Reply #3: Politics is all about making and un-making myths. Oedipus Bush [View All]

[leveymg]

Another Classical Tragedy: Oedipus Bush
http://www.democrats.com/node/1788

Submitted by leveymg on December 7, 2004 - 10:56am.
OEDIPUS BUSH: The Myth of the Idiot King and the Secret Rites of American Self-Destruction

The Cast:

Oedipus Tyrannus – Deformed outsider becomes Tyrant King. West Texas everyman, slow-talker, cedar cutting rancher in the Ronald Reagan mold. Half-remembered past as ne’re-do-well first-born scion of an East Coast family of Wall Street financiers with powerful Nazi sympathies and clients. After the Fourth Reich fell, the family of Hitler’s Bankers found vast new fortunes as Republican politicians and intelligence community chiefs. During the Cold War, all was forgotten and forgiven among the rich and powerful in America.

Oedipus, The One Who Destroys the Temple of Democracy. At first dismissed as the least gifted of the dynastic clan of the Fascist Fellow Travelers, Oedipus goes on to fulfill his fated role as the avenging slayer of Demos.

Oedipus, The Unlikely Hero. Son of a powerful former Director of Central Intelligence, was raised to fulfill a dynastic destiny in the mold of an All-American hero. The chosen heroic archetype: The Lone Ranger; in reality, Oedipus struggled with limited intellectual gifts and even more restricted moral sense. Started and ended at the bottom of his class at Andover, Yale and Harvard. Too challenged to be accepted by any Ivy League law school, was instead offered a dunce’s seat at Business School. Wandered without achieving any satisfying goals as an early adult, a recovering alcoholic, washed out pilot, failed oilman turned born-again Christian. An unlikely hero. But, as Hannah Arendt observed, true evil is truly banal and most war criminals are obedient bores.

Oedipus Saved. Granted numerous favours by the Gods, he is saved from financial disasters and imprisonment. Eventually, guided out of the wilderness by friends of the Old King, welcomed back to the Court of Secrets after a period of aimless wandering, numerous arrests, insider stock-trading, stuporific drinking and cocaine addiction.

Oedipus Reborn. Reborn as heir apparent to the piratical wing of the Right-wing foreign policy establishment. A perfect innocent.

Oedipus the Gullible. Incoherent mouthpiece for Dark Prince Rove, Crusader Cheney, and a foreign cabal with designs on the Kingdom.

Oedipus' political persona: heroic rise of defective inferior to leadership – now familiar Republican Presidential role based on an ancient script by Sophocles as first performed on the American stage by Richard Nixon.

Hidden past – son of the King of Secrets .

Telltale deformity – stumbles over his own words , utterly transparent and contemptuous of others ; mildly dyslexic or brain-damaged .

Regicide – Secret fear and hatred of his father. Destroys CIA and Pentagon credibility in Iraq – symbolicly kills his father’s legacy of statesman-like prowess as DCI and CIC gained in Desert Storm

Incest - Marries Jocasta, his mother, election campaign as courtship, consumation of the dirty deed during the second term.

Hatred of the father and Oedipal drive to disgrace the mother GOP, brings death and dishonor to his own house and collective ruin to the kingdom.

Tragic fate of Oedipus Bush – amnesia, denial of guilt, self-incrimination, wreckless inattention, self-blinding, the suicide of his ill-begotten children, the tyrant king is doomed to wander alone in darkness for eternity.

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2004. Mark G. Levey