July 1, 2003 by lonbud

Give A Little Bit

George W. Bush needs our help.

I never imagined typing those words, but I have seen the light. And I submit we must, each and every one of us, extend our deepest reserves of compassion to the man. It may be all that can save him, and the rest of us, from himself.

Here I have been making our President guilty of willfully isolating the United States from nearly the entire rest of the world by his unilateral withdrawal from global trade and environmental agreements, by his mendacious leading of the charge to war against sovereign – though heinously governed – nations, by his asserting primary, unchallengeable dominion over all the nations of the earth, all of which with disdain for every institution of international care and cooperation – to suit the demands of imperial ambition, and to slake the thirst of corporate capitalism.

In true point of fact, George W. Bush is a victim of the culture of cruelty by which every male member of our society is to some degree beaten down and left fearful, emotionally vacant, always striving to meet impossible ideals of masculinity. From the earliest moments of life, boys in our society are raised to understand power as something they must gain, retain, and be willing to use, lest their manhood come into question. True, the predominance of boys finds a way to accommodate the emotional – sometimes physical – absence of their fathers, to withstand the tortuous cruelty of their peers, surviving countless assaults levied on their self-image by parents, teachers, coaches, cops, bosses, and authority figures of every kind, to live lives that do not threaten the sort of large-scale, widespread danger and destruction George W. Bush has wrought in his own life.

But our President’s is a special circumstance – and we must take the importance of his office as an indication of the depth of his need for our understanding.

I come to this perspective as the father of a son myself, through the wonderful, fascinating studies and case histories described in Raising Cain, a book on the development and socialization of boys by Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson, two psychologists with over 35 years of experience studying boys’ childhood and adolescent development, and treating them for the vast array of limiting influences that keep boys in our society from growing to be compassionate, sensitive, emotionally available men in their maturity.

As I was reading their work over the weekend, revisiting my own boyhood and relationships with my father, brother, friends, teachers, and employers, it occurred to me Kindlon and Thompson were able to describe precisely the kind of man we have sitting in the Oval Office today. In dealing with “the angry boys, the boys who kick things, and especially the boys who don’t talk,” they found that boys – even those from the best families and excellent schools, where boys are respected and well-educated – face in our culture a “tyranny of toughness” that can lead to adulthoods notable for inarticulate stoicism and fearful, angry, violent isolationism.

One can only imagine the challenges and struggles young George was forced to meet as the son of a driven, powerful, and successful, yet inarticulate, and emotionally ignorant father. The shame and humiliation he must have endured as a dyslexic facing school curriculums that emphasized reading, writing, and verbal abilities – cognitive skills that normally develop more slowly in boys than in girls anyway – had to have been staggering. It can be no surprise that by the time he reached prep school and college his energies were “already disengaged from the task of learning” and that he tuned out of school, biding his time, just barely making the grade, “experiencing a certain alienation of spirit,” with “no joy for learning.”

Over two thousand years ago, the Hebrew sage Hillel said, “a person too anxious about being shamed cannot learn.” With some thought and reflection on George W. Bush’s wholly unremarkable academic career, together with the public evidence of his truncated attention span, his limited grasp of nuance and complexity in the conduct of the affairs of state, and his consistent inability to articulate clearly even the ideas in which he ostensibly believes, it is clear he is crying out for us to recognize the burden of his difficult childhood, to forgive him his inability to muster much more than the inflexible distrust, and wooden expressions of toughness and bravado that have characterized his years in public office.

Aside from the challenges presented by his relationship with “Poppy” Bush, and the shame and anxiety embedded in his psyche by the torture of his school years, the President also suffers from being cast in the image of what Kinlon and Thompson describe as one of the two most common destructive boy archetypes. Too often, people of intelligence and goodwill react to boys “from unconscious assumptions about the way all boys are.” We expect too much and yet not enough: they must be “tough little men” when they are really just “little boys who need goodbye hugs and affection.” But when they behave in cruel and thoughtless ways, we say, “boys will be boys.”

The two most common archetypes are the “wild animal,” one who cannot be controlled and is “incapable of responsible behavior or intelligent thought,” and the “entitled prince,” who is allowed to operate “outside the same moral standards as the rest of us.”

For the entitled prince,

“we assume the boy’s gender or talents entitle him to a future of leadership, success, and power, we excuse him from the labor of learning to live and work wisely with others, protecting him from the consequences of acting badly, and hold him to a different, lesser standard of moral accountability in his actions and behavior towards others.

When our responses are distorted by these and other archetypal ideas, boys suffer for it….culture or teachers react to a boy in ways that suggest they are fearful of him, baffled by or uncomfortable with him, then he assumes he is fearsome….[and is excused] from reasonable childhood expectations because he is a man in the making and need not be bothered. Lessons of empathy and accountability are replaced by a creed of entitlement void of responsibility. Boys who feel feared, discounted, or unduly revered in school suffer “a kind of emotional isolation that only intensifies their own fears, feelings of unworthiness, or arrogant expectations of entitlement.””

Sound familiar? It does to me, especially perhaps, because I recognize in my own experience the wild animal and an entitled prince. I have been labeled both in my time. My own suffering as someone in need of being “whipped into shape” in childhood is now palpable to me; those with book on me know the degree to which I have been excused from the “consequences of acting badly” in my life.

George W. Bush shares with each one of us the essential commonality of being human. We live in a culture that offers no security. Some boys are targets, others more frequently lead the assaults, but every boy knows he is vulnerable. Even self-possessed and popular boys concede, “being on top just means you have to worry all the time about slipping or somebody gaining on you….all sorts of people are waiting to take you down.” Boys under constant pressure to assert power or be labeled a weakling are more likely to “level cruelty at others with little recognition of or regard for its emotional impact.” If George W. Bush seems cruel, it is “because he is afraid, and his need to defend against that fear is ironclad.”

As I suggested to begin, George W. Bush needs our help. We must tell him it’s OK to abdicate the throne. His continued pursuit of “the Big Impossible” only dooms us all.