February 26, 2003

PSCHOBABBLE ALERT: JOE KLEIN WANTS BUSH TO FEEL YOUR PAIN

      Joe Klein is troubled. He anguishes. He cares. He is the perfect liberal product of our therapeutic culture. He worries and he shares his worries with all of us. He is, after all, a best selling author, one of a breed prone to thinking their feelings are profound and worth our attention. He appeared yesterday on Don Imus's show, telling us how he vacillates back and forth over whether to use military force against Iraq. This is because he feels anxious; things could go wrong; people will be hurt. It's all just too much for a pundit to bear, except of course, that he can count on us to share his angst. As of yesterday he was in favor of action, though he admitted he shifts back and forth and may change his mind again. Klein, like so many in the chattering class mistakes his anxiety for profound intellectual questioning. In an article, ostensibly about President Bush, but more revealing of Klein, he never tells us where he stands on how best to deal with the threats we face. Instead, he laments that Bush doesn't seem to be like Klein, a handwringing worrier who sees all the complexities Klein sees. "Bush's faith", Klein asserts,"... does not discomfort him enough; it does not impel him to have second thoughts, to explore other intellectual possibilities or question the possible consequences of his actions." Klein offers no evidence to support this negative asssertion. How could he? What is evident though, is that the President doesn't publicly fret, worry and lament. He seems clear on his goals and does no public handwringing. He just doesn't exhibitionistically suffer and feel our pain. He says things to our troops like "We're on their trail, we're smokin' them out, we've got 'em on the run." Klein deeply disapproves. The French foreign minister would be terribly upset by such blunt cowboy language. Unlike Klein, or Bill Clinton, President Bush doesn't share his own deeper feelings with the rest of the citizenry.

      One wonders what Klein would have thought of Churchill when Churchill, speaking to the boys at Harrow in 1941 when things were going very badly said: "You sang here a verse of a School Song: you sang that extra verse written in my honour, which I was very greatly complimented by and which you have repeated today. But there is one word in it I want to alter - I wanted to do so last year, but I did not venture to. It is the line: "Not less we praise in darker days."
I have obtained the Head Master's permission to alter darker to sterner. "Not less we praise in sterner days." Do not let us speak of darker days: let us speak rather of sterner days. These are not dark days; these are great days--the greatest days our country has ever lived..."

      No shared pain wanted or proffered by Churchill. Apparently, a leader who projects clarity and confidence is scary to Joe Klein. Well I hate to tell you Joe, real leaders like Churchill, Roosevelt and Truman kept their doubts, fears and worries to themselves. Harry Truman was not known as the Happy Warrior because he bit his lip and wept regularly for victims of life's circumstances, in the style of the President you know best. Churchill, we now know, did have moments of deep doubt and worry for the future of England, but what the public saw was a leader, a defiant, even cheerful leader who gave the V for Victory sign instead of sharing his angst.

      When you inform us of the inner life of President Bush, unless you are a mind reader or his psychoanalyst, you are really telling us about yourself. The clarity and decisiveness wanted in a leader are precisely what you envy and are unable to find in yourself. No problem there, you've found the perfect job for handwringing and doubt; you're a media pundit, paid to inflict your worries on the rest of us. You can employ your verbal skills to conjure forth an ideal leader, one who, not surprisingly, resembles your meal ticket, Bill Clinton--all angst and empathy and hesitancy.You self-flatteringly explain your own fearfulness and weakness as indicative of a superior intellect, capable of seeing so many, many sides of every question, able to see root causes of every problem and thus hesitant ever to act decisively. You are, in that regard, a true representative of the therapeutic culture of the now rapidly receding Clinton years.Take heart Joe, fortunately for you and the rest of us, the Bill Clinton model of feel-your-pain, leadership is gone, hopefully forever. We live in "sterner times" requiring strength of character, not shared weakness.

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