[Crossposted from Hiram Hover]
If nothing else, E. J. Dionne deserves points for originality for his column last Friday, entitled “Bush the Egghead: Practicality Never Stops a Nice Theory.”
President Bush’s critics have him all wrong. They think of him as an anti-intellectual, opposed to theory and disdainful of grand ideas.
To the contrary. George W. Bush’s spring of discontent arises from a fact that no one dares to notice: George W. Bush is an egghead.
What makes Bush an egghead, says Dionne, is his “profound commitment to theoretical notions,” and his determination to push them “regardless of the facts or the consequences.” On a range of issues, Bush has abandoned “that old-fashioned brand of conservatism that sees experience and practicality as preferable to theory.”
On behalf of all eggheads, I’ll enter the obligatory objection: Dionne resorts to a lazy bit of sterotyping when he defines a disconnect from reality as the defining quality of the breed.
The bigger problem, though, is that Dionne just has it wrong. Bush isn’t an egghead–he’s a fantasist.
The egghead thinks things through; the fantasist makes things up. Theories, in one way or another, are supposed to be demonstrable–and falsifiable–by logic, evidence, or both. Not so fantasies–they draw their vitality from the imagination and the will. The notion that private accounts will help bring solvency to Social Security is not a theory–it’s an invention. No one who’s listened to Bush speak on that topic for more than 30 seconds thinks he can articulate a theory about how privatization will have that result; it just will, because he says so.
And in that sense, Bush shares a good bit with my son, who at the age of 3 announced one day that he was a 13-year-old girl with 16 sisters. (Their father was an Australian golf pro and their mother a professional tennis player, but alas, they’d been orphaned. And yes, there’s more to that fantasy–much, much more.) My son didn’t have a theory about why he was an orphaned Australian teen-ager. He just was because he said he was. He was in the thrall not of ideas or theories, but of fantasies, guided by his wishes and imaginings. And like the president, he expected the rest of us to play along.
Of course, my 3-year-old’s fantasies weren’t nearly as destructive as the president’s–the worst part, as I can recall, was trying to keep his 16 sisters’ names straight. Nor were his fantasies as tenacious–he was a 13-year-old girl, I think, for only about a month, before he moved on to being a dog (or maybe it was a pirate). But when he did give up that fantasy, it wasn’t because he’d been argued out of it with facts or logic. And if the president ever gives up his fantasies, that won’t be the reason, either.
A steeple chase one, of course, jumping over those little wooden things, and the water pits… great fun! (til cleanup time). Your son sounds great, by the way.
I think you have it exactly right, with Bush. It is because he says it is, and that’s that. “Creating their own reality” as that one guy said… it’s not only Bush, it’s the lot of them.
Dionne and others are still desperately clinging to something, anything, to avoid having to face what’s in office now, I think. Or their part in putting it there. And their lack of control of whatever the outcome is going to be, or of the new ‘reality’ ;).
Great writing.
Yes, Dionne–whom I think is one of the best of the mainstream commentators–is giving Bush too much credit by half.
At first, I was surprised he didn’t just use the more common “reality based” vs. “faith based” explanation of Bush’s thinking, but I guess he was trying to find his own approach, and to avoid anything that might seem like a diss to people of “faith.”
I can understand feeling afraid, I’m terrified too much of the time. I feel like I’ve stepped through the looking glass and I can’t get back to a country where things are, if not great, at least normal and understandable.
Being led by mad men with a strong propensity for sadism is not a recipe for calm.