which are direct benefits of the mobilization of intelligence, professionalism and consensus-based management in government. On the whole, a pretty good deal. Still, we have tenaciously clung to the illusion of the solitary leader, the man in control, in one key office – the Presidency.

Bush indisputably personifies this archetype in its most extreme and ridiculous form. He is the triumph of the Id – the feral, the selfish, the uncompromising – over the constraints of reason and society. As President, he governs by the gut rather than the head. Indeed, he makes a spectacle of his contempt for deliberation and discussion, and he flat out refuses to take substantive accountability for the consequences of his actions. That’s what all the talk of faith and leadership and decisiveness boils down to: a refusal to be ruled by the external demands of reason, expertise, information and consensus, and an affirmation of the solitary masculine will over the soft virtues of community.

All of this makes him a hero to half a nation of men (and some women) who are, or perceive themselves to be, oppressed, exploited and fundamentally not in control of their lives and destinies.

Click here for the rest.

So that makes Bush a real, bona fide "Big Brother," in the Orwellian sense, who can do for us what we cannot. This is a really depressing thought, but it has to be true. Given that it's becoming quite obvious to anybody with half a brain that voting for Bush is now an immoral act (see post below), one has to wonder why half the electorate still seems to be supporting him. This line of thinking ultimately gets into all sorts of issues concerning the obedience/authority training in the public schools and the glorification of badass action heroes in the popular culture, but Salkowitz really hits on the bottom line: numerous Americans vote their hearts, rather than their minds.

Creepy.

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