Speak of the devil! I feel as though I'm channeling King George II's acolyte: Message 20709224 <In mid 2002, after I had written an article that the White House didn't like, I had a meeting with a senior Bush adviser. He told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend - but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency. The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community", which he defined as those who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality". "We're an empire now and, when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Bush, clearly, is one of history's great confidence men. That is not meant in the huckster's sense, though many critics claim that, on the Iraq war, the economy and a few other matters, he has engaged in some bait-and-switch. I mean it in the sense that he's a believer in the power of confidence. At a time when constituents are uneasy and enemies are probing for weaknesses, he clearly feels that unflinching confidence has an almost mystical power. It can all but create reality.>
I wouldn't say confidence can create reality, but knowing what will create reality, lends confidence.
Cling to the gold Jay, hang on tight. I'm going to make the world swirl and surge. I'll create reality, and you duck and dive, or, as you would have it, hide in the undergrowth, or high on a hill, or safely behind a parapet, or quietly behind a pixelated cyberspace screen, sniper-scope aligned, waiting for an ignorant blundering beast to crash around looking for enlightenment with short-sighted eyes.
Mqurice |
