i'm the president. i'm the decider.

[intertribal]

President H.W. Bush: "Now Junior, I mean Dubya here, he's the real Born-Again."

W. is a movie I think every American should see. It starts off and you're so amused by the "impersonations" by the actors of Bush and his cabinet that you think it's going to be an SNL skit, but what it becomes is cathartic experience.

First off, let me just confirm that Josh Brolin is one of my new favorite actors. Yes, all I've seen is this and No Country For Old Men, but, damn. He's a talented guy.

Does Bush come off as sympathetic? Yes, in a welcome-to-the-human-race kind of way (Perp: "You don't know what it's like." Goren: "What? To work so hard, and still be a nobody?" Perp: "Yes..." Goren: "Welcome to the human race."). Would Bush, as Stone I believe said, like this depiction of him? No. It's fair, and it's sympathetic, but it's not gentle. I seriously doubt any of his supporters would like this movie. Other people who come off similarly include Colin Powell, the rest of the Bush clan, and Laura Bush. Plenty of people come off as unsympathetic - Condoleeza Rice was a particularly grating sycophant, Rumsfeld and Cheney are brutal strategists who disappear when the "WMDs" in Iraq are similarly nowhere to be found, and Karl Rove is a peculiar Gollum-like creature who skulks in the shadows of the war room with binders filled with statistics who lives so vicariously through W. that at one point he calls George H. W. Bush "Poppy".  But part of W.'s problem is that he is surrounded by people trying to put words in his mouth - Rove and Cheney in particular are the most egregious of the bunch - and he must every now and then remind these underlings that he is the President, he's leading the campaign, it starts and ends with him.  As it turns out this is because he suffers from a chronic fear of not being in control of his own life, not living up to the Bush name, not being Texan enough, not "earning his spurs", as his father puts it.  

What this movie drives home is something I very much agree with: that politicians are just people, just normal people with the same psychoses and neuroses the rest of us have - they've just got the power to act on their insanity. W.'s problem is essentially that he lives in fear of disappointing his father, who prefers his brother Jeb - when W. becomes governor of Texas but Jeb loses the same race in Florida, Bush Sr. mopes about how hard it is for feet-on-the-ground, head-screwed-on-straight Jeb, and W. says, "Why do you always have to be feel bad for Jeb? Why can't you feel good for me?" When Bush Sr. loses the presidential race in 1992 and breaks down crying, saying he thought the war would be enough, W. is flustered and infuriated - he shouts that this would never have happened if his father had charged onto Baghdad like W. told him to. While pacing outside as his mother consoles his father, W. tells Laura that he will never let that happen to him. And indeed: during the campaign for war in Iraq, he asks Ari Fleischer if the latter told the press that "I hate assholes who try to kill my dad".

At a disastrous press conference, Bush struggles to pick his worst mistake.

We have no idea, of course, if these conversations took place, but they may very well have. The thing is, I've realized recently that part of the reason I want to work in government is because I want to be there for the wank. People in government are crazy, snarky, bitter, tired people, and this movie captured that excellently. My favorite scene in the whole movie is probably when W. is leading his cabinet - in their suits and their middle-aged bodies - on this trek through some kind of military training ground that is essentially prairie. They're constantly batting at flies and trying not to groan because W. in his safari suit is so enthusiastic about this, laying out his vision for the war in Iraq and dismissing Colin Powell as a worrywart, cracking jokes that the rest of them are obligated to chuckle at. They seem to have lost the trail, but W. assures them the vehicles are just up ahead, another half a mile, "just follow me!" and they all head off into the wilderness.

A lot of people think that politicians are a different class of people. They're either super-intelligent hyper-Americans, revered as Gods, or soulless, evil robots (or soulless, evil puppets who can't tie their own shoelaces). This girl in my thesis class said the other day, "People in the State Department are all the same. They just re-program the new people that come in." And a lot of people follow this idea that Capitol Hill is all anonymous suits and ties, "yesmen", cronies working for Big Ideas. This is just bullshit, and that goes for both parties. Believe me. People in the State Department are most certainly not "all the same". I can tell stories. This is from my research:

"The fact that the USA tried to discredit Sukarno through attempting to make a pornographic movie about his romantic proclivities indicates the climate of the times."

"While some of Sukarno’s American critics considered his recent outburst egregious but not inconsistent with previous antics, the CIA detected a deeper significance. Agency analysts began to suspect that Sukarno was becoming mentally unhinged… One of Sukarno’s wives, his fourth, seemed to be the source of most of the problems; the CIA’s contacts reported that some of Sukarno’s associates were plotting to kill her."

"The undersecretary of state [Ball] discounted what he considered wishful thinking by Jones; the ambassador, whose retirement was at hand, seemed to be showing the strain of seven years at a difficult post. An extraordinary request by Jones a few days earlier that Johnson personally assure Sukarno that the CIA was not trying to assassinate him did not improve Ball’s estimate of the ambassador’s judgment."

I'm sorry, but this is stuff I find positively hilarious.  And it's all true, and it all had real consequences.  Politics is about a lot of things, but politicians are not sterile 'droids.  They're not all-bad or all-good, like so many people would like to believe.  They don't behave in a way a realist political scientist would describe to be "rational".  But then again, who does.  People are not perfect calculators of gain/loss margins. 

W. and his reverend pray after he announces that he has heard the call:
"God wants me to run for president."
The reverend's doubt-filled reaction: "... truly?" 

Comments

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

Are you saying ideas killed your father?

My experience, I suppose, is of people who don't care about ideas making stupid decisions because of it, not reflecting on their marriage until they'd been married 10-15 years and had a child, not thinking about where they stand in society but only wanting 'what they deserve', caring more about their financial status than the friends around them, and in the end, being naggingly unhappy and alone. That's one experience. Another is of myself not engaging with school and freaking out instead, and people like Steve telling me that if I just let myself be excited about ideas, if i let that show in class and in my assignments and other aspects of my life, then I would achieve academic success as well, without ever having to try for something as material as good grades. People like Steve trying so hard to be a good teacher and so invested in it because they feel that a liberal education, that trying to help people reach a critical understanding of the world around them, is a real difference they can make in the world, a good thing. And then the things I study, where ignorance of social forces only contributes to people letting themselves be ruled by them, to discrimination and psychological pain and violence, and I long to see people be more independent than that. And it seems like there are very few ways to be more independent, and one of them is related to education, to learning to stop and think critically about these things. That's why I care. And I'm not saying that everyone has to, or even that you have to, but it's why I have to care.

I know you do think about ideas in different ways, and if you're happy with the Foreign Service, I wouldn't tell you not to do what makes you happy.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

I am kind of saying that ideas killed my father. Not ideas themselves, but how he handled those ideas. Obviously it all comes down to how you wield ideas.

It's clearly better to care and be engaged with life in general no matter how. I guess I just don't like feeling judged and looked down upon.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

Caring about ideas and seeking truth are not one and the same thing. As for your father, I don't know, obviously.

I'm sorry you feel that way. I clearly crossed a line between expressing that I disagree w/ what you're saying and seeming to look down on you as a person. I still don't think I do the latter. Maybe (an insane?) part of me feels like you deserve better, because I expect more out of life. But that's not the same as looking down on you.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

I don't know either, not completely, and I never can. And in a lot of ways finding out more has made me more anxious than not knowing anything (and being free to invent my own preferred narrative for his life/person).

Well... it is looking down on me, because I believe in freedom of choice, and it's looking down on my decisions. That's actually more what I mean actually, like you think I can do better and that I'm wasting my brain being in the Foreign Service or something. I really don't think I am, because I think (arrogantly) that I would be useful to people in the Foreign Service, and I feel like I could actually make a difference to US policy there. I don't really have any ambition of being an Ambassador or whatev, I just want to be a great Pol/Econ officer in hardship posts and I want to campaign for aid and send people to study in America and advise the government on how not to fuck things up even more.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

My point was that beliefs are the sort of ideas you're talking about, that can be more or less informed, and the belief I'm talking about is in the importance of Enlightenment itself.

I believe in freedom of choice too, and it's not even you wanting to be in the Foreign Service that bothers me. That seems good, precisely because you "could actually make a difference to US policy there," and I think you have every right to be arrogant about thinking you could be useful there. It's that somehow you seem to be saying that in order to do this you should give up caring about "big ideas" and so on. I don't see why you want to do that. And I know you keep saying it relates to your father, but I can't help thinking that we're talking about different things.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

"My point was that beliefs are the sort of ideas you're talking about, that can be more or less informed, and the belief I'm talking about is in the importance of Enlightenment itself."

Yeah, I know. I know they're not the same. I guess I think they're more similar than you do? I don't know what my dad thought about Enlightenment.

It's not like I'm not interested in Enlightenment, or whatever you want to call it. Or Big Ideas. But for me it's a more personal matter. I am highly interested in seeking my own personal Enlightenment, and I believe I will be able to do that through living life. I don't think it's something I'll find through discussion; but I think we have very different ideas on what Enlightenment is, that's part of the problem.

I don't think that the Foreign Service necessitates I give up thinking about big ideas, in any case.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

Beliefs are all of the same nature, I think, but the difference between the two sorts we're talking about is that they're of different orders. One is a belief about the best way to decide one's beliefs, and the others are simply beliefs about matters--that's all I mean.

I think it's something you get through living life as well as discussing...it's something you reach through being shown--by personal experience, others' experience, scientific experiments, literature, history, whatever it takes, whatever is capable of showing the consequences of a certain thing--enough that you might change your understanding and beliefs.

In the older descriptions of Enlightenment, it's also related (and I would agree) to not just taking someone else's word for it, and figuring things out for yourself:

"Enlightenment is man's release from his self-incurred tutelage. Tutelage is the incapacity to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. Such tutelage is self-imposed if its cause is not lack of intelligence, but rather a lack of determination and courage to use one's intelligence without being guided by another."
-Kant

"The floating of other men's opinions in our brains, makes us not one jot the more knowing, though they happen to be true."
-Locke

And yeah, I agree that the Foreign Service doesn't necessitate giving up thinking (about big ideas or anything else, as far as i know).

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

and if disagreeing with someone's decisions is the same as looking down on them as a person, then i think we're all arrogant fucks, because i don't really see how you can go through life agreeing with everyone's decisions.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

hmm... I guess I don't necessarily agree with everyone's decisions, or even approve of them, but I don't openly regard these decisions with disdain. I usually think, "that's fine for you". But I'm more into "live and let live", in general.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

I'm "live and let live" about a good many things, but with other things I think there is some ethical value worth considering. But regardless, I don't ultimately think that I ought to make others' decisions for them.