George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

more singular hobbies Suetonius includes his love of rolling and wallowing in piles of
gold coins.
Caligula kept his wife, Caesonia (described by Suetonius as "neither beautiful nor
young") with him until the very end. But his greatest devotion was to his horse, whom he
made consul of the Roman state. Ultimately Caligula fell victim to a conspiracy of the
Praetorian Guard, led by the tribune Gaius Chaerea, a man whom Caligula had taken
special delight in humiliating. [fn 13]
The authors of the present study are convinced that these references to the depravity of
the Roman Emperors, and to the records of that depravity provided by such authors as
Tacitus and Suetonius, are directly germane to our present task of following the career of
a member of the senatorial class of the Anglo-American elite through the various stages
of his formation, apprenticeship, intrigues, and ultimate ascent to imperial power. The
Roman Imperial model is germane because the American ruling elite of today is far
closer to the world of Tiberius and Caligula than it is to the world of the American
Revolution or the Constitutional Convention of 1789. The leitmotiv of modern American
presidential politics is unquestionably an imperial theme, most blatantly expressed by
Bush in his slogan for 1990, "The New World Order," and for 1991, the "pax
universalis." The central project of the Bush presidency is the creation and consolidation
of a single, universal Anglo-American (or Anglo-Saxon) empire very directly modelled
on the various phases of the Roman Empire.
There is one other aspect of the biographical-historical method of the Graeco-Roman
world which we have sought to borrow. Ever since Thucydides composed his
monumental work on the Peloponnesian war, those who have sought to imitate his style -
-with the Roman historian Titus Livius prominent among them-- have employed the
device of attributing long speeches to historical personages, even when it appears very
unlikely that such lengthy orations could have been made by the protagonists at the time.
This has nothing to do with the synthetic dialogue of current American political writing,
which attempts to present historical events as a series of trivial and banal soap-opera
exchanges which carry on for such interminable lengths as to suggest that the authors are
getting paid by the word. Our idea of fidelity to the classical style has simply been to let
George Bush speak for himself wherever possible, through direct quotation. We are
convinced that by letting Bush express himself directly in this way, we afford the reader a
more faithful-- and damning-- account of Bush's actions.
George Bush might agree that "history is biography," although we suspect that he would
not agree with any of our other conclusions. There may be a few peculiarities of the
present work as biography that are worthy of explanation at the outset.
One of our basic theses is that George Bush is, and considers himself to be, an oligarch.
The notion of oligarchy includes first of all the idea of a patrician and wealthy family
capable of introducing its offspring into such elite institutions as Andover, Yale, and
Skull and Bones. Oligarchy also subsumes the self- conception of the oligarch as
belonging to a special, exalted breed of mankind, one that is superior to the common run