BuzzFlash presents Fifth Columnist
by P.M. Carpenter

Welcome to Fifth Columnist, a new BuzzFlash column by P.M. Carpenter, which combines political commentary and historical perspective.

George W., Journalists, and Revisionism Envy

by P.M. Carpenter

As Sigmund Freud famously said in the hope of stemming his profession's compulsion to plumb for deep significance in the readily comprehensible, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar." Today's armies of headpeepers and pop psychologists eager to lighten your wallet through endless sessions in which they explore the complex "inner you"-- although the inner you is perhaps just a hopelessly congenital twit, something your spouse, parents, children, coworkers, neighbors, and even your dog understands -- would seem to indicate that Freud's caveat went ignored.

His counsel should have applied to members of my own profession of history, in that many spend their academic lifecycles debunking what was valid and commonplace knowledge among contemporaries of eras past, employing all manner of byzantine "deconstructionism" and other garbled contortions void of balanced historical perspective which, believe me, you don't even want to know about. When historical revision arises from compelling evidence pieced together, it's a thing of intellectual beauty. When thinly substantiated revisionism debunks the obvious only as a means to sell one's advertised insight, it's an intellectual travesty, a gross public disservice.

All of which leads us to consider the state of mainstream professional journalism and its curious treatment of George W. Less than halfway through what is likely only the first of two terms (and that prospect does give cause to seek out a licensed shrink and beg for Valium), otherwise responsible journalists and commentators are indulging in full-blown denial of the obvious -- that being the manifest banality of this administration -- and searching instead for an imagined complexity somewhere inherent in W.'s inner self. These column-filling exercises are reminiscent of the satirical absurdity in the film Being There, in which the intelligent multitudes surrounding vacuous-yet-president-to-be Chauncey Gardner invented a presumed profundity deep within the man merely because he had made it so far. Chauncey, of course, was philosophically vacant and always had been, and though that would have been palpably obvious to any prepubescent stock boy, the pundits felt the need to plunge deeper.

The most recent example of imagined depth on George Ws behalf appeared last week in the musings of Bill Keller, columnist for the New York Times. Under the suggestive title "The Soul of George W. Bush," Keller strained his every fiber of credulity to locate some evidence of presidential gravitas; though, for sure, he couldn't bring himself to the level of revisionist foppery so prodigiously churned out by White House hacks that W. in reality is "a deep thinker, a student of ideas, ... [a] very curious man." Keller did, however, pose the question of whether there is "an emergent Bush philosophy." To this he answered, "I think there is."

In my Dictionary of Philosophy -- compiled, admittedly, 21 years ago, so it's possible our Orwellian meanderings since may have altered these concepts -- "philosophy" is variously defined as "the attempt to determine the limits and scope of our knowledge"; as a "critical inquiry into ... presuppositions"; and above all, "a systematic and complete view." But what Keller passed off as evidence of Bush's philosophy failed on all counts to substantiate so much as a dram of it. Quite the contrary, the article only reinforced what already seems so monstrously obvious to so many: that Ws leadership is utterly and happily liberated from any philosophical grounding whatsoever.

Is George a principled free trader? He was the veritable Patron Saint of free markets until, as Keller noted, he deep-sixed that moniker at the expedient drop of a hat to secure Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio's steely electoral votes in '04.

Is he of the libertarian school? He sure sounded like it during the 2000 campaign, but folks at libertarian Meccas like the Cato Institute have since taken to strong drink as George has expediently flipped to "activist, deficit-spending, interventionist" apostasies.

Can George "be claimed by the culture warriors of the Christian right"? Nope, said Keller. W. sat on their laps during the campaign whispering all kinds of expedient promises into their philosophically antediluvian ears and then, once in office, just as expediently chucked all that faith-based humbuggery in a Nazarene-minute.

How about big-business conservatism? Surely J.P. Morgan himself would drop to his capitalist knees in awe of Ws True Believer status in that realm. Not so fast, wrote Keller. George fancies himself -- egads -- a born-again moralist, and there's nothing quite so unforgivable and immoral to six-figured business school graduates as morality in commerce, even though Ws born-again morality has a habit of gravitating toward the expedient itself in his relations with big business.

So let's see, W. is an expedient free trader, an expedient libertarian, an expedient Christian warrior, and an expedient big-business conservative. Unless expediency has been recently codified as a philosophical school of thought, Keller's perception of a "Bush philosophy" is mysterious indeed.

Mr. Keller did make one point that some might characterize as an authentic philosophy, a true worldview: "Sept. 11 confirmed for [Bush] that God had chosen him for a purpose, and showed him what that purpose is." If that, in fact, is what grounds Bush after all these ungrounded years, it's the scariest philosophy imaginable. For after all, the architects of 9-11 devoutly believed "that God had chosen [them] for a purpose, and showed [them] what that purpose is."

But given his consistent record of political expediency, my guess is that Ws God materializes daily in the person of Karl Rove, and the purpose that W. divines is merely to demagogue the bejesus out this "war" to every last expedient drop. Such is the transparency -- the pregnant obviousness -- of Bush II. So let us heave Keller & Associates' forced and clever revisionism into the dustbin of nonsense. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

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