Archetypes

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Awhile back we learned from Jonathan Alter about a new phrase — “a real Dick Cheney.”

I mean, you’ve got a situation now where, you know, in workplaces across America, if somebody says, He’s a real Dick Cheney, what they mean is, a guy who sounds like he has a lot of gravitas in those meetings at your company, and looks the part, but is actually, you know, kind of full of it and can’t get the job done when it comes to making a profit.

Bill Gallagher found another one — “going rummy.”

rumsfeld: n 1) an arrogant person whose incompetence puts others in danger; 2) an inebriated attitude of self-importance and disdain for truth and opposing views, high on hubris; 3) a person who creates failures and fiascos; 4) a jerk. etymology: word derives from U.S. President George W. Bush’s Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, whose early 21st century military failures brought great suffering to the world and weakened American security. derivatives: v, adj, slang: Don’t go “rummy” on me!

DETROIT — “Don’t make a rumsfeld out of this!” That’s what my friend Carlos Meriwether proclaimed when he heard a discussion about the formal definition of a rumsfeld. Carlos is expressive, articulate and insightful.

An Army veteran and restaurant worker frequently honored for the quality of his work, Carlos is a grunt — an up-front kind of guy who deals with the facts and gets his job done with steady competence. He is just the opposite of a rumsfeld.

Dick and Rummy have become archetypes. In ancient times the tribal shamans would have woven colorful myths and legends around them, and eventually they would have morphed into demons who whisper in the ears of men and make them do foolish things.

Speaking of stupid, and myths, at The Guardian George Monbiot has christened our President “The King of Fairyland.”

At his press conference with Tony Blair last Friday, George Bush laid out his usual fairy tale about the conflict in the Middle East. “There’s a lot of suffering in Lebanon,” he explained, “because Hizbullah attacked Israel. There’s a lot of suffering in the Palestinian territory because militant Hamas is trying to stop the advance of democracy. There is suffering in Iraq because terrorists are trying to spread sectarian violence and stop the spread of democracy.” The current conflict in Lebanon “started, out of the blue, with two Israeli soldiers kidnapped and rockets being fired across the border”.

I agree that Hizbullah fired the first shots. But out of the blue? Israel’s earlier occupation of southern Lebanon; its continued occupation of the Golan Heights; its occupation and partial settlement of the West Bank and gradual clearance of Jerusalem; its shelling of civilians, power plants, bridges and pipelines in Gaza; its beating and shooting of children; its imprisonment or assassination of Palestinian political leaders; its bulldozing of homes; its humiliating and often lethal checkpoints: all these are, in Bush’s mind, either fictional or carry no political consequences. The same goes for the US invasion and occupation of Iraq and the constant threats Bush issues to Syria and Iran. There is only one set of agents at work – the terrorists – and their motivation arises autochthonously from the evil in their hearts.

Israel is not solely to blame for this crisis. The firing of rockets into its cities is an intolerable act of terrorism. But to understand why the people assaulting that country will not put down their arms, the king of fairyland would be forced to come to terms with the consequences of Israel’s occupation of other people’s lands and of its murder of civilians; of his own invasion of Iraq and of his failure, across the past six years, to treat the Palestinians fairly. And this he seems incapable of doing. Instead, his answers last Friday suggested, Bush is constructing a millenarian narrative of escalating conflict leading to the final triumph of freedom and democracy.

So I fear that Paddy Ashdown may be right. The United States cannot pursue a wider settlement in the Middle East, for it is led by a man who lives in a world of his own.

Maybe in the myths Dubya would have been the vain and foolish prince who falls under the spell of the demons Dick and Rummy, and when the prince becomes king he does all kinds of foolish and stupid things to destroy his own kingdom. It’d make a heck of a myth.

At TAP, Matt Yglesias dissects the same words of Dubya quoted by Monbiot.

One is used to hearing Bush say things that aren’t true. He appears, however, from the look on his face and from the baffling nature of the untruths he uttered, to have lapsed from dishonesty into confusion. (Sheer boredom may have sent him tumbling to new depths of ignorance.) “There’s a lot of suffering in the Palestinian territory,” Bush mused, “because militant Hamas is trying to stop the advance of democracy.”

It is? Has Bush forgotten that Hamas came to power as a result of elections that he insisted the Palestinian Authority hold? I happen to think the White House made the right call on the question of Palestinian elections — even in retrospect, even knowing that Hamas won — though many observers think his policy has merely backfired. Rather than defend the policy, however, Bush seems to have forgotten all about it. He returned to the theme later in the press conference: “One reason why the Palestinians still suffer is because there are militants who refuse to accept a Palestinian state based upon democratic principles.”

That’s absurd. The President appears to be totally unfamiliar with what is perhaps the single most-discussed topic in international politics. Nothing gets people disagreeing quite like the subject of how to apportion blame for the Palestinian peoples’ considerable suffering. But absolutely nobody blames Arab militants opposed to democratic principles. Terrorists opposed to Israel’s very existence? Sure. Israeli intransigence? Why not. But only someone paying no attention whatsoever would subscribe to Bush’s theory.

Dubya really is the stuff of myths and fairy tales. No competent modern fiction writer would have created a character that stupid and make him President of the United States.

Although we no longer live in the age of myths, we still make archetypes out of historical figures. Abraham Lincoln became an archetype for compassion and wisdom, for example. Richard Nixon became an archetype of shift-eyed sneakiness. Adolf Hitler is an archetype of evil. After all these years Napoleon remains an archetype of delusions of glory, just as “Waterloo” is shorthand for a final, crushing defeat.

Speaking of which — it has been argued that President Bush suffers from a napoleon complex, meaning he is overcompensating for a sense of inferiority; see also this essay on how Bush in Iraq resembles Napoleon in Spain.

This morning while googling for “mythical archetypes” I found this interesting discussion on masculine archetypes. One of the archetypes discussed is the Bully —

The boy (or man) under the power of the Bully intends to impress others. His strategies are designed to proclaim his superiority and his right to dominate those around him. He claims center stage as his birthright. If ever his claims to special status are challenged, watch the ensuing rageful displays! He will assault those who question what they ‘smell’ as his inflation with vicious verbal and often physical abuse. These attacks against others are aimed at staving off recognition of his underlying cowardice and his deep insecurity. [Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine]

Hmm, sounds familiar. I like this part, too:

The Hero throws the boy up against the limits, against the seemingly intractable. It encourages him to dream the impossible dream that just might be possible after all, if he has enough courage. Ir empowers him to fight the unbeatable foe that, if he is not possessed by the Hero, he might just be able to defeat.”…

…What is the end of the Hero? Almost universally, in legend and myth, he “dies,” is transformed into a god, and translated into heaven. . . . The “death” of the Hero is the “death” of boyhood, of Boy psychology. And it is the birth of manhood and Man psychology. The “death” of the Hero in the life of a boy (or a man) really means that he has finally encountered his limitations. He has met the enemy, and the enemy is himself. He has met his own dark side, his very unheroic side. He has fought the dragon and been burned by it; he has fought the revolution and drunk the dregs of his own inhumanity. He has overcome the Mother and then realized his incapacity to love the Princess. The death of the Hero signals a boy’s or man’s encounter with true humility. It is the end of his heroic consciousness.

If there’s one thing I’m sure of about our President, it’s that he has never encountered his limitations. He is as oblivious to his limitations as a spoon is oblivious to soup. He’s oblivious to his dark side; the dragon has been bought off; he mistakes his own inhumanity for virtue. He’s still a boy, in other words. And I believe the same is true of Dick and Rummy.

Face it; our leaders are a pack of Peter Pans.

13 thoughts on “Archetypes”

  1. Yeah….and Alberto Gonzales make the perfect Sancho Panza. Bush has promised him an Island.

  3. I would not be surprises if the infamous Peter Principle gets revised on the basis of this administration.

    What we have here is a case of positive feedback, where the group’s incompetence reinforced and amplified each member’s position.

  4. He’s a real Dick Cheney,

    I’ll add the most obvious rejoinder. In my workplace we have a shorter version: “He’s a real Dick.” Along similar lines to the post, on my blog I’ve suggested a few ways that GWB and the war in Iraq should be the source for analogies, rather than the target:

    On a failing software project: This project is making as much progress as the war in Iraq. On poor leadership: Enron’s management team showed all the skills of Bush on Iraq. On disastrous decision making: In the mid-1990s, Company X was trying to decide whether to go head to head against Microsoft. Their eventual decision was the equivalent of “Let’s invade Iraq.” On lame excuses: Oh, right, you really thought you’d be greeted with flowers and candy.

  5. If these people are Peter Pans – and Bush definitely is – his cult-like followers see him as Superman, or maybe Luke Skywalker.

    Sometime after 9/11, somebody in my office printed out a piece of pro-Bush artwork depicting Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld cast into the familiar Star Wars characters – probably it was around the time of the release of one of the later installments of this movie series.

    W was depicted as Luke Skywalker, earnestly wielding a light sabre (zzzzwhoooooosh!), fighting evil, who was probably personified as Osama bin Laden. I wish I could give you a link. I just held my nose and walked past it, despite the encouraging, admiring eyes of my right-wing coworkers who, with their uplifted eyes, wanted me to also believe in their hero.

    Insightful and frightening post. These people have absolutely no clue, not only about their limitations, but especially about their own depravity. I think we’re all numb by now by the infantile statements and actions of these people, particularly their front-boy, GW Bush. One of the most shocking things to me, early on, was Bush’s simplistic characterization of the world into stark Good vs Evil. The right’s utter inability to see evil in their own hearts is absolutely chilling.

    I think a lot of this blindness has to do with group-think, and the lack of development of an individual consciousness. There are loads of righties who will sanction anything, because “everyone” is doing it. Like the Borg, they never develop an individual consciousness, or at least the courage to exercise it in defiance of their peer group. This level of individuation is something that normally happens as one leaves adolescence.

  6. My husband and I were talking about bullies just yesterday. I said that we had become the bully of the world and it’s not a good thing because bullies are not respected, feared and hated, but not respected. The other children will find ways to avoid, confront, or undercut the bully. In the past we had to worry about a few terrorists who saw us as the bully, now it is the entire world. We are not safer.

    One of the things I have noticed about the friends and relatives who vote republican that I know is that they idealize movies and movie figures. Dirty Harry immediately comes to mind. They don’t seem to “get it” that movies are fantasy and fantasy means that circumstances are exactly right for things to turn out the way you want…it’s scripted. Dirty Harry is good because he never accidently kills bystanders, he can ignore the constitution and the rights of the guy he is going after because he never gets the wrong guy. Would any of us honestly care if we as Americans had constitutional rights if the police were never corrupted, if they always got criminals only and we were always treated fairly without that grandiose piece of paper?

    Getting to the point, there are alot of indicators that republicans are childish. That is one of the first I noticed about my own father, my sister in law, and one of my cousins who are all rabid republicans.

  7. Hmmm don’t forget brownie,,,(my favorite archetype) ….he has become a favorite when someone screws something up…Heck of a job brownie!….you must admit, bb(before bush) we were running a bit low on archtypes…Quayle was getting old,,,however my other half still asks if I will give him a monica.

    Here it has become common to say “I bushed up”…all the kids are saying it…I guess a phrase like that kinda pees on bush’s idea history will smile upon him.When your name replaces the f word thats just not good.What I find weird about it is that kids have figured it out already while their parents still seem to be drinking the koolaide.Go figure.

    George Monbiot and Matt have it right.It is so nice to hear someone speak the truth about the situation.Matt hit the nail on the head when he said ” But only someone paying no attention whatsoever would subscribe to bushs theory”… sadly to few are paying any attention…and no one in the MSM bothers to correct the lies , they just keep spoon feeding them to the American people, and the people keep eating it up.

    If I walked down my block today, door to door, and asked each person about the Israel / Lebanon conflict I promise you everyone believes Hezbolla attacked Israel for no reason.They believe Hezbolla dropped the first bomb.And they believe bush when he says this is a part of our war.

    I was unlucky enough to be trapped in a car yesterday during the sean hannity radio show….he was working hard to tell everyone why we have to help Israel because they were fighting “the terrorists”…and until those terrorists are dead we are in danger.He told his listeners “Those people want to kill you”….He is telling his listeners we are all targets of Hizbolla….they will be here anytime to chop of all of our heads if we don’t send troops into fight the entire middle east…So according to Hannity either we fight or Hizbolla will come kill us all.He spent the entire time I was in the car pounding it into his listeners heads.Sean insannity was working overtime with the bush supplied talking points yesterday. He was so excited at the prospect of this grand new war one wonders how he kept himself from becoming aroused.He sounded like a child trying to sell his parents on the idea of buying him a new toy….his sales pitch almost had a pleading tone to it.The koolaide is strong!

  8. How about a “Condoleezza”, for an ineffectual, self-absorbed, primly schoolmarmish person who lectures other people on failings that they themselves share?

    Projection, narcissism, and infantilism really do seem to be defining characteristics of the Right. Like when Cheney vowed that “the grownups” would be in charge again after eight years of peace, prosperity and international respect under the “childish” baby boomer Clinton. Yeah, right.

  9. The great tragedy is that unless the Hannity insanity is stopped, his words (“Hizbollah is out to kill you”) will become a self fulfilling prophecy, as the “Islamofascists” find a way to exact serious revenge on our country. We liberals will then be made to look pretty stupid, and we will be scapegoated for it.

    I despise the neocons, their megalomanic schemes, their lizard brain mentality, and the living hells they’ve inflicted, with our tax money and our young men and women, on the rest of the world. I despise what they have done to my once great country, and I fear what will happen when the other shoe drops.

    I know full well that what goes ’round comes around. I also know full well who’s going to be scapegoated for it. Here’s the Setup: Who have Hannity and Rush et al. been blaming for all the country’s woes for the last 20 some years? Liberals.

    Lighter note, I love the teenage “I bushed up”. LMAO… It’s even better than the bumper sticker I saw in for the Bush/Dukakis matchup: “Lick Bush in ’88”.

  11. Maha:

    Well posted as usual. I rise to challenge but one word: “stupid”. Bush and his crew are ignorant, not stupid. Ignorant of history, ignorant of law, ignorant of ordinary morality. They are personally ignorant of want, of hunger, of need, never having experienced it. Not of fear, of course, since they have shown their yellow streaks repeatedly starting with the avoidance of combat in their favorite war until now, Vietnam.

    No. Not stupid. Instead, they have a low and unscrupulous cunning, which, coupled with the bully’s instinct to sucker-punch a perceived enemy as soon as a back is turned, has made them potent politically. They can win (or get close enough to steal) elections. Of course the same evil slickness that propels their politics turns out to be no formula for governing. Their malignant incompetence at handling ordinary affairs prevents them from running a government anywhere but off a cliff. A moribund Washington press corpse, more interested in flattery from those they cover, and well-compensated enough to think more of tending their 401-k’s than finding out who is trashing the commonweal, did not stand in their way, and indeed gave them cover while plinking at what still passes miserably for the opposition. A punditocracy, carefully bought and paid for over a generation with dollops of cash from right-wing heirs of robber barons, eggs the bully boys on to this day.

    Nay. Not stupid. Shameless, cowardly, dishonest, sly, spoiled, thieving, greedy …

    So maybe not Peter Pans either, except for their narcissistic immaturity.

    But if they were, maybe we could clap and Tinker Bell, swathed in the Stars and Stripes, would rise from her swoon, Constitutional rape and war crimes would be forgotten, and Never, Never Land would be whole again. No. Unfortunately that is a dream and we are living a nightmare. The bastards have done us in for our sins of letting them seize power. Generations might have to pass before we can reclaim a “decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” But we can make a start. Impeach them all. Impeach them now. Jail them later. And apologize to the world that great big America allowed herself to be scared into being a bully, just like the chickenhawks who misruled her.

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