Bush's Waterloo

Did it not seem out of place after the 9/11 attacks when George Bush stated that these were carried out by cowards? Certainly, the mentality of these Jihadis is hard to reconcile with sanity. But using the appellation of cowardice to describe them seems rather bizarre. Perhaps it is more telling about the Weltanschauung of Mr. Bush. After all, in the Viet Nam era, which formed his embedded persona that lurks just below the surface, cowardice was the all too common coin of the land among his frat brothers. The same crew who used their upper crust connections to escape the war with a semblance of patriotism via service in alternative non-combatant roles worked out by their rich mommies and daddies. These same are now the neocon war hawks. The ones who ever so bravely send our less than fortunate youth to the hellish charnel house that Iraq has become.

But then, isn't this all of a piece with the underlying unspoken tenets of geopolitics? If we live in a nightmarish world where things are to be hoarded in an unrelenting contest of each against all, then this worldview of Messers Bush and company almost seems like "realism." Yet it is the realism of a society driven to desperation and self immolation precisely because of such largely unspoken suppositions. It too is of a piece with a mentality that adopts a Texas drawl to distance oneself from the moniker of being a "Yalie." Ease of born again dissimulation, I'm afraid.

However, this is thankfully not reality. It is merely a degenerate mistaken sort of mental geometry, which cannot but fail.