BUSH AT HARVARD: "SPOILED AND UNDISCIPLINED"

From THE FAMILY, pp. 309-310.

[Open quote.]
During his first year [seeking an MBA at Harvard] George came to the attention of Yoshi Tsurumi when the macroeconomics professor announced his plan to show the film The Grapes of Wrath, based on John Steinbeck’s book about the Great Depression. “I wanted to give the class a visual reference for poverty and a sense of historical empathy,” Tsurumi explained. “George Bush came up to me and said, ‘Why are you going to show us that Commie movie?’

“I laughed because I thought he was kidding, but he wasn’t. After we viewed the film, I called on him to discuss the Depression and how he thought it affected people. He said, ‘Look. People are poor because they are lazy.’ A number of the students pounced on him and demanded that he support his statement with facts and statistics. He quickly backed down because he could not sustain his broadside.”

Professor Tsurumi continued: “His strong prejudices soon set him apart from the rest of the students. This has nothing to do with politics, because most business students are conservative, but they are not inhumane or unprincipled. Unlike most of the others in class, George Bush came across as totally lacking compassion, with no sense of history, completely devoid of social responsibility, and unconcerned with the welfare of others. Even among Republicans his kind was rare. He had no shame about his views, and that’s when the rest of the class started treating him like a clown—not someone funny, but someone whose views were not worthy of consideration . . . I did not judge him to be stupid, just spoiled and undisciplined. . . I gave him a ‘low pass.’ Of the one hundred students in that class, George Bush was in the bottom 10 percent. He was so abysmal that I once asked him how he ever got accepted in the first place. He said, ‘I had lots of help.’ I laughed, and then inquired about his military service. He said he had been in the Texas National Guard. I said he was very lucky not to have had to go to Vietnam. He said, ‘My dad fixed it so that I got into the Guard. I got an early discharge to come here.’”
[Close quote.]

No wonder Georgie's classmates had little respect for him. Most of them saw nothing in him worth consideration.

"'He was remarkably inarticulate,' said Steve Arbert. 'God, so inarticulate it was frightening. The reason I say that he is dumber than dumb is not that I saw his test scores or his grades; it's the comments he made in the classes we had together that scared me...." (THE FAMILY, p. 309)


Not only did Eastern elites see through Georgie Bush, but so did earthy Southern Republicans he worked with in Alabama. In 1972 when Junior worked on Winston Blount's campaign for the Senate against John Sparkman in Alabama, his coworkers "behind his back... called George 'the Texas soufflé' because... he was all puffed up and full of hot air.'" (THE FAMILY, p. 305)
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It's obvious why George Bush Junior came to hate the people he had to study under and with at Yale and then Harvard. They did look down on him and judged him harshly, but not because of the likable person he could be. They slowly came to distrust him because he held a lot of unsupported opinions which were not backed up by the facts as Professor Tsurumi's comments reflect.

So here was a chance for Bush to buckle down and study and come up with facts and scholarship to support his opinions. Instead, just like at Yale, and just as I've pointed out in a similar posting, Georgie folded, drank, partied, whined and complained. He showed the same weaknesses which he and his neocon friends like to make fun of in others. When George was at Harvard, he "spent many weekends with his aunt [Nan Bush Ellis] and her family outside of Boston, lambasting Harvard's 'smug guilt-ridden affected liberals.'" (FAMILY, p. 308)

Bush was unable to see that he was hiding his own guilty self-pity under his contemptuous anger. But more... I think my thesis that George was not fighting the Eastern establishment so much as he was fighting the Easternness in his dad and granddad is supported by the fact that during this time of his lost years at Harvard, he challenged his dad to fight him "mano a mano" after a night of drinking.

Let me admit once more, as a drunk myself, I can understand George Jr. completely. I've acted just like him when confronted with people better educated than myself, and I challenged my dad to a fight once too. The only difference between President Georgie Bush Jr. and me, Georgie Thomas Jr., is that I decided to grow up and confront my insecurities and deep-seated lack of self worth. Instead of continuing to fold up and blame others, I redoubled my efforts to learn from history and to dig into my psyche to find out what makes me tick. And I specially learned a lesson or two from fellow recovering drunks about making the mistake of thinking that god is telling me to do things which are harmful to others. They call that "self will run riot." If you ask me, "self will run riot" describes Bush's actions in the world to a gnat's ass. There's a pile of difference between people who decide to learn who they are and those who seek power in order not to have to deal with their own weaknesses like George Bush has done.
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"Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power." —Aldous Huxley (Yep, you're born again too. Right, George?)