LETTERS TO DAVE


PART TWO: THE LIE MULTIPLIED

Dear Dave,

I’ve just gone away from my computer to attend a 12 step, non-AA, every-Saturday meeting and to lunch with people of both sexes from that group. More insight poured into my head over the course of the last three hours as I listened to their stories from the week, their struggles with self and others.

One thing I realized as I pulled into my driveway is that I write nowadays not so much for the benefit of others but to clarify who I am. It’s a far different task for me than the writing task is for you, Dave, who writes and reports news. Even your column must take into account the presence of others whereas I write purely for fun, the titillation of the exercise of imagination and the discovery of self. Pure pleasure! Which is basically what this exercise has become for me—a current snapshot to myself as to the steps that led me to be the current person I am. Very informative to me, but if, at any time this bores you, I know you’ll stop reading and go on to better things. I will still be blissfully unawares, writing away in the vasteness of my small room like the compulsive writer that I am until I complete Part Three, The End. (Hey—you could let Rebecca read this. I’ll bet she’d like it. It’s her cup of tea, I believe.)

Anyhow… I thought some about what I meant in the very last line in the closing of Part One about wanting to get “status” with your “clan of writers”. It occurs to me that I’m trying to force a writer’s or writing relationship with the unwilling editors of the Spokesman and that my exchange with them is full of conflicts because I’m still in conflict with relationships from my past, especially with people who dismissed and discounted me. It is, of course, a relationship all in my own head, which would amuse them, I’m sure, if they fully understood it. Or, maybe they have thought about men and women like me who badger them from afar, and they do understand the psychological dynamics. It’s funny to see myself as a potential flake in their eyes and, yet, to know I’m not a flake in my own eyes.

For Doug F. and Steve S., I’ve become too much (as you noted), and they don’t really want to hear from me again (your situation with John H.), which is a bad situation for I have the goal to get at least one really, atheist guest column on the opinion page of the SR. Unfortunately, by your having responded kindly to many of my comments and to our having met, you have fallen into a psuedo-relationship with me, for good or ill, in our imaginations, for which I thank you. At least I’m not totally unreal in the collective mind of the SR. I at least exist somewhere there in one mind. For your trouble, you get to receive this longish, three part, personal memoir.

In my belief system, imagination is all any of us have, and we are constantly writing our own stories in our own heads from the least sophisticated among us to the most. The only difference between me or you and an undereducated, redneck oyster farmer on the Louisiana coast is that I’m fully aware of our state of affairs.

Anyhow… my situation with your top editors parallels my lifelong existentialist situation with the entire American culture. Existentialism would be unbearable if I wasn’t so damn proud of it. It’s the kind of strained relationship that led the ex-patriots of the 1920s—Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Gertrude Stein and etcetera—to abandon America for Paris. I love the Twenties! If I weren’t so old, I’d consider living in Canada or France, but now it might be silly, and, perhaps, my wife couldn’t go along with it. I can hear one of your senior editors say, “Let me tell you, George, you are no Hemingway.” I know that, but well… but… I am a sober Kerouac, or more ambitiously, an F. Scott Fitzgerald in my own head....

Now... hurrying to the present from that Cheney of the past and into present day sociobiology and evolutionary psychology: in the Pete incident, with my AA tools, I caught myself in my own mental lies and deceptions, and I got insight about human consciousness which bears even more fruit, now, with further scientific information. In recent years I’ve discovered a lot about lying. It appears that dissimulation, lying, or protective “mental” coloration (a form of hiding away) are all part of the human animal’s biological baggage for survival. Even chimps, our nearest relatives, can be observed deceiving one another. Two conclusions are obvious in the research. One: we are selfish and must survive. Two, we are herd animals and must get along with others in order to survive. We need to exchange information about water holes, plants, crops, spear points, camouflage colors and where the game is while competing with our collaborators for mates and goods. (A lot of what I’m saying is found in Pinker’s and other’s work.) So our very survival means that we must learn to lie and to detect liars and to hide our true motives while getting along. Some researchers find that our sophisticated human consciousness evolved from this need to deceive and to detect deceivers. After all, survival in the wild for earlier human forms depended to some extent on who could hide and who could detect hiders best.

We know others lie because we know we lie, thus there’s a sort of arms race of liars and lie detectors. The best detectors survive and procreate better than the least effective ones. That means the best liars are better survivors while the more honest have troubles. And—here’s a scary one—the best liars are those who believe their own lies themselves. That’s right—the best liar doesn’t even know he’s lying because he believes he’s telling the truth. Which knowledge will bear more fruit in later paragraphs.

I think after the total naiveté of my childhood, which was considerable and painful for me, I went on to become one of the more devious liars in the world, which is why I think I can detect a liar at fifty paces. So... when I listen to most TV evangelists, my consciousness almost universally screams out, liar! But it’s difficult to tell. Some of those religious liars believe their own lies, thus they’re perfect at it, and only a master liar like myself can detect them. Poor simple, mostly honest folk are at the mercy of good liars.

Now we have come, as promised in the first line of this very abbreviated memoir, to the subjects of alcoholism, George Bush and lying and to the exposing of the big lie which George Bush is telling himself. Bush and I are both alcoholics. Alcoholism is a disease as far as statistical research goes. You can’t prove the connection conclusively, but when you look at the statistics that show the rates of alcoholism in the children of alcoholics, you do get a strong correlation.

Further, in AA’s view, since it’s a disease, once an alcoholic always an alcoholic. You never get over it. Now Bush openly says he was once an alcoholic. He proclaims that Graham saved him from “alcoholism” though, according to Kitty Kelley, Bush was actually saved in a coffee shop discussion with a very wild, evangelical racist down in Texas. The story of Graham was later added to normalize and glamorize the moment and give Bush a connection with other presidents who were close to Graham.

Many in AA would condemn me for these portions of my memoir because in AA we are to keep AA out of any political situations: AA, as an organization, has no political opinions; we avoid political and religious debate because everybody is welcome and can find help in AA, no matter what their religious and political beliefs. Bush, however, is not in AA and so I think I can take him to task, using some of the principles I’ve learned in AA. If he were humble enough to be in AA, I could not write what I shall.

So we can all agree that Bush is a self-proclaimed alcoholic which gives me leave, as a member of AA, to say a few things about his non-AA recovery, though I am not claiming that I can speak for AA as a whole. There is one thing that AA really insists on when the subject is drunks. For a powerless alcoholic to recover who has “no effective defense against that first drink” (that first drink is always the drink which always gets him drunk, not the last one), the drunk must find for himself some power, a spiritual power, to help him when the urge to drink comes over him. As William James, a premier American psychologist and brother to novelist Henry, says, “The only cure I’ve ever found for dipsomania [alcoholism] is religiomania.” For many in America that spiritual force is found, naturally enough, in a “god of their understanding”.

Well… Bush had his moment of truth and I found mine too, both of us at about 40 years of age, but I’ve never heard that Bush’s was as powerful as mine, which is strange since he now walks so closely with god. I had a complete and satisfying “born again” experience in which I was thoroughly lifted up and turned around, my pockets shaken out, before I was set down again. I believe I was a little outside of reality for a time. For nine days (I don’t know why that magic number stays that way) I literally believed that everyone around me were truly but souls trapped in physical bodies. I saw souls when I looked into eyes. Life, as we said, (and some still do) in AA, is a soul in a body having a human experience.

Though I did not become a Christian in my conversion, mine was a very profound and a deeply moving, psychic experience, and it kept me sober for many long years and gave me a useful tool for handling all the guilt and shame I had to deal with and all the problems which came my way along the way. There was a god-like power, I thought, but it wasn’t Jesus, though Jesus seemed one of many fine models to copy a life from. Nowadays, my higher power is AA itself and the wonders of the cause and effect, natural Universe, and my church of the “what’s happening now” in the 12 step meetings I attend.

Now... what about Bush’s sobriety, you ask?

In AA, we’re told to watch out for the god stuff. It’s a heady and dangerous concept for alcoholics new to the god idea. Almost without exception, people who have been profligates and ne’er-do-wells all their adult lives who suddenly find the god concept become suddenly crazy fuckers. Some even seem to be “drunk with the Lord!” which is how many Christians describe the born again times. As alcoholics in our drinking years, we were filled with dreams of vainglory and were puffed up with “grandiose” notions, and we don’t get rid of those tendencies very easily or quickly. We struggle with grandiosity all our lives. Newly sober alcoholics imagine and do all sorts of wild things, thinking all the while they’re doing god’s will. If our advisers don’t restrain us, we wildly run amuck, doing harm and damage on every hand. In order to counter that tendency to headstrong action, we are told to get human advisers to advise us when we go off half-cocked on god power. They mustn’t be “yes” men; they ought to be humble advisers and offer the advice of restraint and caution.

Bush, as I understand it, no more then got sober, and he set off to be governor of Texas, with more to follow, and rather than finding good direction and help in AA with down to earth, sober advisers, he found coattail men around him, people like Carl V. Rove who wanted to make him emperor… well, at least president of something or other…. So, need I say this, after all I’ve written in these last few paragraphs? Isn’t my point clear? All I need ask is, “Who is going off half-cocked around the world to make war, imagining he’s hearing the voice of god telling him to do this and to do that. Who has grandiose dreams of his own self-importance, who postures in a vainglorious manner? Who is a really convincing liar because he believes his own lies?”

If Bush were a friend of mine in AA, I’d sit him down and tell him in the most loving manner possible, with respect and charity, “Hey, ol’ buddy, I fear you’re off on a dry drunk. Time to sit down, be still, listen to your Jesus, and get off the power trip.” Unfortunately, none of the people near him would or will tell him that. They don’t have the AA experience. They don’t know how dangerous a recovering drunk can be when he first gets the god tool in his power mad hands. They’re on power trips too, using him and riding his coattails for all he’s worth. Consequence world chaos.

Herein lies the end of Part Two. Only one more part to go, Dave, my imaginary relationship inside the SR. Part three and last section will tell how I went from a moral, judgmental point of view of reality (Bush’s way) to a scientific view, but that’s a tale for tomorrow.