Bending the Third Rail
Because We Should, We Can, We Do
Friday, December 29, 2006
The Fixer
Michael Tomasky has written a book review of James Baker's memoirs. The book is apparently a pretty fluffy piece lacking insight. But I found this passage by Tomasky interesting:
The culture that produced Baker is pretty much the same culture, it seems fair to say, that runs our country right now. It was a culture of confident wealth, country clubs, oil speculation, and ranches of literally thousands of acres; a culture of the great outdoors, of fly-fishing, and most especially of hunting all manner of game from ducks to elk to bear where permissible. It was a place where money was measured differently than in most places (his father, he writes, had warned him that he'd never make the "really big money" practicing law); and a place, and time, where one did better not to talk too much about personal matters. When Mary Stuart [Baker's first wife] was sick with cancer, Baker didn't even tell his [4] sons, then aged seven through fifteen, that their mother was dying (he says he regrets this profoundly). In 1973, when he decided to marry his current wife, Susan —she was a product of the same culture and had been a very close friend of Mary Stuart's—he again shared nothing with his sons, who were, he writes, "shocked" to learn that they had suddenly acquired a new stepmother and three new stepsiblings.
Classic.

Isn't it helpful to understand that our country is ruled by dissociated, dysfunctional individuals? And remember, Baker is one of the more functional of the bunch. Wouldn't want to deal with those pesky emotions, they might hurt! This is precisely how Bush can continue a losing strategy in the face of overwhelming evidence that he's wrong. And for Bush, his dissociation is to the degree of being sociopathic.
Written at 1:33 PM by Greyhair.
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