Just Above Sunset Archives
December 21, 2003 The Apocalypse - It'll be just fine...
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Just Above Sunset Archives December 21, 2003 The Apocalypse - It'll be just fine...
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George
Bush: The Manicheism Candidiate? Manichian?
Whatever. Trust me. This will make sense. The longer version, in
Spanish, is available at Signos de Vida if you'd like. Juan Stam is a theologian and structural linguistics fellow from Costa Rica. He's one of those
guys who talks about religious history and about metalanguage. George W. Bush began to take part in a Bible study group in 1985, after two decades of binge drinking.
For two years he studied the Scriptures and put his heavy drinking behind him. In that same process, he succeeded in
refocusing his life, which had been diffused and confused, into a coherent cosmic vision - or ideology - which corresponded
to the mentality of the conservative evangelicals of his country. Well, Stam ponders how,
given that "state of sublime innocence in his own country, like Adam and Eve in paradise," Bush can muster only one explanation
for the terrorists' hatred of his nation: "There are people who hate freedom." In other words, they are
so evil that they abhor the good because it is good. Ah yep. Good questions.
Bush does not seem to have much hesitation in identifying God with his own project. In a
speech in September 2002, Bush cited a Christological text in reference to his war project: "And the light [America] has shone
in the darkness [the enemies of America], and the darkness will not overcome it [America shall conquer its enemies]."
When he appeared in a flight suit aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, he said to the troops: "And wherever you go,
you carry a message of hope - a message that is ancient and ever new. In the words of the prophet Isaiah, 'To the captives,
come out! to those who are in darkness, be free!'" Well, we're all used to
this. Harmless enough. Maybe. Manipulation of Prayer: True
prayer does not pretend to tell God what we want Him to do but rather asks that God tell us what He wishes us to do.
We do not pray in order to enlist God in our ranks but to examine ourselves, to change and to do God's will. Therefore,
the confession of sin and repentance are crucial moments in prayer and worship. Prayer has played a role without precedent
in the Bush presidency and in the propaganda of the evangelicals who support him. Photos of Bush at prayer are common.
Great publicity was given to the fact that during a prime-time news conference shortly before his speech giving the ultimatum
to Saddam Hussein, Bush asked his advisers to leave him alone for ten minutes. In evangelical symbolism, that meant
that a man of prayer was going to commune with God, somewhat like Moses on Mount Sinai. Wait a second! This guy just said Bush
is a heretic who proves Karl Marx was right, at least about religion. Cool! ___ What?
The apocalypse scares you? Really? What's your problem? I did receive a private
email about all this from an old friend in Albany, New York. She found it all interesting. And scary. The apocalyptic imagination has spawned a new kind of violence at the beginning of the twenty-first
century. We can, in fact, speak of a worldwide epidemic of violence aimed
at massive destruction in the service of various visions of purification and renewal.
In particular, we are experiencing what could be called an apocalyptic face-off between Islamist forces, overtly visionary
in their willingness to kill and die for their religion, and American forces claiming to be restrained and reasonable but
no less visionary in their projection of a cleansing war making and military power.
Both sides are energized by versions of intense idealism; both see themselves as embarked on a mission of combating
evil in order to redeem and renew the world; and both are ready to release untold levels of violence to achieve that purpose. Yes, Lifton is indeed arguing
we as apocalyptic in our views as the folks on the other side. That's what I
was getting above. And here's his reasoning:
The American apocalyptic entity is less familiar to us.
Even if its urges to power and domination seem historically recognizable, it nonetheless represents a new constellation
of forces bound up with what I've come to think of as "superpower syndrome." By
that term I mean a national mindset - put forward strongly by a tight-knit leadership group - that takes on a sense
of omnipotence, of unique standing in the world that grants it the right to hold sway over all other nations. The American superpower status derives from our emergence from World War II as uniquely
powerful in every respect, still more so as the only superpower from the end of the cold war in the early 1990s. Well, that may be coming
on a bit strong, but one does listen to the Bush team and senses Lifton is close to being spot on here. In important ways, the "war on terrorism" has represented an impulse to undo violently precisely
the humiliation of 9/11. To be sure, the acts of that day had a warlike aspect. They were certainly committed by men convinced that they were at war with us. In post-Nuremberg terms they could undoubtedly be considered a "crime against humanity." Some kind of force used against their perpetrators was inevitable and appropriate. The humiliation caused, together with American world ambitions, however, precluded
dealing with the attacks as what they were - terrorism by a small group of determined zealots, not war. A more focused, restrained, internationalized response to Al Qaeda could have been far more effective without
being a stimulus to expanded terrorism. Nazis? He doesn't go so far as to say we are like them - or very much like them. But he sees parallels. The war on terrorism is apocalyptic, then, exactly because it is militarized and yet amorphous,
without limits of time or place, and has no clear end. It therefore enters the
realm of the infinite. Implied in its approach is that every last terrorist everywhere
on the earth is to be hunted down until there are no more terrorists anywhere to threaten us, and in that way the world will
be rid of evil. Bush keeps what Woodward calls "his own personal scorecard for
the war" in the form of photographs with brief biographies and personality sketches of those judged to be the world's most
dangerous terrorists, each ready to be crossed out if killed or captured. The
scorecard is always available in a desk drawer in the Oval Office. Well, that cheers me up. Despite the constant invocation by the Bush Administration of the theme of "security," the war
on terrorism has created the very opposite - a sense of fear and insecurity among Americans, which is then mobilized in support
of further aggressive plans in the extension of the larger "war." What results
is a vicious circle that engenders what we seek to destroy: Our excessive response to Islamist attacks creates more terrorists
and more terrorist attacks, which in turn leads to an escalation of the war on terrorism, and so on. The projected "victory" becomes a form of aggressive longing, of sustained illusion, of an unending
"Fourth World War" and a mythic cleansing - of terrorists, of evil, of our own fear.
The American military apocalyptic can then be said to partner and act in concert with the Islamist apocalyptic. Lifton has some idealistic
thoughts on how to break this cycle. You could click on the link and see what he has to say about that, if you scroll
down to the last few paragraphs. I just don't agree him.
His solution - "renouncing omnipotence" - is not something our current leaders are likely to embrace, nor would
most Americans. That would be too scary - far more frightening. Americans like to chant, "We're number one!" as often and as loudly as possible.
Chanting that may be cold comfort, but it is comfort nonetheless. ____ Footnote: Oh, and in case you're
wondering who this Lifton fellow is, here's his biography. Perhaps one should take him seriously. Robert
Jay Lifton is Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at the Graduate School University Center and Director
of The Center on Violence and Human Survival at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at The City University
of New York. He had previously held the Foundations' Fund Research Professorship of Psychiatry at Yale University
for more than two decades. He has been particularly interest in the relationship between individual psychology and historical
change, and in problems surrounding the extreme historical situations of our era. He has taken an active part in the
formation of the new field of psychohistory. Dr.
Lifton was born in New York City in 1926, attended Cornell University, and received his medical degree from New York Medical
College in 1948. Her interned at the Jewish Hospital of Brooklyn in 1948-49, and had his psychiatric residence training
at the Downstate Medical Center, Brooklyn, New York in 1949-51. He was an Air Force psychiatrist serving in the United
States, Japan, and Korea from 1951-53. He was Research Associate in Psychiatry at Harvard from 1956-61, where he was
affiliated with the Center for East Asian Studies; and prior to that was a Member of the Faculty of the Washington School
of Psychiatry. From
mid-1995, he has been conducting psychological research on the problem of apocalyptic violence, focusing on Aum Shinrikyo,
the extremist Japanese cult which released poison gas in Tokyo subways. His book, Destroying the World to Save It: Aum
Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism was published by Metropolitan Books in October, 1999. His
writings on Nazi Doctors (on their killing the name of healing) and the problem of genocide; nuclear weapons and their impact
on death symbolism; Hiroshima survivors; Chinese thought reform and the Chinese Cultural Revolution; psychological trends
in contemporary men and women; and on the Vietnam War experience and Vietnam veterans, have appeared in a variety of professional
and popular journals. He has developed a general psychological perspective around the paradigm of death and the continuity
of life and a stress upon symbolization and "formative process," and on the malleability of the contemporary self. Recent
books include Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, (Putnam and Avon Books, 1995) (with Greg Mitchell) which explores the impact of Hiroshima on our own country; and
The
Protean Self; Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation, (Basic Books, 1993) which describes the contemporary "protean" self and its expressions of fluidity and change as
its possible relationship to species consciousness and a "species self" (related importantly to one's connection to humankind). Other
books include: |
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