Past is Prelude
If you really want to know the Bushes, read Darwin
by Alan Bisbort

"We may be through with the past, but the past isn't through with us."
-- Quiz Kid Donnie Smith, played by William H Macy, in "Magnolia"

Sept. 5, 2003 -- HARTFORD (apj.us) -- Much has been made about the dark shadows that engulf George W. Bush's past. I have offered my own armchair diagnosis (see "Dry Drunk", APJ, September 24, 2002), which, given how widely it's been circulated via the Internet (and updated for In These Times this May), seems to have struck a chord. Within a week after "Dry Drunk" was originally published on American Politics Journal, I received-among the countless messages of both praise and condemnation-an intriguing message from Katherine van Wormer, Ph.D. at the University of Northern Iowa and the author of "Addiction Treatment: A Strengths Perspective".

Dr. van Wormer wrote,

"I have just co-authored the book, Addiction Treatment: A Strength Perspective and I agree with Alan Bisbort, spotted the problem long ago. The patterns are there: the tendency to go to extremes, the tunnel vision, the 'I' as opposed to 'we' thinking, the black and white, polarized thought processes-good vs. evil, all or nothing mentality. We now know that the addicted brain is a changed brain. The president's drinking is well documented, the fact that he can't drink moderately is significant, as well as is the problematic behavior of his relatives. Now he's setting out to avenge his father and compete with his father at the same time, desperate to prove himself. If the public could realize this, they would not fall in line. One day they will."

Two weeks later, prompted in part by my piece, Dr. van Wormer wrote one of the more cogent assessments of the larger (biological, medical, psychological) issues that I had only touched on in my original column, "Addiction, Brain Damage and the President," posted on CounterPunch magazine on October 11, 2002.

Most recently, psychologist Oliver James in the Guardian (London) has pretty compellingly painted a portrait of the Commander in Chief as one whose "Id" has exploded in hate and rage at his absent father and chillingly stern (and, frankly, weird) mother. The most telling new thing that I learned from James' article was the death to leukemia of W's baby sister, a tragedy that deeply hurt him when he was a young boy. This pain was, undoubtedly, compounded by the fact that, the very next day, his mommy and daddy, the now-sainted Barbara and George H.W., were out on the golf course, driving, chipping and putting away their apparently under-whelming grief.

These are all, indeed, parts of this enigma called George W. Bush who has taken control of our nation. Seemingly a simpleton, his mangled statements are nonetheless accorded the stature of words graven into stone. Blissfully ignorant of geography and science, he is nonetheless reshaping the globe and the very climate of the planet like no one before him in human history.

In the larger picture, though, perhaps what's most important to remember about Bush Jr.'s past is that ALL of the Bushes' collective pasts are tied up in this current of darkness through which the nation is now swimming. It's not just Shrub, who was the inheritor of the Bush demonic dynamic, but his daddy, mommy, grandparents, great-grandparents, siblings. However screwed up any or all of the Bushes are personally-and I still maintain that W is an untreated alcoholic, whether or not he still imbibes-the important thing to keep in mind is that they are driven by one thing: the sense that THEY were meant to rule.

Richard Conniff examined this overriding sense of "entitlement" among America's prep-private-school-groomed wealthy in his book "The Natural History of the Rich: A Field Guide" (Norton). The book, an engaging and light-hearted examination of the most dominant among the species of Richius Americanus, got lost in last fall's shuffle.

But, in a recent interview with me, Conniff came around to the obvious connection between his field studies and the Bush family:

Richard Conniff: When I was traveling around promoting the book I got a call from a Hollywood producer, one of the top producers, and he wanted to meet. He said he liked to meet interesting people. It was obviously his assistant who was calling and I said, 'What do you mean interesting people?' and she said, "Well, you know, Jonas Salk." And I said, "Well, I'm no Jonas Salk. Come on, it's just a book." And then she said, "And George W. Bush's speechwriter." And I said OK.

Alan Bisbort: They had just lowered the bar considerably from Jonas Salk.

RC: And so I went out and met the guy and spent an hour yammering about the book and about applying animal behavior models to the rich people that he knew and it obviously rang true for him.

AB: You cite the quote from Fitzgerald, "The rich are different from you and me." Is that true enough to make the sort of generalizations you make?

RC: There definitely is a rich mentality. Absolutely. It's a cultural subspecies, but it still behaves like a subspecies in the natural world. They go off into their own habitat, they marry other rich people, and they behave and talk about things that really are only for other rich people to understand. I'm convinced that it's true.

AB: What evolutionary process comes into play when you are simply lucky enough to be born wealthy like, say, George W. Bush? Here's a guy who, if given a two mile head-start on the rest of us, could not be a success. His daddy's done everything for him.

RC: George W. Bush is an interesting case because inheritance of social dominance is a standard fact in the primate world. For instance, among vervet monkeys and baboons, grandmothers typically kibbitz at play time to make sure that little Tiffany Baboon and Percy Vervet III get more attention than the other kids.

AB: Even though he affects this Texas thing, Bush, Jr. went through the old money system in Connecticut, and yet he's come out like this.

RC: You have the grandmother interfering. To make sure the kid gets special respect from his and her playmates, and this tends to reinforce a sense of entitlement among the offspring, that they're entitled to submissive behavior from everybody else and that they are entitled to social dominance. And this sort of attitude makes them more dominant and it allows a family to perpetuate a dynasty over generations and that's clearly what the Bushes have done quite well. They have bred their offspring for generations to expect to be, as Jung used to put it, one of the thousand male leaders. That's one part of it. The other thing that dynastic families do is they create a family mythology and they use that to keep the family going for generations. And they bring in all their friends and allies to aid future generations. George W. made his fortune basically by being bankrolled and bailed out by a pal from Yale.

AB: I would think that the Connecticut Bushes would be baffled by all that Texas twang hogwash. It's as if they've watered down the family name.

RC: No, wait. It's a shrewd development on the part of the family. They realized that as patrician blue-blooded New Englanders they weren't going to have a lot of political sway in Tennessee or Alabama or even in Montana, so they turned themselves into good old boys. It was a great cultural move...The one other thing to be said for them is that great dynastic families tend to disperse their offspring to areas where they can feed back into the family with information and power from other centers of power. Like the Rothschilds sending their first five kids to the various power centers of Europe. And again primates do the same sort of thing. They disperse one sex or the other to neighboring areas and become powerful there. Compare the Bushes to the Kennedys. The Kennedys sent their kids to Rhode Island and Maryland, whereas the Bushes were far more strategic in sending their kids to electorally powerful states like Texas and Florida.

AB: I hadn't even thought of that. It's genius!

RC: It is genius. It's hard to credit the Bushes with genius but clearly it paid off in 2000.

Alan Bisbort lives, sans wealth, in blue-blooded Connecticut, where he's a columnist for the Hartford Advocate. His most recent book, co-authored with Parke Puterbaugh, is "California Beaches", 3rd edition (Avalon/Foghorn).