The Boatmen's Song


"Like all weak men, he laid an exaggerated stress on not changing one's mind." (Somerset Maugham, "Of Human Bondage" )

President Bush is trying to put back together the western alliance, which he so ungraciously discarded in favor of the "Coalition of the Willing." That wasn't a lot different from trading Manhattan for some costume jewelry. Now he wants Europe to treat him as if he has behaved like a friend and ally. But he hasn't. He has behaved like one of those fairy tale giants who is always defeated, in the end, by a foe much smaller but more clever.

I remember back to when this war first started, and how, in Prescott, there were pickup trucks with American flags flying, going around the town square. The collective chest was puffed out, like one of those fish that make themselves look bigger as a defense mechanism. They do this to build sexual power. Those fish can't mate with a female if she's bigger than them. With the advance of women's rights, there's nothing like a good war to put the thrust back into the old guided missile.

At the local Starbuck's the "conservatives" seemed full of robust energy, once they were able to feel the burn of aggression finally allowed full expression. It reminded me of a talk Robert Johnson, the Jungian psychologist, once gave about "The Shadow."

The Shadow is what we are but don't know we are, because it is anti-social. We all have a killer in us, but we don't let it act out so that we can live in a civilized society; likewise we have a thief, a beggar and a capering goat with an erection the size of a billy club, and coincidentally a vagina that expands to digest paralyzed prey. It's all there. We pick and choose what to display as our ego identity, usually after a process of adrenaline shocks at the points where we cross a taboo line. You can cross the line but the price is steep.

Obviously a huge amount of energy gets pushed off into the Shadow, and if it doesn't find a way to express itself, it has to be projected away on other people, preferably people who are racially, or at least culturally, different from us. This Shadow was kept in check in some civilizations by stoning or otherwise ritually killing a stranger, such as a wandering Jew, after accusing him of poisoning the wells or putting the evil eye on the children. Women were stoned or stripped of economic status for dancing with Dionysus.

Johnson related that a friend showed him how to connect with this Shadow energy when his ego was depleted. He said he was going to give a talk and was just running on empty, so he followed the friend's advice. He wet a towel and rolled it up. Then he began to beat it against the floor with great force, while shouting with each blow. "When I came out of that room I had fire in my eyes," he said.

I think the men who were so hot for war were like Johnson; they were just tired out from being nice. The old collective ego was dying, like the fairy tale king is dying when there's got to be some new energy. Nobody told them about rolling a wet towel and whipping the devil out of the kitchen tiles. They could watch the football game or the stock car races to whip up some hormones, but somehow it seemed inauthentic compared with a President urging them to go kill some "bad guys."

I want to be a sailor,
Sailing out to sea.
No plowboy, tinker, tailor's,
Any fun to be.
Aunts and cousins,
By the baker's dozens,
Drive their men to sea,
Or highway robbery.
I want to be a bandit,
Can't you understand it?
Sailing to sea is life for me,
Is life for me.

("I Want to be a Bandit," Geoff Muldaur, from the movie "The Thief of Baghdad" 1940)


I don't see the bravado and aggression about the war around town now. There are a few diehards. I heard on public radio (and I can't recall which program or guest) that thirty percent of the population will always remain supportive of what is most authoritarian in government. I would have to think that's correct.

But a lot of them seem to have tapped all that aggression built up in the Shadow, until, like drunks bingeing and then crawling home hung over and sick, they get the awful feeling that they gambled away the kids' milk money.

Bush is having trouble with the alliance because he broke it. When the thirty percent solution made it into power, Americans were out in the street pouring French wine into the gutters, and making fun of the Germans. We were treating it like news, instead of a mental problem, when leaders talked about leaving our old friends in favor of new ones. This was a much bigger threat to national security than Iraq could have been. No real conservative could have failed to prefer conserving the NATO alliance, and expanding it through trade and diplomacy.

There's no delicate way to put this; Bush has trouble getting anybody to help him because they don't want to see him succeed. You want to see somebody succeed when they have shown the way forward, and you wish to follow them. You know it burns the balls off France and Germany to treat Bush like a leader, instead of an arrogant rich kid who gets in trouble and then has to ask his family to bail him out, after he's flipped them off.

Today I read in the news that Mr. Bush has decided the troops will stay in Iraq until victory is ours. Former President Jimmy Carter (a career military officer), who has opposed this war from the beginning, describes the decision to invade Iraq as the worst diplomatic mistake in history. He thinks foreign troops occupying Iraq is fueling the violence, and that we should pull them away from Bagdad, at least, back into less volatile areas.

There is more than one way to look at things, but not for a man who places an exaggerated stress on never changing his mind.

I opened with Maugham and I'll close with him, and with a rich white man floating down a jungle river, puffing his pipe and marveling at the exotic adventure in which he finds himself. The black natives are singing a song as they work, and the man asks the captain, "What are they singing about?"

"They're singing about you," he says.

This is a bit discomfiting. Something has begun to intrude on his fantasies about himself. He asks what they are singing, and the captain tells him what the words mean. "He has much tobacco, yet he offers no man a cigarette."

Posted: Tue - November 28, 2006 at 11:53 AM