Understanding , Blaming and the Mysterious Power of Blind Spots
President Bush had one of his rare press conferences on Monday, March 21st and during it, something very interesting happened. Veteran journalist Helen Thomas asked the President something many Americans have been hungering to know the answer to: "Why did you really want to go to war? . . . What was your real reason?" You could hear the gasps in the room from the audaciousness of her question. What was even more audacious, for those willing to hear, is that he may have actually answered her question--to the best of his ability.
For the past three years people on the left have been screaming about how President Bush lied and led us into war. You can still see the bumber stickers everywhere about how he lied to us. There is a kind of magical thinking in the public discourse that if enough people criticize the man harshly enough then that somehow is going to get him to suddenly be honest and reveal the real reason he led us into war. It presupposes that there is a conscious lie and that he knows that he lied and with enough public pressure he will fess up, admit the lie and come clean. Sort of like a huge version of being called to the principal's office by the American public. But he hasn't come clean and I don't think he will ever do that because he doesn't believe that he has lied, within the commonly understood meaning of the word lie. He doesn't believe that he has done anything wrong and the more he is accused of doing something wrong, the more strenuously he defends himself and argues that he was doing something right. He was defending the country for gosh sakes!
If we truly wanted to understand our president's actions in leading us into an unpopular war, and if we wanted to find a peaceful, humane and dignified way to conclude that conflict, then I believe, a whole new way of understanding our President's actions as a human being is called for. Much political hay has been made of the fact that when President Bush was first notified of the attacks on the Twin Towers he kept right on reading a story about a goat to a class of first graders. Why didn't the Secret Service pull him out of there immediately? Why didn't he race out of the room and jump into action? Why, in photographs does he have that strange glazed look in his eyes as he reads to the children? I understand, I think, what was going on with him, because I have been there myself and it is amazing to me that no one else has pointed it out. I think the President was in a state of trauma, or as one might say, he was in shock. The unthinkable had just happened, something so horrific that the mind could not take it in. And the President was not the only one in shock. Apparently the people surrounding him, his advisers and the Secret Service were in shock also. No one was thinking straight. But the trauma was worst for him because he was and is Commander in Chief. He was supposed to know what to do and he did not know what to do. He was in that numb frozen state where you are in charge and you feel like you are swimming under water and you can't act because you are traumatized. This is not to defend or criticize the man. It is simply how the brain works when trauma happens. It's happened to me during other events in my life and it happened to lots of people on 9/11. Lots of people got caught with their pants down that day, including a lot of people who had been trained how to react in emergencies. We hope that presidents will know what to do in unthinkable emergencies, that they will rise to the occasion if the horrific happens and that they will act wisely and nobly. But boy are we unforgiving if they act like a human being and freeze. Don't forget that President Bush never served in the military. If he had he might have had some training under fire which might have prepared him for an emergency like 9/11. But he wasn't and he reacted like he reacted. My hunch is that September 11, 2001 was the single worst day of his life and that he still hasn't gotten over it. And I also think that no matter how much that the left and liberals may criticize and beat up on him for being an incompetent president, he probably on some level, has never forgiven himself for not having acted more quickly and more powerfully in those minutes and hours after he first heard about the attacks. I also bet that he never told anyone about this, with the possible exception of Laura Bush.
What happens to people who carry a secret, a self-humiliation that they don't forgive themselves for, that they don't work through and let go of? It goes underground, inside the human soul and develops into a strange attractor, a phenomenon that I will call a "blind spot". A blind spot is something that we do or say or need really badly that every one else can see about us but we can't see ourselves. It's like the guy who gets a divorce and tells everyone he's "can't stand the bitch" but everyone knows he's still in love with her. Or the secretary who writes great reports, yet complains about her job all the time, blames the boss and co-workers but who is terrified to admit to herself she really wants to chuck it all and be a novelist! Blind spots! What if President Bush was completely humiliated on 9/11 and publicly embarassed that he froze and didn't do a better job in those first few hours? What if he had an image in his mind of what a good, powerful, manly leader would do after an attack such as we suffered that day? What if he swore revenge to himself: "I'll get you back, if it kills me?" Is condemning him for his reaction, human as it was, helpful?
What if, when he answered Helen Thomas's question he was telling the truth? Maybe he was absolutely right. Maybe he didn't want to go to war because wanting is a conscious choice and he didn't consciously want to take young men and women to their deaths. So no, he didn't want to go to war in Iraq. But anyone who was paying close attention in the fall of 20o2 and early 2003 could feel that President Bush and his administration needed to go to war. It was palpable. It was inexorable. We were going to war come hell or high water because something, some need was driving us to war and it didn't matter that it wasn't rational. It didn't matter that the intelligence didn't fit. It didn't matter that there were no WMD. It didn't matter that there weren't any allies to speak of to work with us. None of that mattered. When you have an unconscious need or drive, one that hasn't been worked through, then that becomes more important than anything. And unfortunately for 2319 young Americans, that meant losing their lives, and for 17,000 Americans that meant wounds that may never heal and we are not even counting here the numberless lives lost, incomparable grief and anguish amoung the Iraqi people themselves. What an incredibly sad, sad state of affairs. And of course, you don't have to buy my explanation, for it is simply that, an explanation, an attempt to understand another human being's actions.
For human beings love to go to war and we seem to be addicted to the phenomenon. During the countdown to the Iraq war I was reading Chris Hedges' superb book, "War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning." I recommend it highly. If we are ever to eradicate the use of war to solve problems on this planet we are going to have to find other ways to deal with this human tendency to have blind spots, to not want to talk about perceived weaknesses and embarassments. We are going to have to find ways to develop the habit of self-reflection. And, you will probably have deduced, that among President Bush and his associates, the habit of self-reflection does not appear to be in abundant supply. How different the world would be if our world leaders were committed to their own growth and development and routinely took responsibility for their own errors and mistakes. Our present leaders are still stuck in the paradigm of you have to be tough and strong and you have to stay the course. There is a time and place for that certainly but there is also a need for humility and sometimes for vulnerability. I wish President Bush well. I truly do. I fear for his emotional and spiritual health once he leaves office. He does have the loving support of an extraordinary life partner in his wife Laura and he does appear to have a solid faith in God. He will need to draw on those sources in the future, as I am sure he is doing already.
Questions of Inquiry:
1. If we wanted to create a climate of openness and support, that encouraged our present world leaders to take such responsbility and facilitated their growth and development, how might we do that?
2. How can we build habits of self-reflection and learn to look at and see our own blind spots?
3. Once a march toward war starts, how can we encourage our media and our leaders to slow down and look for what else is going on, to look for underlying causes and contributing factors?
For the past three years people on the left have been screaming about how President Bush lied and led us into war. You can still see the bumber stickers everywhere about how he lied to us. There is a kind of magical thinking in the public discourse that if enough people criticize the man harshly enough then that somehow is going to get him to suddenly be honest and reveal the real reason he led us into war. It presupposes that there is a conscious lie and that he knows that he lied and with enough public pressure he will fess up, admit the lie and come clean. Sort of like a huge version of being called to the principal's office by the American public. But he hasn't come clean and I don't think he will ever do that because he doesn't believe that he has lied, within the commonly understood meaning of the word lie. He doesn't believe that he has done anything wrong and the more he is accused of doing something wrong, the more strenuously he defends himself and argues that he was doing something right. He was defending the country for gosh sakes!
If we truly wanted to understand our president's actions in leading us into an unpopular war, and if we wanted to find a peaceful, humane and dignified way to conclude that conflict, then I believe, a whole new way of understanding our President's actions as a human being is called for. Much political hay has been made of the fact that when President Bush was first notified of the attacks on the Twin Towers he kept right on reading a story about a goat to a class of first graders. Why didn't the Secret Service pull him out of there immediately? Why didn't he race out of the room and jump into action? Why, in photographs does he have that strange glazed look in his eyes as he reads to the children? I understand, I think, what was going on with him, because I have been there myself and it is amazing to me that no one else has pointed it out. I think the President was in a state of trauma, or as one might say, he was in shock. The unthinkable had just happened, something so horrific that the mind could not take it in. And the President was not the only one in shock. Apparently the people surrounding him, his advisers and the Secret Service were in shock also. No one was thinking straight. But the trauma was worst for him because he was and is Commander in Chief. He was supposed to know what to do and he did not know what to do. He was in that numb frozen state where you are in charge and you feel like you are swimming under water and you can't act because you are traumatized. This is not to defend or criticize the man. It is simply how the brain works when trauma happens. It's happened to me during other events in my life and it happened to lots of people on 9/11. Lots of people got caught with their pants down that day, including a lot of people who had been trained how to react in emergencies. We hope that presidents will know what to do in unthinkable emergencies, that they will rise to the occasion if the horrific happens and that they will act wisely and nobly. But boy are we unforgiving if they act like a human being and freeze. Don't forget that President Bush never served in the military. If he had he might have had some training under fire which might have prepared him for an emergency like 9/11. But he wasn't and he reacted like he reacted. My hunch is that September 11, 2001 was the single worst day of his life and that he still hasn't gotten over it. And I also think that no matter how much that the left and liberals may criticize and beat up on him for being an incompetent president, he probably on some level, has never forgiven himself for not having acted more quickly and more powerfully in those minutes and hours after he first heard about the attacks. I also bet that he never told anyone about this, with the possible exception of Laura Bush.
What happens to people who carry a secret, a self-humiliation that they don't forgive themselves for, that they don't work through and let go of? It goes underground, inside the human soul and develops into a strange attractor, a phenomenon that I will call a "blind spot". A blind spot is something that we do or say or need really badly that every one else can see about us but we can't see ourselves. It's like the guy who gets a divorce and tells everyone he's "can't stand the bitch" but everyone knows he's still in love with her. Or the secretary who writes great reports, yet complains about her job all the time, blames the boss and co-workers but who is terrified to admit to herself she really wants to chuck it all and be a novelist! Blind spots! What if President Bush was completely humiliated on 9/11 and publicly embarassed that he froze and didn't do a better job in those first few hours? What if he had an image in his mind of what a good, powerful, manly leader would do after an attack such as we suffered that day? What if he swore revenge to himself: "I'll get you back, if it kills me?" Is condemning him for his reaction, human as it was, helpful?
What if, when he answered Helen Thomas's question he was telling the truth? Maybe he was absolutely right. Maybe he didn't want to go to war because wanting is a conscious choice and he didn't consciously want to take young men and women to their deaths. So no, he didn't want to go to war in Iraq. But anyone who was paying close attention in the fall of 20o2 and early 2003 could feel that President Bush and his administration needed to go to war. It was palpable. It was inexorable. We were going to war come hell or high water because something, some need was driving us to war and it didn't matter that it wasn't rational. It didn't matter that the intelligence didn't fit. It didn't matter that there were no WMD. It didn't matter that there weren't any allies to speak of to work with us. None of that mattered. When you have an unconscious need or drive, one that hasn't been worked through, then that becomes more important than anything. And unfortunately for 2319 young Americans, that meant losing their lives, and for 17,000 Americans that meant wounds that may never heal and we are not even counting here the numberless lives lost, incomparable grief and anguish amoung the Iraqi people themselves. What an incredibly sad, sad state of affairs. And of course, you don't have to buy my explanation, for it is simply that, an explanation, an attempt to understand another human being's actions.
For human beings love to go to war and we seem to be addicted to the phenomenon. During the countdown to the Iraq war I was reading Chris Hedges' superb book, "War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning." I recommend it highly. If we are ever to eradicate the use of war to solve problems on this planet we are going to have to find other ways to deal with this human tendency to have blind spots, to not want to talk about perceived weaknesses and embarassments. We are going to have to find ways to develop the habit of self-reflection. And, you will probably have deduced, that among President Bush and his associates, the habit of self-reflection does not appear to be in abundant supply. How different the world would be if our world leaders were committed to their own growth and development and routinely took responsibility for their own errors and mistakes. Our present leaders are still stuck in the paradigm of you have to be tough and strong and you have to stay the course. There is a time and place for that certainly but there is also a need for humility and sometimes for vulnerability. I wish President Bush well. I truly do. I fear for his emotional and spiritual health once he leaves office. He does have the loving support of an extraordinary life partner in his wife Laura and he does appear to have a solid faith in God. He will need to draw on those sources in the future, as I am sure he is doing already.
Questions of Inquiry:
1. If we wanted to create a climate of openness and support, that encouraged our present world leaders to take such responsbility and facilitated their growth and development, how might we do that?
2. How can we build habits of self-reflection and learn to look at and see our own blind spots?
3. Once a march toward war starts, how can we encourage our media and our leaders to slow down and look for what else is going on, to look for underlying causes and contributing factors?
posted by Joy at 3:30 PM
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