The Contradiction That is Bush: Could He Be a Zen Master and Not Know It?

Bush has perfected the use of "negative capability" in his personality--that is, the ability to hold two completely contradictory ideas simultaneously in his mind and experience no discomfort. According to the Los Angeles Times, the tapes recorded by ex-pal Doug Wead reveal Bush as a man who can, in the same paragraph, even the same sentence, completely contradict himself.

Bush tells Wead, "The Bible is pretty good about keeping your ego in check" and says he stays humble by reading it every day. Yet he casts himself in grandiose terms, boasting that his popularity will "change Texas politics forever" by catapulting coattail Republicans to success when he wins his second term as governor.

I note this because it explains Bush's contradictory statements about Iran during his European enduro (see posting from yesterday immediately below).

I once had an in-law who Bush reminds me of in a striking way. Let's call him Knobhead (the in-law, I mean). Knobhead was born-again, regular churchgoer, Bible scholar, the whole bit. However, he had some interesting conflicts with Christian ideals in his business practices, which included the exploitation of elder citizens by selling them useless insurance policies, often convincing them to cash in other, better investments to purchase his products. Of course, he felt he was providing a "service," as he called it, even as he screwed these folks over, and he considered his growing income as a sign from God that he was blessed in his practices. When he got sick of his wife, he kicked her to the curb without a dime, even though they were by now wealthy, telling her that if she protested in the least he would "destroy her." Being the good little Christian wife, and thoroughly intimidated by his extended family, which in some ways resembled the Bush clan with its collection of sons of varying and questionable accomplishments, she restarted her life after 40 in an efficiency apartment, with no college education, no marketable skills, learning the ropes of her new class, the working poor. Knobhead soon remarried, and refused to discuss the past, or even acknowledge that it had existed.

I think the means by which Knobhead and Bush are able to pull this off with no conscience or reflection--in spite of their frequent praying, which I always thought was meant to be reflective--is that they each have mastered the Zen art of "living in the moment." Think about it. If your attention is only to what is in front of you, and you have no interest in even the most recent history, then you can act from day to day, hour to hour, even second to second, as if nothing you say or do can be used to illustrate the complete contradiction that you have become to your own self, up to and including accusing others of being "flip-floppers," the ultimate irony of all.

Of course, having no sense of irony is valuable for someone like Bush, and this is where he parts from being a true Zen master, because without irony there is no self-awareness, and without self-awareness, well, you get the disaster for the country, and the world, that the Bush administration has become.

Such are the things that monsters are made of.