A DECLINE IN THE VALUES OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY?

Kitty Kelley in her unauthorized but, as usual, balanced biography of the Bush family, THE FAMILY (p.152), reveals how some old-time Republicans feel about the current crop of Bushes.

[Open quote.]
Temperamentally, the Bushes [Prescott and Dotty Bush, grandparents of W.] were in perfect harmony with the Eisenhower era of Republican grandees—moderate men with an international perspective who believed in human rights. They didn’t realize it at the time, but they were in the final evolutionary turn of the Republican Party to the right, and soon their kind of politics would be doomed. Within the next two decades the liberal Republicanism of Jacob Javits (New York), Clifford Case (New Jersey), Leverett Saltonstall (Massachusetts), John Sherman Cooper (Kentucky), George Aiken (Vermont), Thomas Kuchel (California), and Margaret Chase Smith (Maine) would be extinct. By the time the grandsons of Prescott Bush — George W. Bush and Jeb Bush—ran for public office, they would be practicing an extreme brand of Republican politics that bore no resemblance to the moderate views of their grandfather.

“I’m so glad Pres [Prescott Bush] is gone and doesn’t have to bear the shame of his right-wing grandson’s lies to the country,” said Betsy Trippe DeVecchi in July 2003. “Prescott was such an honorable man he never would’ve lied or been unprincipled the way George W. Bush has been in dragging us to war in Iraq.”

The only daughter of Juan Trippe, the founder of Pan American Airways, Betsy Trippe DeVecchi grew up in Greenwich with the Bush children in the 1940s and was a close friend of Jonathan Bush, who was called Johnny Jim. “Prescott taught me to play tennis on the Rockefellers’ indoor court,” she said. “He was a lovely man, and his wife, Dotty, was so warm and gracious. Once they drove me up to Hotchkiss to see Johnny Jim in a play... Pres sat on the board of my father’s company. They shared the same Republican politics. Both were big friends of Wendell Wilkie and Tom Dewey and, of course, President Eisenhower.”
[Close quote.]

If old-time Republicans feel that way about the current Bushes, you can imagine, then, how an old Roosevelt Democrat from that time thinks:

“For my money—and I’m a Democrat [Herman Wolf] who worked for Abe Ribicoff— Prescott Bush was a fine gentleman. In fact, he was the best of the Bushes. After him, the blood thinned as it went down the line. His son George Herbert Walker Bush wasn’t much to look up to, and then, God help us, we got George’s son George Walker Bush, and the less said there, the better.” (Kelley, page 167)

The scariest quirk in the current fundamentalist/Bush phenomena comes out in something Bush's Grandfather Prescott Bush said as he prepared to vote to censure Joe McCarthy during the McCarthy era. Change just a word and current America sounds pretty frightening indeed:

"He [Prescott Bush] said he had to vote to censure because the honor of the Senate was at stake, and failure to rebuke McCarthy would be a victory for Communism. 'For he has caused dangerous divisions among the American people because of his attitude,' said Prescott, 'and the attitude he has encouraged among his followers, that there can be no honest differences of opinion with him. Either you must follow Senator McCarthy [George Bush] blindly; not daring to express any doubts or disagreements about any of his actions; or in his eyes you must be a Communist, a Communist sympathizer, or a fool who has been duped by the Communist line.' " (Page 158)

That's right! Shades of McCarthyism from Texas.


AND HERE'S THE REAL ROOT OF BUSH'S MCCARTHYISM

(From MYTHS TO LIVE BY by Joseph Campbell, p. 91) "The Biblical image of the universe simply won’t do any more; neither will the Biblical notion of a race of God, which all others are meant to serve (Isaiah 49: 22-23; 61: 5-6; etc.); nor again, the idea of a code of laws delivered from on high and to be valid for all time. The social problems of the world today are not those of a corner of the old Levant, sixth century B.C. Societies are not static; nor can the laws of one serve another. The problems of our world are not even touched by those stone-cut Ten Commandments that we carry about as luggage and which, in fact, were disregarded in the blessed text itself, one chapter after they were announced (Exodus 21:12-17, following 20:13). The modern Western concept of a legal code is not of a list of unassailable divine edicts but of a rationally contrived, evolving compilation of statutes, shaped by fallible human beings in council, to realize rationally recognized social (and therefore temporal) aims. We understand that our laws are not divinely ordained; and we know also that no laws of any people on earth ever were. Thus we know—whether we dare to say so or not—that our clergies have no more right to claim unassailable authority for their moral law than for their science. And even, finally, in their intimate role of giving spiritual advice, the clergy have now been overtaken by the scientific psychiatrists— and indeed to such a degree that many clergymen are themselves turning to psychologists to be taught how best to serve their pastoral function. The magic of their own traditional symbols works no longer to heal but only to confuse.

"In short, then: just as the buffalo suddenly disappeared from the North American plains, leaving the Indians deprived not only of a central mythic symbol but also of the very manner of life that the symbol once had served, so likewise in our own beautiful world, not only have our public religious symbols lost their claim to authority and passed away, but the ways of life they once supported have also disappeared; and as the Indians then turned inward, so do many in our own baffled world—and frequently with Oriental, not Occidental, guidance in this potentially very dangerous, often ill-advised interior adventure, questing within for the affect images that our secularized social order with its incongruously archaic religious institutions can no longer render."

Stiff-necked, unbending righteousness grows from such ambiguity and it can't imagine that it might be wrong and it must have an enemy to justify the anger it feels because of it's own confusion. Thus, religious men like Bush and McCarthy must surround themselves with sycophants and yes girls, for their fragile beliefs cannot abide challenges which they knows will break those frail beliefs and show them to be lies. But the antidote to rigid theocracy, according to E.O. Wilson, is not always emotionally satisfying:

"FOR MANY the urge to believe in transcendental existence and immortality is overpowering. Transcendentalism, especially when reinforced by religious faith, is psychically full and rich; it feels somehow right. In comparison empiricism seems sterile and inadequate. In the quest for ultimate meaning, the transcendentalist route is much easier to follow. That is why, even as empiricism is winning the mind, transcendentalism continues to win the heart. Science has always defeated religious dogma point by point when the two have conflicted. But to no avail. In the United States there are fifteen million Southern Baptists, the largest denomination favoring literal interpretation of the Christian Bible, but only five thousand members of the American Humanist Association, the leading organization devoted to secular and deistic humanism.

"Still, if history and science have taught us anything, it is that passion and desire are not the same as truth. The human mind evolved to believe in the gods. It did not evolve to believe in biology. Acceptance of the supernatural conveyed a great advantage throughout prehistory, when the brain was evolving. Thus it is in sharp contrast to biology, which was developed as a product of the modem age and is not underwritten by genetic algorithms. The uncomfortable truth is that the two beliefs are not factually compatible. As a result those who hunger for both intellectual and religious truth will never acquire both in full measure." (E.O. Wilson's CONSILIENCE, p.261)

I think Wilson does not understand the joy in living in an ambiguous reality. Once you accept you can't know up from down and sideways from crosswise, the swimming in place turns out to be quite exhilarating.