Talking with Mark Crispin Miller, Author of Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney's New World Order

Talking with Mark Crispin Miller, Author of Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney's New World Order

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

Mark Crispin Miller is sort of a Renaissance man of the progressive movement. You can read his books, see his one man show in New York, listen to him as a political/media commentator or attend one of his classes in culture and communication at NYU.

Miller is an occasional contributor to BuzzFlash who specializes in nailing down the media context of the current political scene, particularly as it relates to the propaganda/media machine orchestrated by the Bush cartel.

A couple years back, we featured his seminal analysis, The Bush Dyslexicon, a guide to interpreting what the squatter in the White House means by analyzing his dysfunctional phrasing.

In August, Miller will be back with a follow-up tome, Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney's New World Order (which, yes, we will be offering as a BuzzFlash premium). You can bet it rakes the media and Bush over the coals.

Miller is enlightened, witty and invariably on-target in his trenchant analysis of the Orwellian doublespeak Bush cartel reign. You might say that it runs in the family. His brother Bruce is the editor of Take Them at Their Words: Shocking, Amusing and Baffling Quotations from the GOP and Their Friends, 1994-2004.

http://www.buzzflash.com/premiums/takethem.html

Here is the first part of our most recent interview with Mark Crispin Miller.

* * *

BuzzFlash: Tell us about your new book, Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney's New World Order.

Mark Crispin Miller: I wrote Cruel and Unusual to make the case that Bush & Co. is fundamentally un-American -- an order wholly alien to the spirit of our founding documents. Certainly the regime represents some dark old strains in U.S. history: nativism, white supremacism, theocratic tyranny. But as far as our mainstream political traditions are concerned, Bush & Co. have simply junked them. They've hijacked the U.S. ship of state, and have it on a suicidal course.

I argue that Bush & Co. is the anti-Jefferson. This regime is not conservative, but represents a radical subversive movement -- one now largely in control of all three branches of the government, and also dominant throughout the press. What ultimately drives them is irrational. Sure, they're in it for the money and the oil; but that's not all that's going on here. They're neo-Calvinists, quite clearly working toward the imposition of theocracy on the United States, and then on the whole world. (Although mostly atheists and Jews, the Straussian types around Rumsfeld and Cheney are fine with that agenda, as they believe that theocratic government is best, because it makes the populace compliant.)

BuzzFlash: What's unique about the Bush Administration is how overt its complete lack of humility is for institutions such as the United Nations and for the leaders of other countries.

Mark Crispin Miller: I agree. That's why Bush, in the fall of 2002, had such a hard time uttering that Quaker axiom, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." As ever, his tongue went AWOL not because the man's an imbecile, but because he just can't make his mouth say things that are completely foreign to his nature. One of those things is, of course, contrition. Bush could just as easily say "Shame on me" as he could dance Swan Lake.

The far right's shamelessness, I believe, marks a certain turning-point in American politics. Throughout the history of our politics, of course, there's always been a streak of lunacy, there have always been explosive types, and public vitriol per se is nothing new. But what we've been experiencing since the Clinton era represents a whole new ball-game. Imagine a game where one team wants not just to win, but to destroy the other side, which they regard as evil. They use their bats as clubs, they throw their fastballs at the batters' heads, they tamper with the scoreboard, wreck the field and take over the stadium. They need to feel that kind of animus -- which is really all that they're about. And what makes them shameless is their firm belief that God approves of everything they do.

What we're confronting now, in other words, is something wilder, something much harder to deal with, than mere political corruption -- although this bunch is so corrupt that it defies description. I think that there is madness at the top of this enterprise -- not just in the Oval Office, as in Nixon's case, but all throughout the upper tier of Bush & Co.'s managers. Whether it's Bush melting down onstage or, say, Karl Rove behind the curtain, there's a fanatical unreason -- an unnatural unanimity of viewpoints -- that you finally cannot argue with, and that you can't defeat in the traditional way because they will do anything to win. The same mind-set is evident at the grass roots. Certain millions of our fellow-citizens enjoy Bush's short temper, his intransigence, his swaggering, because it makes them feel vicariously powerful. There's certainly no other reason to explain why any have-nots would support this administration, which has been screwing them royally from the get-go.

This may sound odd, but I wish that Bush and Cheney were all about the bottom line, and nothing else. Such an impetus would at least be rational. Of course, there is a certain craziness in trying to burn up every last drop of oil in the whole world, but there is a nationalistic logic to it. Everybody needs power, and we might as well be the ones to control the world's power supply. Such partial explanations sell Bush/Cheney short: I think there's an important pathological dimension to this moment that most of this regime's detractors overlook by imputing to Team Bush a certain kind of craftiness, deliberateness, detachment that just isn't there.

BuzzFlash: You're saying that philosophically and culturally, they really see themselves as remaking the world. There's obviously an enormous amount of information on how Bush believes that it's his destiny to be a Christian leader in a modern holy war. The references are throughout all of his statements and rhetoric.

Mark Crispin Miller: It's right out in the open.

BuzzFlash: If it were a specific policy, we could at least say, well, although it may seem crazy to us, it's not madness. Whereas the whole idea of going to war to bring democracy to an entire other region goes beyond a specific policy. It's really a philosophical mindset.

Mark Crispin Miller: I'd say it's a pathological mindset. I wouldn't dignify it by calling it philosophical. And I wouldn't prettify it by calling it ideological. It's perfectly natural for reasonable people to assume that their relentless adversary is likewise rational. We tend to think that if we could just, say, wake Dick Cheney up at 4 a.m., before he had a chance to get his talking points together, he would 'fess up. But Cheney isn't making anything up. He appears to believe in every word he says, against all evidence.

There's a book by Roger Griffin, a political scientist, called The Nature of Fascism, and in it he proposes as one of the essential criteria of a fascism is the desire to renew the world -- "change the culture," as Bush puts it -- and do it through the party. You cleanse the world of all its old defects and its bad inhabitants and so on. Bush just told the Pope he wants to change the culture. It's tempting to think that this is part of his boilerplate. But he's been talking about changing the culture since he ran for president in 2000.

What's most significant here, and yet gets almost zero coverage in our media, is the fact that Bush is very closely tied to the Christian Reconstructionist movement. The links between this White House and that movement are many and tight. Marvin Olasky -- a former Maoist who is now a Reconstructionist -- coined the phrase "compassionate conservatism," and was hired by the Bush campaign in 2000 to serve as their top consultant on welfare. Olasky's entire career has been financed by Howard Ahmanson, the California multimillionaire who has said publicly that his life's goal is "to integrate Biblical law into all our lives." Ahmanson funded the far-right seizure of the California legislature back in '94, and is also the main force behind the schism in the Episcopalian church. Also, he appears to be the most important advocate of the so-called "intelligent design" movement, which is creationism. Ahmanson backed Bush in 2000 -- with exactly how much money we don't know -- and is supporting him again.

Christian Reconstructionism is a maverick theological movement. It's far more activist and radical than most Christian Evangelism is. For the most part, Christian Evangelicals generally have chosen to deplore this world in their expectation of Jesus' return, whereupon this world will be improved. The reconstructionists believe that it is the obligation of every Christian to do whatever he or she can do to make this Christian republic with an eye toward making the other nations of the world Christian republics.

This means replacing the Constitution with the Pentateuch -- the first five books of the Old Testament. It is an anti-pluralist movement, which would entail the disenfranchisement all non-Christians, and the establishment of a common law based on Leviticus. If you want a sense of what the theocrats are after, read that book, and also read The Handmaid's Tale. Although the reconstructionists don't believe in violent tactics to get their way, and many of the Islamists obviously do, the world envisioned by the former seems to be more punitive that the global caliphate imagined by al Qaeda.

And in fact we are now dealing with an adversary whose world-view is opposed to ours completely. They are nostalgic for the Middle Ages, or at least for the colonial theocracies of the 17th and early 18th centuries. They value faith over reason. So those who have dragged this nation into war against Islamist terror think exactly like Islamist terrorists. Whatever creeds they think they follow, what really drives both groups is paranoia. Each side wants to replace the other, either through annihilation or conversion. Certainly the Busheviks are fired up with old Crusaders' zeal.

BuzzFlash: Which is exemplified by the fact that -- how many missionaries are in Iraq?

Mark Crispin Miller: Exactly.

BuzzFlash: -- and that's a public relations disaster. It's an image problem.

Mark Crispin Miller: Well, if we start with that war, you're absolutely right. The American people are unaware of the extent to which Iraq has been overrun by Christian missionaries, primarily Southern Baptists. The International Mission Board has thousands of Americans operating in Iraq, with most of them, it seems, intent primarily on saving souls -- converting Muslims. They bring material inducements with them. They have clean water, blankets, food. They're basically trying to barter an enlargement of the world's Christian community -- which is a dangerous provocation, because Muslims see such apostasy as a capital offense. So some of these missionaries, as you may know, have been assassinated. Once we put it all together, we can see quite clearly that "George sees this as a religious war," as reported by a close relation of the president's in The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty, by Peter and Rochelle Schweizer.

So this is not just a geo-political game, or just a bid to hog the global oil supply. It is fundamentally a religious war. The guy who's now in charge of counter-terrorism efforts in the theater of war is William "Jerry" Boykin, who used to go to fundamentalist churches in his full dress uniform and talk about the enemy being a guy named Satan, and claim that Bush was chosen by the Lord to be our president. The guy is a fanatic. And far from urging him to curb his zealous outbursts, his bosses at the Pentagon promoted him after that controversy. Now he is one of the most influential people giving orders in Iraq and thereabouts. You may also recall that our troops were given pamphlets urging them to pray for Bush, and to pray that he stand tough against all criticism.

Now all of this puts Bush on the same level with America's Islamist enemies. It's also what makes Bush & Co. so weirdly reminiscent of past totalitarian movements. All the major war-drives in modern history -- in Germany, in the Soviet Union, and in the Middle East -- have been impelled by people who believed that they were at risk, that they were being persecuted, that they faced annihilation. Hitler actually believed that "world Jewry" threatened Germany, and that his bloody enterprise was a means of self-defense against the Jews. We know all too well that al-Qaeda's people universally regard the Jews and Christians as plotting to wipe out Islam. And the Christo-fascist types now in control of the United States believe that they're the victims of non-Christians. Rush Limbaugh's brother, David, has written a book called Persecution, whose thesis is that Christians are a persecuted minority in the United States. There's a picture of a lion on the cover. It's insane.

BuzzFlash: People who are oppressed don't have entire television networks at their disposal.

Mark Crispin Miller: They have as much freedom as they deserve, and they claim a number of "freedoms" that they shouldn't have, according to the Constitution.

BuzzFlash: You're the astute observer of George W. Bush's rhetoric and lack thereof. Explain the significance, if you will, of Bush's statements around probably one of the most damaging issues, the Iraq prison abuse scandal. What is your analysis of how he handled this utter tragedy and embarrassment to the country?

Mark Crispin Miller: He's responded to it as he always does to revelations that discredit him or threaten to discredit him. He's denied it, tried to minimize it, blamed others for it. He can speak clearly on the issue only if he sticks to the "few bad apples" talking point. I'm struck also by the fact that Bush cannot pronounce the prison's name. He can't say "Abu Ghraib," but keeps coming up with strange new variations. He has such trouble saying it because he doesn't want the story to be known -- perhaps not even to himself, although he obviously signed off on the torture plans.

Bush feels no empathy. There's no evidence that he can empathize with anyone. There is only evidence that he's incapable of empathy, because whenever he tries to make an unscripted empathetic statement, his language melts into amusing gaffes. In place of empathy, he expresses what he regards as righteous wrath, indignation, disgust, nausea at the gruesomeness and sadism of the enemy's acts. As far as I can remember, he's outdone every modern president in the explicitness of his gruesome and inflammatory charges. He goes on in such gory detail with, let's face it, a certain relish. This is a guy who, as a lad, blew up frogs for sport. This is a guy who set a record for executing people in Texas. This is the guy who made fun of Karla Faye Tucker when she was facing execution. The guy's a sociopath.

So he needs some way to broadcast the impression that he's full of kindness. This is why he needs the formulas of evangelical oratory: to convince us, and perhaps himself, that he's "compassionate." He's mastered that idiom. I submit to you that it's both a psychological and a political necessity that he have that mode of discourse so that he can mask his actual cruelty, the peculiar hardness of his heart.

BuzzFlash: Let's point out one, which was that Bush wouldn't -- couldn't -- apologize to Arab leaders. But that his press secretary, Scott McClellan, did say the United States is deeply sorry, deeply regretful. Explain this dynamic. Is it only to communicate this appearance of strong leadership that I never say I'm sorry?

Mark Crispin Miller: Well, that would be the sort of rational explanation that we often hear: that this White House is simply wedded to the tactic of toughing it out, and that there's a rational aim behind it -- i.e., not to let them ever see you sweat. But Bush's inability to apologize is not only a tactic, but a symptom, too. He can't express contrition or remorse, or do self-criticism. His ego is so fragile that the prospect of real introspection is extremely threatening to him.

We all remember Bush's gaffe in Tennessee, when he tried, and failed, to get through the old Quaker axiom, "Fool me once, shame on you. Feel me twice, shame on me." This was a year after 9/11, so enough time had passed for the media to get up off its knees a little bit, and they played that flub for major laughs. William Schneider made fun of it. Andrea Mitchell made fun of it. And it was on "The Daily Show." But that moment was far more revealing than such comedy suggests. Bush failed to utter that old saw successfully not because he's half-retarded, but because he could no more say "shame on me" than he could improvise a sonnet. And if you watch the footage carefully, you can see it. Just when he realizes what remorseful words he's going to have to utter next, he gets that deer-in-the-headlights look in his eyes, and quickly quotes The Who instead. It's quite a moment. We open the show with it.

"Shame on me" from Bush's lips? Never in a million years. This is a guy who can do no wrong. This is a guy who has God on his side. This is a guy who is entitled to be president. This is a guy who is the president only of those good Americans who "share his values." This is a guy whose adversaries are bad people -- U.S. Democrats and foreign Islamists alike. Bush has a grandiose sense of utter rectitude that's much more frightening than, say, the chicanery of Nixon, who was, of course, crazy, too. But whereas Nixon was a lone nut stuck in the White House, who had some rational people there to keep an eye on him, this president is no anomaly within the movement that he serves. He and all his men are utterly like-minded. They are one in their belief.

BuzzFlash: The Bush campaign are masters of using the media to manipulate people. One of the ways they've been able to turn the tables on the disaster -- the failure of the Iraq war and the continued occupation -- is to trot out this hack leadership rhetoric that "we will stay the course." What's interesting, looking at it from your thesis, for many people, it does work. They would rather have a president be certain, even if he's wrong or misguided.

Mark Crispin Miller: Right. The picture of certainty is what Bush basically has to offer his supporters. He's an icon of cowboy self-assurance. It isn't based on any actual certainty in his own mind -- he flip-flops constantly -- so much as it's based on his telling us, repeatedly, how certain he is.

I've never heard a president tell us so often that he's resolved and focused and determined. He's like a piece of propaganda that explains itself. "This is what I am -- I'm a man who says what he thinks and thinks what he says and says what he knows and knows what he thinks," etc. That pose is a gigantic lie. Bush doesn't know what he's doing. He's completely at sea and yet consistently advertises himself as an absolute rock of sureness. Does Bush believe in his own posture? Yes and no, would be my guess. Those who excel at such disorienting propaganda are simultaneously cynical manipulators and passionate believers.

This is what Orwell meant when he referred to "doublethink" in 1984. The people who are the most effective spokesmen for the cause are not men behind the curtain who sit back and calmly push our buttons. Many eminent propagandists have wanted us to buy that rationalist notion: Goebbels, for example, or, in this country, Edward Bernays, "the Father of Public Relations." They promote themselves as utterly above the fray, expertly playing people's hearts and minds with a technician's coolness. But it's a myth. In fact, the most successful, most effective war-propagandists -- the spreaders of anti-Semitism, anti-communism, anti-Islam, you name it -- are all both cynical and credulous at once.

There must be three or four books out about Bush's lies. And they're good books. But Bush has not been lying quite as often as some critics think. For one thing, he believed completely, and still believes, in the threat posed by Saddam Hussein to George W. Bush. This gets us into something that's crucial both to my book and to the show, and that is the weird prevalence of projectivity throughout this rightist movement. Projectors are those people who consistently attack others for the things they hate most in themselves. When Bush talks about Saddam Hussein, he's talking about himself. "This is a man who has defied the world." "This is a man who does not know the truth." "This is a man who has made the United Nations look foolish." In the next breath after that last one, he himself spoke mockingly of the UN, and got a big laugh with it.

Bush lives in a world of almost perfect solipsism. There are Bush-like people in the world, and they're the good ones. And there are not-Bush-like people in the world, and they're the bad ones. The bad ones are the ones who do exactly what he's doing himself, or who have done what Bush plans to do. The good ones, on the other hand, are those like Putin -- whom Bush seems to see as a reflection of himself. Throughout the summer of 2001, Bush kept praising Putin for his Bush-like qualities: "He's a man who loves his wife the way I love my wife." "He's a man who loves his daughters the way I love my daughters." "He is a physical fitness person." It was uncanny.

This is ultimately not about an individual psychology. I don't really care about Bush as a case history. It's of no interest to me, and we don't have to wait for a cure to kick in. What's significant about Bush's projectivity is that it perfectly expresses or reflects the larger projectivity of the Christo-fascist movement. All crusading movements are paranoid. Movements to rid the world of evil are always paranoid because they're fundamentally driven by the crusaders' inner evil-doers. You can kill every evil-doer in the world. You can kill everybody. But you can never kill enough of them if it's the evil-doer in yourself who most disturbs you.

BuzzFlash: I've always thought that the language of evil pretty much dictates what your action is. The calling of every human to erase and conquer evil in its entirety -- it's this never-ending fight, really.

Mark Crispin Miller: Hitler showed us where you end up: suicide. Your actions will become increasingly self-destructive, because it's ultimately something in yourself you're after. This converges, chillingly, with the eschatology of the Christian right. They don't think that apocalypse is anything to fear. "Bring it on!" appears to be their attitude. "Let's get this over with, and go to glory!" It's all mixed up with economic motives and hatred of environmental measures and so on. But there is a profound attraction to apocalypse here that suits the suicidal tendencies of these projective types.

In the show, I talk about the rogues gallery of anti-Clinton propagandists of the Nineties -- all of them ranting on obsessively about Slick Willy. Not on the basis of any of Clinton's policies; in fact, his policies were often pleasing to Congressional Republicans. It was always a personal attack, based on his alleged sexual immorality, his monstrous sexual appetite. Well, that myth was started in 1989 by Lee Atwater, Bush the Elder's top propagandist -- and a big-time sex addict, as we learn from The Hunting of the President. He was a compulsive womanizer, and the more anonymous the sex the better -- and it was he who made an issue out of Clinton's "skirt problem."

You look at William Bennett. William Bennett, moralizer-in-chief of the propaganda forces of the Republican right, writes The Death of Outrage and The Book of Virtues and all these other tomes. Not only does it turn out that he's dropping millions in Las Vegas, but he's also got a dominatrix there. I've been exchanging emails with her. The double standard takes your breath away. Rush Limbaugh often would refer to Clinton as "our pot-smoking President," called repeatedly for the incarceration of all drug users, black and white. And all this time, the guy is an enormous pill-head.

Now the word that comes to mind here when we talk about such people is "hypocrisy." But that is not exactly right. A mere hypocrite does not require an object of his endless moralizing fury. You can be hypocritical without needing somebody to hate. All you need to do is just go out into the world, act all pious and devout and kind to animals, and then go home and hump your Doberman. These people are not hypocrites, exactly, but projectors. They feel compelled to tear relentlessly into some Other, as if they might somehow flush out their inner toxins by attacking someone else for having them within.

This isn't just about Limbaugh and Bennett. The whole pack of them are violently projective -- gay homophobes, Jewish Nazis, racists secretly afraid they might be black. Matt Drudge, Michael Savage, Dr. Laura, John Fund, Andrew Sullivan -- the list goes on and on.

BuzzFlash: You're a writer and thinker who really stimulates us here at BuzzFlash, because your work goes beyond looking at policies -- whether they work or not -- and looks at the motivation behind them. There's this human component that most writers don't address. You have very effectively channeled this in the form of your one-man show. You talk about enduring human struggles as they relate to this president, this war, our country right now. What's that like, to do a one-man show based on explaining the politics of our time?

Mark Crispin Miller: Well, I'll tell you how it evolved. The Bush Dyslexicon came out in June of 2001. And from Sept. 11 on, of course, it became impossible for me to talk about the book in public. Understandable, certainly.

For months I got no media; I couldn't even get any bookstore readings in New York, or anywhere. It was frustrating, because we all kept hearing it asserted that 9/11 had transformed Bush heroically into another person, comparable to FDR and Winston Churchill. And as far as I could see, all that 9/11 really did was reconfirm that Bush is who he is: a man who cannot mourn, but has no trouble promising revenge and urging war.

So I decided that I'd like to do a show, onstage. If I could have that as a forum I could talk out loud again, and, in the process, also do something that you can't do when you're just writing, and that's engage in public conversation. So, thanks to my wife, who introduced me to Antonio Soddu, a very good producer, we started a few years ago. We rented the Cherry Lane Theatre. At first the show was mostly me just holding forth, with some visuals thrown in. Then we teamed up with a great director, Gregory Keller, who directs operas at the Met. We also took on a brilliant young magician/actor named Steve Cuiffo. So the show took on a new coherence, a dramatic structure, and the New York Theater Workshop saw some promise in it, and they picked it up. We're just finishing a month-long run, and will resume during the Republican convention, and then do it weekly up until Election Day (assuming we get to have one).

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

[BuzzFlash Note: Part 2 of this interview will appear at a later date.]

BuzzFlash Interviews

July 23, 2004		INTERVIEW ARCHIVES
Talking with Mark Crispin Miller, Author of Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney's New World Order A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW Mark Crispin Miller is sort of a Renaissance man of the progressive movement. You can read his books, see his one man show in New York, listen to him as a political/media commentator or attend one of his classes in culture and communication at NYU. Miller is an occasional contributor to BuzzFlash who specializes in nailing down the media context of the current political scene, particularly as it relates to the propaganda/media machine orchestrated by the Bush cartel. A couple years back, we featured his seminal analysis, The Bush Dyslexicon, a guide to interpreting what the squatter in the White House means by analyzing his dysfunctional phrasing. In August, Miller will be back with a follow-up tome, Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney's New World Order (which, yes, we will be offering as a BuzzFlash premium). You can bet it rakes the media and Bush over the coals. Miller is enlightened, witty and invariably on-target in his trenchant analysis of the Orwellian doublespeak Bush cartel reign. You might say that it runs in the family. His brother Bruce is the editor of Take Them at Their Words: Shocking, Amusing and Baffling Quotations from the GOP and Their Friends, 1994-2004. http://www.buzzflash.com/premiums/takethem.html Here is the first part of our most recent interview with Mark Crispin Miller. * * * BuzzFlash: Tell us about your new book, Cruel and Unusual: Bush/Cheney's New World Order. Mark Crispin Miller: I wrote Cruel and Unusual to make the case that Bush & Co. is fundamentally un-American -- an order wholly alien to the spirit of our founding documents. Certainly the regime represents some dark old strains in U.S. history: nativism, white supremacism, theocratic tyranny. But as far as our mainstream political traditions are concerned, Bush & Co. have simply junked them. They've hijacked the U.S. ship of state, and have it on a suicidal course. I argue that Bush & Co. is the anti-Jefferson. This regime is not conservative, but represents a radical subversive movement -- one now largely in control of all three branches of the government, and also dominant throughout the press. What ultimately drives them is irrational. Sure, they're in it for the money and the oil; but that's not all that's going on here. They're neo-Calvinists, quite clearly working toward the imposition of theocracy on the United States, and then on the whole world. (Although mostly atheists and Jews, the Straussian types around Rumsfeld and Cheney are fine with that agenda, as they believe that theocratic government is best, because it makes the populace compliant.) BuzzFlash: What's unique about the Bush Administration is how overt its complete lack of humility is for institutions such as the United Nations and for the leaders of other countries. Mark Crispin Miller: I agree. That's why Bush, in the fall of 2002, had such a hard time uttering that Quaker axiom, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." As ever, his tongue went AWOL not because the man's an imbecile, but because he just can't make his mouth say things that are completely foreign to his nature. One of those things is, of course, contrition. Bush could just as easily say "Shame on me" as he could dance Swan Lake. The far right's shamelessness, I believe, marks a certain turning-point in American politics. Throughout the history of our politics, of course, there's always been a streak of lunacy, there have always been explosive types, and public vitriol per se is nothing new. But what we've been experiencing since the Clinton era represents a whole new ball-game. Imagine a game where one team wants not just to win, but to destroy the other side, which they regard as evil. They use their bats as clubs, they throw their fastballs at the batters' heads, they tamper with the scoreboard, wreck the field and take over the stadium. They need to feel that kind of animus -- which is really all that they're about. And what makes them shameless is their firm belief that God approves of everything they do. What we're confronting now, in other words, is something wilder, something much harder to deal with, than mere political corruption -- although this bunch is so corrupt that it defies description. I think that there is madness at the top of this enterprise -- not just in the Oval Office, as in Nixon's case, but all throughout the upper tier of Bush & Co.'s managers. Whether it's Bush melting down onstage or, say, Karl Rove behind the curtain, there's a fanatical unreason -- an unnatural unanimity of viewpoints -- that you finally cannot argue with, and that you can't defeat in the traditional way because they will do anything to win. The same mind-set is evident at the grass roots. Certain millions of our fellow-citizens enjoy Bush's short temper, his intransigence, his swaggering, because it makes them feel vicariously powerful. There's certainly no other reason to explain why any have-nots would support this administration, which has been screwing them royally from the get-go. This may sound odd, but I wish that Bush and Cheney were all about the bottom line, and nothing else. Such an impetus would at least be rational. Of course, there is a certain craziness in trying to burn up every last drop of oil in the whole world, but there is a nationalistic logic to it. Everybody needs power, and we might as well be the ones to control the world's power supply. Such partial explanations sell Bush/Cheney short: I think there's an important pathological dimension to this moment that most of this regime's detractors overlook by imputing to Team Bush a certain kind of craftiness, deliberateness, detachment that just isn't there. BuzzFlash: You're saying that philosophically and culturally, they really see themselves as remaking the world. There's obviously an enormous amount of information on how Bush believes that it's his destiny to be a Christian leader in a modern holy war. The references are throughout all of his statements and rhetoric. Mark Crispin Miller: It's right out in the open. BuzzFlash: If it were a specific policy, we could at least say, well, although it may seem crazy to us, it's not madness. Whereas the whole idea of going to war to bring democracy to an entire other region goes beyond a specific policy. It's really a philosophical mindset. Mark Crispin Miller: I'd say it's a pathological mindset. I wouldn't dignify it by calling it philosophical. And I wouldn't prettify it by calling it ideological. It's perfectly natural for reasonable people to assume that their relentless adversary is likewise rational. We tend to think that if we could just, say, wake Dick Cheney up at 4 a.m., before he had a chance to get his talking points together, he would 'fess up. But Cheney isn't making anything up. He appears to believe in every word he says, against all evidence. There's a book by Roger Griffin, a political scientist, called The Nature of Fascism, and in it he proposes as one of the essential criteria of a fascism is the desire to renew the world -- "change the culture," as Bush puts it -- and do it through the party. You cleanse the world of all its old defects and its bad inhabitants and so on. Bush just told the Pope he wants to change the culture. It's tempting to think that this is part of his boilerplate. But he's been talking about changing the culture since he ran for president in 2000. What's most significant here, and yet gets almost zero coverage in our media, is the fact that Bush is very closely tied to the Christian Reconstructionist movement. The links between this White House and that movement are many and tight. Marvin Olasky -- a former Maoist who is now a Reconstructionist -- coined the phrase "compassionate conservatism," and was hired by the Bush campaign in 2000 to serve as their top consultant on welfare. Olasky's entire career has been financed by Howard Ahmanson, the California multimillionaire who has said publicly that his life's goal is "to integrate Biblical law into all our lives." Ahmanson funded the far-right seizure of the California legislature back in '94, and is also the main force behind the schism in the Episcopalian church. Also, he appears to be the most important advocate of the so-called "intelligent design" movement, which is creationism. Ahmanson backed Bush in 2000 -- with exactly how much money we don't know -- and is supporting him again. Christian Reconstructionism is a maverick theological movement. It's far more activist and radical than most Christian Evangelism is. For the most part, Christian Evangelicals generally have chosen to deplore this world in their expectation of Jesus' return, whereupon this world will be improved. The reconstructionists believe that it is the obligation of every Christian to do whatever he or she can do to make this Christian republic with an eye toward making the other nations of the world Christian republics. This means replacing the Constitution with the Pentateuch -- the first five books of the Old Testament. It is an anti-pluralist movement, which would entail the disenfranchisement all non-Christians, and the establishment of a common law based on Leviticus. If you want a sense of what the theocrats are after, read that book, and also read The Handmaid's Tale. Although the reconstructionists don't believe in violent tactics to get their way, and many of the Islamists obviously do, the world envisioned by the former seems to be more punitive that the global caliphate imagined by al Qaeda. And in fact we are now dealing with an adversary whose world-view is opposed to ours completely. They are nostalgic for the Middle Ages, or at least for the colonial theocracies of the 17th and early 18th centuries. They value faith over reason. So those who have dragged this nation into war against Islamist terror think exactly like Islamist terrorists. Whatever creeds they think they follow, what really drives both groups is paranoia. Each side wants to replace the other, either through annihilation or conversion. Certainly the Busheviks are fired up with old Crusaders' zeal. BuzzFlash: Which is exemplified by the fact that -- how many missionaries are in Iraq? Mark Crispin Miller: Exactly. BuzzFlash: -- and that's a public relations disaster. It's an image problem. Mark Crispin Miller: Well, if we start with that war, you're absolutely right. The American people are unaware of the extent to which Iraq has been overrun by Christian missionaries, primarily Southern Baptists. The International Mission Board has thousands of Americans operating in Iraq, with most of them, it seems, intent primarily on saving souls -- converting Muslims. They bring material inducements with them. They have clean water, blankets, food. They're basically trying to barter an enlargement of the world's Christian community -- which is a dangerous provocation, because Muslims see such apostasy as a capital offense. So some of these missionaries, as you may know, have been assassinated. Once we put it all together, we can see quite clearly that "George sees this as a religious war," as reported by a close relation of the president's in The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty, by Peter and Rochelle Schweizer. So this is not just a geo-political game, or just a bid to hog the global oil supply. It is fundamentally a religious war. The guy who's now in charge of counter-terrorism efforts in the theater of war is William "Jerry" Boykin, who used to go to fundamentalist churches in his full dress uniform and talk about the enemy being a guy named Satan, and claim that Bush was chosen by the Lord to be our president. The guy is a fanatic. And far from urging him to curb his zealous outbursts, his bosses at the Pentagon promoted him after that controversy. Now he is one of the most influential people giving orders in Iraq and thereabouts. You may also recall that our troops were given pamphlets urging them to pray for Bush, and to pray that he stand tough against all criticism. Now all of this puts Bush on the same level with America's Islamist enemies. It's also what makes Bush & Co. so weirdly reminiscent of past totalitarian movements. All the major war-drives in modern history -- in Germany, in the Soviet Union, and in the Middle East -- have been impelled by people who believed that they were at risk, that they were being persecuted, that they faced annihilation. Hitler actually believed that "world Jewry" threatened Germany, and that his bloody enterprise was a means of self-defense against the Jews. We know all too well that al-Qaeda's people universally regard the Jews and Christians as plotting to wipe out Islam. And the Christo-fascist types now in control of the United States believe that they're the victims of non-Christians. Rush Limbaugh's brother, David, has written a book called Persecution, whose thesis is that Christians are a persecuted minority in the United States. There's a picture of a lion on the cover. It's insane. BuzzFlash: People who are oppressed don't have entire television networks at their disposal. Mark Crispin Miller: They have as much freedom as they deserve, and they claim a number of "freedoms" that they shouldn't have, according to the Constitution. BuzzFlash: You're the astute observer of George W. Bush's rhetoric and lack thereof. Explain the significance, if you will, of Bush's statements around probably one of the most damaging issues, the Iraq prison abuse scandal. What is your analysis of how he handled this utter tragedy and embarrassment to the country? Mark Crispin Miller: He's responded to it as he always does to revelations that discredit him or threaten to discredit him. He's denied it, tried to minimize it, blamed others for it. He can speak clearly on the issue only if he sticks to the "few bad apples" talking point. I'm struck also by the fact that Bush cannot pronounce the prison's name. He can't say "Abu Ghraib," but keeps coming up with strange new variations. He has such trouble saying it because he doesn't want the story to be known -- perhaps not even to himself, although he obviously signed off on the torture plans. Bush feels no empathy. There's no evidence that he can empathize with anyone. There is only evidence that he's incapable of empathy, because whenever he tries to make an unscripted empathetic statement, his language melts into amusing gaffes. In place of empathy, he expresses what he regards as righteous wrath, indignation, disgust, nausea at the gruesomeness and sadism of the enemy's acts. As far as I can remember, he's outdone every modern president in the explicitness of his gruesome and inflammatory charges. He goes on in such gory detail with, let's face it, a certain relish. This is a guy who, as a lad, blew up frogs for sport. This is a guy who set a record for executing people in Texas. This is the guy who made fun of Karla Faye Tucker when she was facing execution. The guy's a sociopath. So he needs some way to broadcast the impression that he's full of kindness. This is why he needs the formulas of evangelical oratory: to convince us, and perhaps himself, that he's "compassionate." He's mastered that idiom. I submit to you that it's both a psychological and a political necessity that he have that mode of discourse so that he can mask his actual cruelty, the peculiar hardness of his heart. BuzzFlash: Let's point out one, which was that Bush wouldn't -- couldn't -- apologize to Arab leaders. But that his press secretary, Scott McClellan, did say the United States is deeply sorry, deeply regretful. Explain this dynamic. Is it only to communicate this appearance of strong leadership that I never say I'm sorry? Mark Crispin Miller: Well, that would be the sort of rational explanation that we often hear: that this White House is simply wedded to the tactic of toughing it out, and that there's a rational aim behind it -- i.e., not to let them ever see you sweat. But Bush's inability to apologize is not only a tactic, but a symptom, too. He can't express contrition or remorse, or do self-criticism. His ego is so fragile that the prospect of real introspection is extremely threatening to him. We all remember Bush's gaffe in Tennessee, when he tried, and failed, to get through the old Quaker axiom, "Fool me once, shame on you. Feel me twice, shame on me." This was a year after 9/11, so enough time had passed for the media to get up off its knees a little bit, and they played that flub for major laughs. William Schneider made fun of it. Andrea Mitchell made fun of it. And it was on "The Daily Show." But that moment was far more revealing than such comedy suggests. Bush failed to utter that old saw successfully not because he's half-retarded, but because he could no more say "shame on me" than he could improvise a sonnet. And if you watch the footage carefully, you can see it. Just when he realizes what remorseful words he's going to have to utter next, he gets that deer-in-the-headlights look in his eyes, and quickly quotes The Who instead. It's quite a moment. We open the show with it. "Shame on me" from Bush's lips? Never in a million years. This is a guy who can do no wrong. This is a guy who has God on his side. This is a guy who is entitled to be president. This is a guy who is the president only of those good Americans who "share his values." This is a guy whose adversaries are bad people -- U.S. Democrats and foreign Islamists alike. Bush has a grandiose sense of utter rectitude that's much more frightening than, say, the chicanery of Nixon, who was, of course, crazy, too. But whereas Nixon was a lone nut stuck in the White House, who had some rational people there to keep an eye on him, this president is no anomaly within the movement that he serves. He and all his men are utterly like-minded. They are one in their belief. BuzzFlash: The Bush campaign are masters of using the media to manipulate people. One of the ways they've been able to turn the tables on the disaster -- the failure of the Iraq war and the continued occupation -- is to trot out this hack leadership rhetoric that "we will stay the course." What's interesting, looking at it from your thesis, for many people, it does work. They would rather have a president be certain, even if he's wrong or misguided. Mark Crispin Miller: Right. The picture of certainty is what Bush basically has to offer his supporters. He's an icon of cowboy self-assurance. It isn't based on any actual certainty in his own mind -- he flip-flops constantly -- so much as it's based on his telling us, repeatedly, how certain he is. I've never heard a president tell us so often that he's resolved and focused and determined. He's like a piece of propaganda that explains itself. "This is what I am -- I'm a man who says what he thinks and thinks what he says and says what he knows and knows what he thinks," etc. That pose is a gigantic lie. Bush doesn't know what he's doing. He's completely at sea and yet consistently advertises himself as an absolute rock of sureness. Does Bush believe in his own posture? Yes and no, would be my guess. Those who excel at such disorienting propaganda are simultaneously cynical manipulators and passionate believers. This is what Orwell meant when he referred to "doublethink" in 1984. The people who are the most effective spokesmen for the cause are not men behind the curtain who sit back and calmly push our buttons. Many eminent propagandists have wanted us to buy that rationalist notion: Goebbels, for example, or, in this country, Edward Bernays, "the Father of Public Relations." They promote themselves as utterly above the fray, expertly playing people's hearts and minds with a technician's coolness. But it's a myth. In fact, the most successful, most effective war-propagandists -- the spreaders of anti-Semitism, anti-communism, anti-Islam, you name it -- are all both cynical and credulous at once. There must be three or four books out about Bush's lies. And they're good books. But Bush has not been lying quite as often as some critics think. For one thing, he believed completely, and still believes, in the threat posed by Saddam Hussein to George W. Bush. This gets us into something that's crucial both to my book and to the show, and that is the weird prevalence of projectivity throughout this rightist movement. Projectors are those people who consistently attack others for the things they hate most in themselves. When Bush talks about Saddam Hussein, he's talking about himself. "This is a man who has defied the world." "This is a man who does not know the truth." "This is a man who has made the United Nations look foolish." In the next breath after that last one, he himself spoke mockingly of the UN, and got a big laugh with it. Bush lives in a world of almost perfect solipsism. There are Bush-like people in the world, and they're the good ones. And there are not-Bush-like people in the world, and they're the bad ones. The bad ones are the ones who do exactly what he's doing himself, or who have done what Bush plans to do. The good ones, on the other hand, are those like Putin -- whom Bush seems to see as a reflection of himself. Throughout the summer of 2001, Bush kept praising Putin for his Bush-like qualities: "He's a man who loves his wife the way I love my wife." "He's a man who loves his daughters the way I love my daughters." "He is a physical fitness person." It was uncanny. This is ultimately not about an individual psychology. I don't really care about Bush as a case history. It's of no interest to me, and we don't have to wait for a cure to kick in. What's significant about Bush's projectivity is that it perfectly expresses or reflects the larger projectivity of the Christo-fascist movement. All crusading movements are paranoid. Movements to rid the world of evil are always paranoid because they're fundamentally driven by the crusaders' inner evil-doers. You can kill every evil-doer in the world. You can kill everybody. But you can never kill enough of them if it's the evil-doer in yourself who most disturbs you. BuzzFlash: I've always thought that the language of evil pretty much dictates what your action is. The calling of every human to erase and conquer evil in its entirety -- it's this never-ending fight, really. Mark Crispin Miller: Hitler showed us where you end up: suicide. Your actions will become increasingly self-destructive, because it's ultimately something in yourself you're after. This converges, chillingly, with the eschatology of the Christian right. They don't think that apocalypse is anything to fear. "Bring it on!" appears to be their attitude. "Let's get this over with, and go to glory!" It's all mixed up with economic motives and hatred of environmental measures and so on. But there is a profound attraction to apocalypse here that suits the suicidal tendencies of these projective types. In the show, I talk about the rogues gallery of anti-Clinton propagandists of the Nineties -- all of them ranting on obsessively about Slick Willy. Not on the basis of any of Clinton's policies; in fact, his policies were often pleasing to Congressional Republicans. It was always a personal attack, based on his alleged sexual immorality, his monstrous sexual appetite. Well, that myth was started in 1989 by Lee Atwater, Bush the Elder's top propagandist -- and a big-time sex addict, as we learn from The Hunting of the President. He was a compulsive womanizer, and the more anonymous the sex the better -- and it was he who made an issue out of Clinton's "skirt problem." You look at William Bennett. William Bennett, moralizer-in-chief of the propaganda forces of the Republican right, writes The Death of Outrage and The Book of Virtues and all these other tomes. Not only does it turn out that he's dropping millions in Las Vegas, but he's also got a dominatrix there. I've been exchanging emails with her. The double standard takes your breath away. Rush Limbaugh often would refer to Clinton as "our pot-smoking President," called repeatedly for the incarceration of all drug users, black and white. And all this time, the guy is an enormous pill-head. Now the word that comes to mind here when we talk about such people is "hypocrisy." But that is not exactly right. A mere hypocrite does not require an object of his endless moralizing fury. You can be hypocritical without needing somebody to hate. All you need to do is just go out into the world, act all pious and devout and kind to animals, and then go home and hump your Doberman. These people are not hypocrites, exactly, but projectors. They feel compelled to tear relentlessly into some Other, as if they might somehow flush out their inner toxins by attacking someone else for having them within. This isn't just about Limbaugh and Bennett. The whole pack of them are violently projective -- gay homophobes, Jewish Nazis, racists secretly afraid they might be black. Matt Drudge, Michael Savage, Dr. Laura, John Fund, Andrew Sullivan -- the list goes on and on. BuzzFlash: You're a writer and thinker who really stimulates us here at BuzzFlash, because your work goes beyond looking at policies -- whether they work or not -- and looks at the motivation behind them. There's this human component that most writers don't address. You have very effectively channeled this in the form of your one-man show. You talk about enduring human struggles as they relate to this president, this war, our country right now. What's that like, to do a one-man show based on explaining the politics of our time? Mark Crispin Miller: Well, I'll tell you how it evolved. The Bush Dyslexicon came out in June of 2001. And from Sept. 11 on, of course, it became impossible for me to talk about the book in public. Understandable, certainly. For months I got no media; I couldn't even get any bookstore readings in New York, or anywhere. It was frustrating, because we all kept hearing it asserted that 9/11 had transformed Bush heroically into another person, comparable to FDR and Winston Churchill. And as far as I could see, all that 9/11 really did was reconfirm that Bush is who he is: a man who cannot mourn, but has no trouble promising revenge and urging war. So I decided that I'd like to do a show, onstage. If I could have that as a forum I could talk out loud again, and, in the process, also do something that you can't do when you're just writing, and that's engage in public conversation. So, thanks to my wife, who introduced me to Antonio Soddu, a very good producer, we started a few years ago. We rented the Cherry Lane Theatre. At first the show was mostly me just holding forth, with some visuals thrown in. Then we teamed up with a great director, Gregory Keller, who directs operas at the Met. We also took on a brilliant young magician/actor named Steve Cuiffo. So the show took on a new coherence, a dramatic structure, and the New York Theater Workshop saw some promise in it, and they picked it up. We're just finishing a month-long run, and will resume during the Republican convention, and then do it weekly up until Election Day (assuming we get to have one). A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW [BuzzFlash Note: Part 2 of this interview will appear at a later date.]
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