The Free View-- weblog of a presidential candidate

Inside Bush's "Brain", and the Battle Between Hope and Dread

This interview with James Moore, author of Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential, contains a lot of interesting tidbits and insights into the mind behind the amazing Bush Team. It pains me a little to call the team "amazing", because I feel that most of what they've done has not been good for our country, and much of it is downright harmful, but they are amazing, in the truest sense of the word. They are awesome, in the real meaning of that word. The author Moore puts it best, I think, when he responds to the idea that he actually admires Karl Rove. He says in effect, "It's not quite that I admire him -- it's more like awe."

While much of the country has been in a glossy shock over the threat of terrorism since 9-11, I've been in stuttering shock over what the Bush Administration has been able to get the country to gobble up like it was Thanksgiving dinner. Stuttering describes the shock, not me -- sometimes it sneaks in on me with a quick jab combination, and I get that sort of dark awe laced with fear or foreboding. Call it the Cloud of Orwell, if you will. Sometimes it has more of an Armageddon vibe to it. 6 of one, half dozen of the other really. Either vision is pretty damn ugly. You probably know the feeling I'm talking about. The feeling that it's gettin' bad, and it's gettin' worse. Many of the folks I know are gripped right up with it, passing through Hopelessness on their way to Doomsayerville. They left the awe phase behind long ago, and spend most of their time in half-dread, half-fear.

But I shake it off. You have to shake it off, if you want to be of use to the world. And Karl Rove is one of the big reasons why you have to shake it off. Because he's out there being the most powerful unelected man in the country, and he is good at it. He's amazing. He's masterful, and he's super-intelligent, and he's fantastic at his job -- and he's dangerous. And wrong. And he's President Bush's right-hand man.

We have to be vigilant, and smart, and super-aware and super-outspoken, and we have to outplay Karl Rove. Because he is playing major headgames with the country and the world: trying to lock us into perpetual war, with the side effect of indefinite suspension of the Constitution; and to put us on the road to empire -- a concept which has been so thoroughly debunked by thousands of years of history that it's not even funny.

Reduced to its simplest objective form, what he is doing is persuading people more effectively than those who disagree with him are. So those who disagree with him, if they wish to prevail, would be well put to get working on the potency of their persuasion. Translation: We've got some convincing to do, so smarten up!

Know the enemy. Know thyself. Know that if you and I and everyone who's pissed off (pardon my French -- or is it "pardon my freedom" now? Did they change that one?) don't start breaking out with some mass convincing quick-like, then that dark, Orwellian, perpetual war deal is really going to become the deal, and we'll be lucky if the history books look back on this phase in terms of decades. More likely it'll be in terms of generations. Like your kids, and their kids...that sort of thing.

But it is not over yet. It's not a done deal. And giving up hope is simply not an option. The way it works is, everytime you feel like losing hope, redouble your hope instead. Deciding there's no hope is like a self-inflicted death blow. It leaves you nowhere, with nothing. By definition it means you have nothing to hope for, and that's so horrible that I could double this rant just talking about it. I'll talk about hope instead.

Hope -- the expectation that something you think is good will actually occur -- is a very powerful thing. Broken down to its smallest component, it's the thing that motivates virtually all human action. You do something because you want a result. In a small way, everything little thing you do, you do because you hope that something will occur as a result. Something that you want. Whether it's moving your mouse to the left or getting married or taking a new job -- or taking political action. It's all driven by hope.

Max out your hope. Don't give up even a morsel of it. It's your choice whether you hope for a positive future or live in dread and fear of what you see ahead. It hasn't happened yet -- it's the future, after all -- so either vision you choose is pure imagination. Pick the positive future you want -- the best one you can imagine -- and live your life bringing the world to it. It's the best you can do. The other path -- wandering along toward a darker tomorrow -- is not an option. It's poison. Shake it off.

If you're already maxed out, both in hope and energy, like I am most of the time, then you need to figure out how to amplify your efforts. Squeeze more out of it. Increase efficiency and amplitude. Get creative. Get radical if you need to. I'm issuing this wake up call to myself as well. Reading about Karl Rove, and flipping through the rolodex of scary things this administration has done, makes for a potent combo. But all he is is a master at playing the game. He can be outplayed. It's just going to take a team effort. An awesome one.

(Pass this on to your hope-disabled friends. :-)

I'll put together a collection of the scary things, as well as the successes of the hope movement, in the near future. And I'm going to work on coming up with a cookbook of recipes for actions folks can do to rattle the cage.