The World According
to George W. Bush

by Doc Cuddy, Editor

Ah, West Texas, the vast, desolate, oil-rich place where I—and George W. Bush—grew up.

A psychic outsider as a child, if I wanted to survive I had to study the men of West Texas closely and learn to understand their puzzling, gruff, often angry, sometimes violent ways.

Absent a live-in father, George W. Bush as a child clearly attempted to construct a self based on the men he saw around him in West Texas. (Study family pictures and one can, perhaps unkindly, only conclude that he was after all the runt of the litter.)

Why did I reject these bigger-than-life role models while George W. Bush embraced them completely? One of life’s little mysteries.

The first time I saw Bush the Younger on TV running for governor of Texas, I felt that I knew him. Inside and out. Knew what made him tick, knew how he judged people and the world, knew how he made decisions, and knew what those decisions would be. He was West Texas male through and through.

I shuddered. Partly because seeing him was like going home to the West Texas desert again. Partly because I knew what the world was in for if he succeeded to high political office.

If I had the stomach for it, I could write a book on the West Texas-rooted personality that inhabits and controls George W. Bush. Since I don’t, let me pass on this brief summary of what’s going on behind that face of consistently inappropriate affect.

Here, from old, extensive mental notes I made while growing up out there is how such men come to be.***

  The Mind of George W. Bush 

As a young male constructing a place to live in your mind--a personality--in West Texas, first you build a box big enough to live in. Give it one, maybe two, small windows and a door. Make the walls good and thick and put on a sturdy roof. You do this because you want, as far as possible, to keep the world out, since the world is a harsh and sometimes dangerous place.

This box, which in other jargons would be called a persona or even a personality, is held together by a number of beliefs, behaviors, traits, characteristics:

	1. Basically this is a jungle world and it’s every man—got that? "man"—for himself.
	2. Trust no one.
	3. In the face of danger men can come together and cooperate to their mutual benefit, but only for a short time.
	4. A woman’s place is in the home—the box, if you will—and it is part of a man’s burden to protect her and her—got that? "her" children.
	5. There may be a deity but He—got that? "He"—is as remote from a man as a man’s father was from himself.
	6. Since the deity, if He exists, is inaccessible, organized religion is a front, a sham, useful at time for business, political, or military purposes.
	7. Money makes might, and vice-versa.
	8. Might makes right.
	9. Men with money are smarter than men without money.
	10. You are your job.
	11. Books are worthless.
	12. If you must read, the only book you need is the Bible.
	13. Fun is for sissies, women, and children. The only fun allowable for a man is sex, poker, whiskey, and jokes demeaning to sissies, women, and children.
	14. Art, theater, music, opera, poetry are of no value except in so far as they keep women and homosexuals occupied.
	15. Except for certain prescribed social, medical, religious, and athletic rituals, touching is forbidden.
	16. America is the greatest country in the history of the world.
	17. Texas is the highest expression of all that is good about America.
	18. If you construct your life—your box—on these self-evident truths, chances are fairly good that you will survive this world.
	19. All of the above are self-evident truths concerning whose eternal validity there can be no argument.
	20. For a special few men whom the deity sees fit to reward for His own inscrutable reasons, following these rules leads to wealth and positions of power. Men in such positions owe nothing to anybody in this world and can do with their wealth and power as they see will.

***To be sure, these traits have been and are common to many men in many cultures. The harshness of West Texas climate and geography combined with the absurd amounts of petroleum discovered beneath it to produce a particularly virulent and dangerous version of the group-think created by such behavior.

END

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