George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

Chapter -XXIV- The New World Order
Roma caput mundi regit orbis frena rotundi
(Rome, the chief of the world, hold the reins of this round orb.)
Inscription on the imperial crown of Diocletian.
During late 1989 and 1990, George Bush traversed a decisive watershed in his political
career and in his own personal mental life. Up until this transition, Bush had attempted to
secure advancement through an attitude of deference and propitiation, currying favor with
a series of politicians and power brokers whom he despised as his social inferiors, and
whom he never hesitated to stab in the back once he got the chance to do so. This was the
old duplicitious "have half" persona of his early childhood. During the long years of
Bush's quest for the vice presidency, and during the eight long years of his tenure in that
office, the public face of Bush was that of dog-like fidelity and Reaganite orthodoxy.
During these years Bush exhibited the same relative cognitive impairment which he had
exhibited since his Andover days. On the surface, he was a top-level bureuacratic
functionary of the US police state, sharing the moral insanity of the policy committments
of the government apparatus which he represented.
Severe and debilitating mental strains had been evident in Bush's personality from his
earliest years. Such tensions were an inevitable result of the inhuman self-discipline
demanded by his mother, Dorothy Walker Bush, whose regimen combined the most
ruthless pursuit of personal affirmation for its own sake, with the imperative that all this
single-minded striving be dissembled behind the elaborate pose of fairness and concern
for the rights of others. During 1989 and 1990, the tensions converging on Bush's
personal psychological structures were greatly magnified not just by the Panama
adventure and the Gulf war, but also by the crisis of the Anglo-American financial
interests, by the threat posed to Anglo-American plans by German reunification, by the
thorny problems of preparing his own re-election, and by the foundering of his
condominium partners in the Kremlin. As a result of this surfeit of tensions, Bush's
personality entered into a process of disintegration. The whining accents of the wimp, so
familiar to Bush-watchers of years past, were now increasingly supplanted by the hiss of
frenetic spleen.
The successor personality which emerged from this upheaval differed in several
important respects from the George Bush who had sought and occupied the vicepresidency.
The George Bush who emerged in late 1990 after the dust had settled was far
less restrained than the man who had languished in Reagan's shadow. The hyperthyroid
"presidential" persona of Bush was equipped with little self-control, and rather featured a
series of compulsive, quasi-psychotic episodes exhibited in the public glare of the
television lights. These were typically rage-induced outbursts of verbal abuse and threats
made in the context of international crises, first against Noriega and later against Iraqi
president Saddam Hussein.