August 19-25, 2004

loose canon

George Is a Zealot

by Bruce Schimmel

Last weekend, I read Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of President Bush by Justin A. Frank. The mental landscape painted by this clinical psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry is not a world in which you'd want to live. But for as long as George W. Bush remains in office, that's where we'll all reside.

Until the age of 40, Bush was a boozer and a loser, and until he discovered religion — as Bush himself readily admits — his life was a ruin. Religion, as it has for so many others, saved him. Or did it?

There is a growing consensus that Bush merely substituted one addiction (alcohol) for another (religion). And because of that shift, we are all suffering the consequences of the president's delusions as he attempts to recast the world outside to fit the limited schemata within his cranium. This is a classic abuse of the power of religion, as everyone knows. And I believe that the reason we don't hear more about it is because pundits of all stripes tend to avoid discussing the president's religious addiction out of a deference for all religious convictions.

But, a very strong argument could be made that Bush, however fully he proclaims it, is not actually religious at all. By his behavior, his personal creed is a strip-mined Christianity, with its love of humanity cast aside. Bush has taken the heart of a great religion and, like other zealots, reduced it to a shell. It is not a religion he practices, but a cult. And in Bush's case, it is a cult of one.

It is well-known that Bush does not attend church. Whatever prayers he practices with others are performed at home — often before meetings with his staff in the White House.

Now politicians hold prayer breakfasts and the like all the time, but in the context of a delicate mind under siege — one that can tolerate neither dissension nor complexity — one has to wonder whether the president's prayers are more like pledges of blind loyalty. Such, it would seem, is what he demands of us all.

Bush's use of religion as an analgesic is not much different from that of any other religious zealot — Christian, Jewish, Islamic — who uses religion to kill the pain, except for one big difference. In the stark and ugly world inside his head, President Bush is playing out an imaginary apocalyptic battle, one that — in reality — is being fought with real weapons on an all-too-fragile earth.

He is a sick man.

He is a dangerous man.

He must go.