Prayer and Exercise
I know I'm a little late with this rant, but I can't get over the public arrogance of the administration. Just when I think it can't get any worse . . .

"Bush believes he was called by God to lead the nation at this time, says Commerce Secretary Don Evans, a close friend who talks with Bush every day."

"Bush copes with anxiety as he always has. He prays and exercises."

"He understands that he is the one person in the country, in this case really the one person in the world, who has a responsibility to protect and defend freedom.''

(all from a USA Today story).

If he were a different color or social class the society might decide that he is delusional and have him involuntarily committed. Isn't he fortunate that he comes from a long line of Bushes who went to Yale instead of cleaning elementary schools.

In the early 1960s Erving Goffman introduced the concept of the "total institution" in Asylums. In certain living situations like mental hospitals, the military, and slavery individuals who work and live within the institution are cut off from the larger society the inmates adopt the world view of the staff or captors. It is also possible for a small segment of society, a cult for example, to develop the same kind of internalized world view.

There is something about this war mentality that seems to have created the kind of Nixonian paranoia that produced the warped group in which Nixon spent his final months as president. The Bush crew seems to have taken all of the restraints off and is now babbling their belief system to the apparently friendly media. They seem to have so exclusively surrounded themselves with people who have identical views that they have lost the capacity to imagine that there might be others in the world who matter.

Or maybe they think that with God on their side, it just doesn't matter.