SO GEORGE, HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT YOUR MOM AND DAD?
Psychologist Oliver James analyses the behaviour of
the American president
Tuesday September 2, 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.
politics.guardian.co.uk
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