Secular Conversion


I read once about a woman who was sitting in her bed, looking out the window, when a bolt of lightning struck. It killed her, but left her image perfectly engraved on the window glass. It was an amazing display of spirit and matter. Why did that come to mind? Maybe it reminds me of how little I actually understand. That event, to me, is magic. Maybe I should figure it out ...

Sometimes you can tell how bright someone is by how far reason extends from them before it begins to enter the realm of magic. For example, our President is a faith based person, which is another way of saying that he has very little separating him from the realm of magic. He is limited, which has become painfully obvious, but he still has a shot at greatness.

I don't mean that he can be remembered as a great leader. He isn't that, and he isn't going to be. So long as he tries to be, he will fail. To be a great leader you have to be doing the work and showing the way, and he hasn't got that capacity. He affects a macho Texas attitude which works well inside the subculture but makes him look idiotic when he tries to use it on the world stage.

Because he talks like a child there is some consideration that whatever his type of intelligence, it is not in expressing deep thoughts. He appears not to have those.

What he has instead is a defensive stance. It is always visible when he walks in any ceremonial role. His shoulders are stiff and he is puffed up in the chest, like he is consciously expanding his upper body. This is a physical response to feeling threatened. Animals will do that to make themselves appear larger when they are in a confrontation. Over time this tendency develops a large upper body and diminished legs. To a body reader that reflects an inner habit of inflating, or exaggerating, aggressiveness to compensate for poor grounding.

Ronald Reagan didn't puff up when he walked. He was more of the real macho man, instead of the affectation of it, which is in the end clownish.

To think of Reagan as an actor is off the mark. He was a personifier. Corporations, and political parties, need an actual person to represent them. They find someone with the qualities they want the public to associate with their company image.

George W. Bush was a product which could be branded and sold as an iconic representation of the western rancher, the same as Reagan. Things might have worked out well for him if he hadn't been presented with something bigger than he could handle. When told that the country was under attack he could not imagine what was required of him, and was thus paralyzed for several minutes.

At that particular moment, there was nobody home. The unconscious took over, the same as it does if you slip on a banana peel. At that moment, you don't know what will happen, but what you don't want to happen is non functionality. That's deadly in a leader. Usually you don't get to the Commander in Chief of the most powerful military in the history of mankind without having been seasoned in crisis level decision making. When there was no party position to follow, Mr. Bush did not know what to do.

So he can't be a great leader. If he keeps trying to be known as a great leader he will perhaps succeed. One of the things Ayn Rand said that I liked a lot was that there are those who want to be great, and those who want to be known as great. With enough money and leverage, the Bush legacy can be crafted into a faith based history from faith based journalism.

The only way Mr. Bush can possibly transcend the inexorable process by which he is becoming a historical joke is by redeeming himself with a reality based secular conversion. Maybe with a reverse conversion, he can rediscover cynicism, after wandering for so long in the desert of idiotic fixation calling itself optimism.

I'm trying not to be cynical. But I am wondering if somebody can have a conversion back to reality, and begin to accept the mainstream of academic and scientific and diplomatic thought. If Mr. Bush can fall to his knees and watch the radiance slip away from him, and back into the general population where it belongs, he can begin to return to his eastern establishment Republican roots, and reconcile with his father.

This can't be easy. Once you've bathed in the radiance of eternity it must be difficult to settle down east of Eden and and realize you're not special. The slow and plodding reality of putting together a policy isn't as exciting as being chosen by God to reshape the world, but it avoids madness and mayhem. A wise old man once told me that European countries are different from us because they have known terrible wars that have come from messianic leaders, and they don't want messianic, or even charismatic visionaries anymore. They want good managers who can rule from the center.

We are having to learn this the hard way.

Posted: Mon - July 23, 2007 at 10:32 PM