Dragon Slayer


(Reprinted in part from "Abstract WMDs," originally published March 31, 2004)

Part of a hypnotist's training is that there are two kinds of words. There are words which describe something that is physical, and can be experienced by the senses, and there are "process words." A process word does not have a meaning per se, but is given a definition internally by the individual. "Courage," for example, or "nuance," are fundamentally different in kind from, "Domino," or "Impala."

There are ways in which these words are used to move suggestions past the critical faculty of the intellect. For example, if you tell somebody two things which are verifiably true, they will tend to accept a third thing, which cannot be verified, as also true.

"Your right hand is warmer than your left hand" (You see that the right hand is in the sun and the left in shade. The senses verify what you say is true.)

"Your ribcage is rising and falling with the rhythm of your breathing." (The senses again verify this is true.)

"And you feel a deep comfort spreading through your entire body."

"Deep comfort" is process language. The only meaning it has is what is ascribed to it subjectively.

But when it comes in a set, following two verifiable statements, it is a successfully inserted suggestion for the person to create whatever conditions they believe exist when they are experiencing deep comfort.

Here is a sample of the Bush induction, with two verifiable statements, and one process statement:

"My father and Ronald Reagan granted export licenses for chemical and biological weapons to be sold to Iraq and used to kill Iranians, because at the time that looked to be in our strategic best interest vis a vis the Soviet threat."

"Saddam Hussein caused the deaths of a lot of people. My father failed to destroy him."

"I will slay the dragon for Mother and be her hero."

Joseph Henderson once told me that when a man starts to grow up he becomes suspicious of all these hero battles going on. "Just who is he doing all this to impress? Why is he out looking for dragons?" As he matures, he can walk around a dragon or even refuse to constellate its aggression with his fears. Until a man gives up this hero stage, he is not a mature man and cannot be a good leader.

As you can see for yourself, this "one two three" device doesn't work right for Mr. Bush. It's like somebody who can't tell a joke. He gets the setup all wrong and then when he hits the punch line he has to go back and change the setup to make it work, and instead of being entertaining he becomes tedious.

The more he tries to make it work, the more he mangles it. We look around and see other people solemnly nodding with absorbed interest in this farce, and wonder why they cannot come out of the con man's trance.

Because President Bush is the representative of the athoritarians, he carries the image of the strongman, which is of the parent who rules with unquestioned authority. This is the part of the nation which reflects extreme patriarchal values. Because those living under this system consider it a "value" system, as opposed to, say, a "penal" system, they need nothing more than a supreme authority figure for their critical faculties to be bypassed. They define themselves not by questioning authority, but by having an unquestioned faith in it.

This is always the key knowledge the confidence man has about ordinary people. Moliere's, "Tartuffe" demonstrates the level to which a hypocrite can rise on the strength of a connection to God. Because other people can't verify the strength of God in somebody else except in terms of how much authority they present themselves as having, they are easy to hoodwink. To not be hoodwinked they would have to expose a ruthless man, always a dangerous thing.

In other words, they are all agreeing to stay hoodwinked so that they don't have to face the blatant disconnect between what was presented as evidence of something in the world, and exposed as evidence only of something which was on the minds of a group of right wing ideologues.

Each step of the way, the shadow side of the neo-conservative cadre around Bush has been projected away from themselves, onto other people. First it was that Saddam had all these chemical and biological weapons. They told us this, instead of telling us the truth of what was in their minds which was that they had granted export licenses for companies to sell Saddam these things, and they were scared to death he would use them or sell them to somebody who would use them.

Once they realized that Saddam had apparently destroyed all these weapons they had to use another lie to protect the first lie. Now the war wasn't about weapons of mass destruction, but was a moral war to remove a man who had killed a lot of people. The truth was they were tricked into taking out Saddam by Ahmed Chalabi. Now they can't admit to this, because it would expose them as bigger fools than would exposure of the first lie.

So in desperation, they are trying to shore up the entire fantasy with a new policy, which is to ignore the physical realm, and move into the abstract world of what is in the minds of other people. Now it becomes the "gathering of evidence" to decide what Saddam was wishing or hoping he could do.

The logical inconsistency of why he would destroy the weapons he had if he was so single-mindedly intent on having them does not come up. In fact, what comes up over and over again is that the conservatives in the administration believe other people are like them, and think like they do. The same people who want to start building more nukes, and get the okay to use them, point to Saddam. He is the "Devil."

For those of us in the country who are not overly concerned with defending our choice of going off to a unilateral and illegal war, because we were against it, there is a continuing expectation that those who were in favor of it will shift, and admit they were wrong.

We keep waiting for the trance to break as there is a history, now, of a fundamental disconnection between what we were told and what was true, or real. There is the frustration now of knowing they don't discern between lies and truth, but only between themselves and the enemy, be it Saddam or Kerry or citizens against the war.

Even if everything they did was in good faith, there is still the fact that their map of reality, on which they operate, does not match the terrain.

The most frustrating part is that freedom has shrunk, and there is the underlying depression that comes with an increased authoritarianism. Grey is the background color on the canvass of the Bush years.

Yesterday I was walking toward the intersection of Ninth and Irving here in San Francisco. There was a street person out there with an electric piano set up on the sidewalk. He had the real bum look, in clothes that didn't fit him, and his fingers were dancing on the keys while a blind man beside him, holding his white cane in one hand and his beggar's cup in the other, kept time with his whole body. They were swinging the intersection.

People passing them seemed almost troubled by the sheer energy of the performance, and the great, uninhibited smiles of the two ragged old men. The passersby looked at each other for a cue, unsure how to react to such a raucous exhibition.

The rest of us on the street knew that Tartuffe is in power, and we were wary. And suddenly the energy we needed to give us back our mojo came flowing out of the speakers and rolling down the boulevard like free money.

Posted: Wed - April 25, 2007 at 06:37 PM