Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September
19, 2003
Ilan Pappe
The
Hole in the Road Map
Bill Glahn
RIAA is Full of Bunk, So is the New York Times
Dave Lindorff
General Hysteria: the Clark Bandwagon
Robert Fisk
New Guard is Saddam's Old
Jeff Halper
Preparing
for a Struggle Against Israeli Apartheid
Brian J. Foley
Power to the Purse
Clare
Brandabur
Hitchens
Smears Edward Said
Website of the Day
Live from Palestine
September
18, 2003
Mona Baker
and Lawrence Davidson
In
Defense of the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions
Wayne
Madsen
Wesley
Clark for President? Another Neo-Con Con Job
Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Wesley Clark and Waco
Muqtedar Khan
The Pakistan Squeeze
Dominique
de Villepin
The
Reconstruction of Iraq: This Approach is Leading Nowhere
Angus Wright
Brazilian Land Reform Offers Hope
Elaine
Cassel
Payback is Hell
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Leavitt
for EPA Head? He's Much Worse Than You Thought
Website
of the Day
ALA Responds to Ashcroft's Smear
Recent
Stories
September 17, 2003
Timothy J. Freeman
The
Terrible Truth About Iraq
St. Clair / Cockburn
A
Vain, Pompous Brown-noser:
Meet the Real Wesley Clark
Terry Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Moore on Gen. Wesley Clark
Mitchel Cohen
Don't Be Fooled Again: Gen. Wesley Clark, War Criminal
Norman Madarasz
Targeting Arafat
Richard Forno
High Tech Heroin
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Website of the Day
The Ultimate Palestine Resource Site!
September 16, 2003
Rosemary and Walt Brasch
An
Ill Wind: Hurricane Isabel and the Lack of Homeland Security
Robert Fisk
Powell
in Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
Imperial Sociopaths
M. Shahid Alam
The Dialectics
of Terror
Ron Jacobs
Exile at Gunpoint
Christopher Brauchli
Bush's War on Wages
Al Krebs
Stop Calling Them "Farm Subsidies"; It's Corporate
Welfare
Patrick Cockburn
The
Iraq Wreck
Website of the Day
From Occupied Palestine
September 15, 2003
Stan Goff
It Was
the Oil; It Is Like Vietnam
Robert Fisk
A Hail of Bullets, a Trail of Dead
Writers Bloc
We
Are Winning: a Report from Cancun
James T. Phillips
Does George Bush Cry?
Elaine Cassel
The Troublesome Bill of Rights
Cynthia McKinney
A Message to the People of New York City
Matthew Behrens
Sunday Morning Coming Down: Reflections on Johnny Cash
Uri Avnery
Assassinating
Arafat
Hammond Guthrie
Celling Out the Alarm
Website of the Day
Arnold and the Egg
September 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
Todos
Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun
Laura Carlsen
A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers
Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Sept. 11
Elaine Cassel
Bush at Quantico
Linda S. Heard
British
Entrance Exams
John Chuckman
The First Two Years of Insanity
Doug Giebel
Ending America as We Know It
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Blank Check Military
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Website of the Day
A Woman in Baghdad
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
Roger Burbach
State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001
Jonathan Franklin
The Pinochet Files
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Postcards to the President
Norman Solomon
The Political Capital of 9/11
Saul Landau
The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11
Stew Albert
What Goes Around
Website of the Day
The Sights and Sounds of a Coup
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
Hot Stories
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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September
20, 2003
Stage Zero
The
Moral Development of George W. Bush
By CAROL NORRIS
If George wasn't driving the world down the road
to extinction with his wars, his environmentally disastrous choices
and world alienating policies--"Look at me, ma, no hands"
he says while sitting behind the wheel of our children's future--I'd
think he was almost fascinating.
Fascinating the way one who is steeped
in myriad psychological issues is.
I'm a psychotherapist. And, having never
seen George in therapy, despite my open invitation, it would
be unethical for me to make an official diagnosis of him. So,
I won't. But, I can kick some thoughts around.
Remember Tom Hanks' movie, "Big,"
when the kid, by an accident of fate, finds himself turned into
an adult, playing grown-up roles he is not developmentally ready
for? This is George. I don't mean this maliciously or satirically;
I really mean it. I think developmentally speaking George is
a big kid. Lots of people are. The difference is they don't have
the means to bomb human beings into "pink mist," obliterate
the infrastructures of countries, and poison the world with coal
and pesticides and carbon dioxide and depleted uranium and napalm,
as they play grown up.
Nowhere was George playing grown-up more
conspicuous than his staged re-election photo op on the USS Lincoln.
When I saw him all dressed up pretending to be a naval aviator,
I kept waiting for him to pull out his GI Joe doll with karate
action, sit down and start playing: "Bring 'em on. We can
take 'em. Huh, Joe? Take that--heeeyah," while making Joe
do a big karate chop as the real soldiers look on, saluting their
Commander in Chief.
And now KB Toys has come out with an
Elite Force Naval Aviator Action Figure to immortalize George's
"historic" day of pretend play. And with that, in a
moment of unintentional, yet brilliant psychological mindedness,
they have placed George, the pretend combat-ready naval aviator,
exactly where he belongs--in the make believe world of the 10
and under set.
In short, George is stuck.
Without getting into too much psychobabble,
in human development terms this means he had some significant
issue or trauma at one stage in his development that precluded
him from advancing to higher stages. Again, theorists would argue
that we all have developmental issues to one degree or another.
And we do. But, again, most of us are playing out our intrapsychic
havoc in the battlefields of our minds, not the battlefields
of the world. Our casualties, disastrously enough, are often
our relationships, not the lives of U.S. soldiers and civilian
mothers and children bombed out of their homes in far away neighborhoods.
There are many ways to think about human
development. One could explore cognitive, psychosexual or psychosocial
development. I suspect George is developmentally stuck in many
ways, so we could look at any of these.
But perhaps more than any other president
I can think of, George evokes pure morality as a rationale for
his policy decisions. This, as opposed to choices based on reason
and facts and evidence informed by morality. [Example: George's
rationale for going to war were WMD's that were an imminent threat
to the U.S. Oops. No WMD's. Now George says in essence, "Yeah,
well, so? Saddam is bad. Really bad. And we're good. So, us being
good and Saddam being bad justifies all the lying and misleading
about this illegal war."]
So, while I don't psychologically assess
people from a moral perspective, it makes sense for George. You
have to meet people where they are.
A preeminent theorist on moral development
is Lawrence Kohlberg, a famous Harvard professor, who demonstrated
through his scientific studies that people progress in their
moral reasoning (i.e., in their bases for ethical behavior) through
a series of levels. He delineated three levels, further broken
down into six stages.
The first is "the Preconventional
Level," where one usually finds oneself in elementary school.
The first stage of this level is where George, I believe, makes
his home. It's called: Stage Zero.
Kohlberg writes: "Stage Zero: Egocentric
judgment. The child makes judgments of good on the basis of what
he likes and wants or what helps him, and bad on the basis of
what he does not like or what hurts him. He has no concept of
rules or of obligations to obey or conform to independent of
his wish."
I know! It's uncanny.
We saw George's egocentric judgment during
his college years as he publicly argued for the right of his
fraternity, DKE, to use cruel hazing rituals, such as branding,
on its pledges. After all, George said, "the resulting wound
is 'only a cigarette burn.'" (New York Times, November 8,
1967).
We saw it in AWOL George, who didn't
see the need to fulfill his obligations, his promised duties
in the National Guard because it didn't align with his wishes.
And we have seen unprecedented self-serving
judgment time and time and time again during Bush's tenure as
president.
One example among thousands: The current
administration is seeking to create legislation that will make
some 18 year old kid who wrongly downloads a song off the Internet
without permission a felon. A felon. Such a label will dog her
and impede her for the rest of her life. This, as Kenneth Lay,
who robbed countless families of their life savings is not held
accountable, but is running free, living not off his wife as
he pretends, but off the fruits of his manipulation. So, what's
the moral here? Rob a corporate buddy of George's of a buck fifty
and, because it's technically illegal, you're forever bad. Run
a corporation, be a buddy of George's, rob your employees of
thousands upon thousands of dollars and, although it's illegal,
you're still good.
A summation of George's egocentric philosophy
might very well be his words to Bob Woodward: "I am the
commander, see. I do not need to explain why I say things. That's
the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody
needs to explain to me why they need to say something, but I
don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."
What a profoundly childlike thing to
say (not to be confused with childish). It sounds to me like
a kid trying desperately, yet transparently, to convince people
he is fit for a role he secretly is unsure he can fulfill and
discuss.
An appropriate response by Woodward to
George's subtext might've been, "Such a big boy, Georgie!
Yes you are!!"
I'm not a big Clinton fan, believe me,
but can you imagine those words coming out of his mouth during
the absurd Lewinsky debacle?
An interviewer asks: "But didn't
you say you did not have sexual relations with that woman?"
"I am the commander, see. I do not
need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing
about being the president...I don't feel I owe anybody any explanation."
Now, we all know many a president has
lied and distorted the truth in office. But, the difference is
they kept in mind the concept of rules and obligations that they
had to at least pretend to obey and conform to. Not just George,
but this entire administration has completely flouted what every
other administration previously has not--the need to pretend
to play by the rules. The rules are forever changed, they tell
us. Remember 911!
Speak brashly and carry a big photo of
Ground Zero is their new philosophy. And Remember 911! is the
battle cry that drowns out any dissenting skirmish this administration
finds itself in. Remember 911! Is the catch-all response that
replaces any obligation to account for their actions. It is the
cozy, protective cloak that has made the Bush administration
all but impervious to questioning and doubt.
And not can they be heard crying, Remember
911!, but Beware The Terrorist Hiding in Your Underwear Drawer!
Code Orange. Code Orange. Duct tape at the ready! Of course,
a terrorist attack could absolutely happen again. We'd be foolish
to think otherwise. But, this in no way negates the fact that
the Bush administration has brilliantly and unabashedly exploited
our post-911 apprehension. There is no greater fuel for righteous
indignation and the resulting lack of critical thinking than
fear. And the Bush administration is fanning the flames of fear
every chance it gets.
So, through our post-9.11 eyes, many
of us have very understandably come to see the radical (yes,
the Bush administration is not conservative, it is radical) egocentric
judgment of the Bush administration as truth. And in many cases,
it has become law. The Patriot Act is the radical, egocentric
judgment of a few, turned law.
And it is from the same Stage Zero mindset
that a plethora of alarming legislation is being passed as hard
fought civil liberties are being overturned. It is from Stage
Zero that John Ashcroft and the proposed "Patriot Act II"
will be enforced. Ashcroft's egocentric judgment--the same judgment
that spent $8,000 of tax payers' money to cover a stone breast
apparently too titillating for John's libido--is going to determine
who is a terrorist and who isn't, who can be expatriated and
who can't. It will be Ashcroft, the same man who reportedly thinks
Calico cats are signs of the devil, who is the final arbiter
of right and wrong, good and bad. And let's not forget that Rumsfeld
was reportedly all too recently considered so way out there his
colleagues didn't take him seriously.
While the causes of all this egocentric
morality are beyond the scope of this article, it is worth saying
that, in George's case, it is surely informed by his particularly
privileged background that has left him without a realistic sense
of how the vast majority of us live and struggle. As he said
in a moment of uncharacteristic truth telling to Reverend Jim
Wallis, "I don't understand how poor people think."
In addition, his morality and subsequent
choices are surely informed and perhaps superceded by his addiction
issues and by his deep-seated shame and desperate need for validation.
George's egocentric judgment is also
given credibility under the auspices of his religious conviction.
I do believe George is a religious man. But, he has in many ways
prostituted his religion to serve his true dogma--the advancement
of the corporation.
So, for all his touting of religious
and moral imperatives, George's policy decisions constitute nothing
less than a moral failure. They have nothing to do with God,
despite George's fantasy of divine rule, they have nothing to
do with compassion, and they have nothing to do with helping
you and me in any real way. Intrapsychically, they have everything
to do with George's wish to finally be more than what he fears
he is--a moral/business/personal failure. And interpersonally,
they have to do with paybacks and power jockeying.
I believe George's handlers exploit his
insecurities, posing him as an Air Force Naval Aviator here and
a Friend of the Poor there, feeding into his need to play those
rolls. At the same time, it fills their need to have an affable,
malleable front man, willing to please and needy enough to believe
the rolls in which he is cast. Karl and Dick and Co., I believe,
are to a certain extent manipulating George just as they are
trying to manipulate us.
So, why don't we all see through this
and call them on it? Because George's handlers and speechwriters
and the rest of the gang are very adept at pretending to be at
a stage where they aren't: Stage 5.
Kohlberg writes: "Stage 5: The social-contract
legalistic orientation. Right action tends to be defined in terms
of general individual rights and standards that have been critically
examined and agreed upon by the whole society... The result is
an emphasis upon the "legal point of view," but with
an additional emphasis upon the possibility of changing the law
in terms of rational considerations of social utility...The "official"
morality of the American government and Constitution is at this
stage."
This is where most of us Americans believe
we are, or at least we used to. Because this is much of what
our country was founded on. And the Bush administration knows
this and they exploit it. They talk the talk of Stage 5 as they
walk the walk of Stage Zero.
But such incongruity is crazy making.
It's like a mother who beats her child as she tells him she loves
him and would never hurt him.
Like the abused kid, many of us want
to believe George is telling the truth and is looking after our
best interest. He seems like a nice enough guy. We try to contort
our sense of morality and reality to fit his, questioning our
own. But, while we hear George tell us the economy is recovering,
we see thousands upon thousands in our communities laid off with
no future job prospects. And we can only contort and deny so
long until finally something gives. So now, the facade is cracking
and many people are starting to see the real, ugly, self-serving
picture behind George's wall of pretty words. And it is through
this crack that activists, progressive politicians and those
of us concerned about the once unimaginable state of our country
must thoughtfully, respectfully and gently enter and begin to
mobilize and organize.
The final of Kohlberg's stages is Stage
6. Again, Kohlberg writes: "Stage 6. The universal ethical-principle
orientation. Right is defined by the decision of conscience in
accord with self-chosen ethical principles that appeal to logical
comprehensiveness, universality, and consistency... At heart,
these are universal principles of justice, of the reciprocity
and equality of the human rights, and of respect for the dignity
of human beings as individual persons."
Kohlberg believed many people never truly
reach Stage 6. But, I think it is not unreasonable to hope that
the man who is running our country and our world should aspire
to this stage. Having a Stage Zeroling behind the wheel is a
sure sign our world will be driven into an enormous ditch before
you can say Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator.
To help clients move through the stages,
Kohlberg believed a therapist should present him or her with
moral dilemmas to discuss. Never have I considered, nor do I
plan on doing therapy with clients this way. But, I think it
is my patriotic duty to help our morality-touting Commander in
Chief rise out of Stage Zerohood and step into a stage more fitting
of his position.
So, again, I invite you, George, to come
see me in therapy and work out some of your moral development
issues, just as I invited you to
work out some of your shame issues a while back.
In the meantime, here is a moral dilemma
for you to chew on to help you work your way up the moral ladder.
Hope it helps.
Moral Dilemma: You are an exceptionally
privileged man who has a long history of personal and business
failures. Despite yourself, you find you are appointed to the
most powerful position in the land through the help of friends
and family in high places.
You say you are compassionate (burning
the flesh of others aside). Yet in your short tenure in office,
you have instituted public policies and norms that have irretrievably
pockmarked the face of the world such as walking away from international
treaties, years in the making: The Kyoto Treaty, the Nuclear
Nonproliferation Treaty, the International Criminal Court Treaty,
and the Land Mines Ban Treaty, making our world infinitely more
dangerous.
You have created the largest federal
budget deficit in American history, as you blithely accept the
highest unemployment rate in decades, (the upturn of the last
economic quarter was mostly due to payments to the coffers of
a few defense contractors. So only a few of your friends have
seen the benefits of the slight upturn. And the small unemployment
decrease was due to people so frustrated they just dropped out
of the job market).
And as the US now boasts the highest
proportion of children born into poverty in the "developed"
world (22%) and 43 million Americans have no health insurance,
your administration is slowly but surely gutting all our country's
safety nets, which will ultimately add fuel to your privatization
frenzy and create a truly vicious cycle.
Through this same privatization, you
are pilfering the jobs and futures of millions of federal employees
in the name of national security, effectively gutting the Civil
Service Act of 1883, dragging federal employment practices back
to the good old days of nepotism and cronyism while you do your
best to pass a law to cut the overtime pay of hard working citizens.
Your administration reportedly instructed
the EPA to lie to the people of New York City about the toxic
air they have been breathing since 9.11, which has caused very
serious respiratory illnesses. You ask soldiers to continue to
die, to expose themselves to higher and higher levels of toxic
depleted uranium that promise years of subsequent health problems,
as you show a uniquely George-esque brand of "supporting
our troops"--ignoring the demands of the family members
of active troops who are clamoring for some answers and accountability
for this war; trying to block the pay raises of those on active
duty; and pledging to veto a bill that would overturn an old
law that, in effect, makes veterans pay for their own benefits.
Do you have Laura look up what the word
compassionate means in the dictionary and pick a new, more appropriate
word like, say, self-interested? Do you have a moral reckoning
and become the man you pretend to be? Or, do you forever remain
"...a white Republican guy who doesn't get it..." as
you said to Reverend Jim Wallis and, true to your pervasive pattern,
continue to pull an Orwell and tell us War is Peace, Occupation
is Liberation, and Self-Interest is Compassion? Discuss.
Carol Norris
is a psychotherapist, freelance writer and member of CODEPINK:
Women for Peace. She can be contacted at writing4justice@planet-save.com.
For more info about Code Pink, go to:
www.codepinkalert.org
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
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