Bush as "Outliver"

Leslie Brill's Counterpunch essay is, to be honest, not quite as structured as I'd expect from an English professor. However, it underscores the case against Bush that I'll be trying to lay out in the final days of the campaign, and hopefully the beginning of the end to the insanity that defines the adminstration.

Brill uses the German term der Überlebende to describe Dubya. This could be translated as "Survivor," but he (and I think Brill is male, based on a quick googling of his name) chooses the term "Outliver" because Bush embraces any number of policies that involve killing--and this dates back to his tenure as Texas Governor, where he presided over the greatest number of executions since the restoration of the death penalty.

Citing Elias Canetti's Mass Und Macht, the professor analyzes the method to Bush's madness:

Since assuming power through a disputed and bizarrely concluded election, the second Bush Administration has consistently made choices and exhibited behavior characteristic of Canetti's Outlivers-of Outlivers, moreover, heavily laden with the anxiety of command. It has preferred modalities of power to judicial or legislative processes, and has reflexively acted out a mania for secrecy. Mistrustful of other nations, it has withdrawn from, defied, and refused to participate in numerous international treaties. With the curious exception of North Korea, it has preferred bilateral to multilateral diplomacy, and it has cooperated with multi-national organizations like NATO and the UN only as long as those groups endorse conclusions it has already reached. It has unhesitatingly put at risk hundreds of thousands of U.S. military personnel and has hardly seemed to notice the thousands of foreign nationals it has killed, wounded, and imprisoned...

Prominent in the personality of this Administration is its obsession with the power of governments to kill. Discussing "The Ruler as Outliver," Canetti observed that his "first and decisive feature is his legal power over life and death. It is the seal of his power, which is absolute only as long as his right to impose death remains undisputed" (273). The eagerness of the Bush Administration that the death penalty should be more widely and frequently sought in federal courts reflects the Outliver's craving for absolute power. In pursuit of more death-penalty prosecutions, Attorney General Ashcroft has repeatedly overruled recommendations of his own prosecutors; and the executions already accomplished under Ashcroft's urging are the first of federal death row prisoners in thirty-eight years. Equally suggestive is the Administration's fondness, when speaking of foreign enemies, to promise, "They will be captured, or killed." To make the latter more probable, Administration warriors urge development of tactical nuclear weapons designed to inflict lethal American might upon those who try to escape in mountain caves or buried concrete bunkers. Whether such actions violate international law and assumptions of innocence, or re-escalate a nuclear arms race, does not seem to merit discussion.

The assassination of Uday and Qusay Hussein offered a vivid example of this Administration's passion for killing. The attack on the home in which they were trapped was simply murderous-overwhelming cannon fire and rockets against a few cornered opponents. As Peter Davis noted in The Nation, there was "no waiting them out, no disabling gas lobbed into the house At the end they were impotent, helpless, and the order of the day-which no one here doubts came from Washington-was Exterminate the Brutes." When given a choice between capture and kill, those in charge evidently hardly considered the former.

For the paranoid leader, "every execution for which he is responsible bestows some strength. He obtains the power of the Outliver" (274). Given that no weapons of mass destruction have yet been found in Iraq (as of September, 2004) and that, if they eventually appear, they are unlikely to have posed a substantial threat to the U.S., Canetti's next sentences are especially germane: "His victims may not have actually been lined up against him, but they might have been able to do so. His fear transforms them, at first retrospectively perhaps, into enemies that have struggled against him. He has sentenced them; they have been brought low; he has outlived them" (274). Unself-consciously, Bush gloated in his 2003 State of the Union address, "All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. Many others have met a different fate. Let's put it this way-they are no longer a problem." The implications of the adjective "suspected" for the imprisonment and killing seem to have escaped him (and applauding legislators). Similarly, the regime of Saddam Hussein, whether it had weapons of mass destruction or not, is "no longer a problem." So we have been told; but ongoing casualties render increasingly questionable the famous "mission accomplished" boast...

Because George W. Bush and many of his key officers lean strongly toward the type that Canetti called Outlivers, American citizens and the world must take seriously the threats they pose. As the U.S. electorate confronts the claims and counter-claims of another presidential election, the incessant assertions of the Bush Administration that dire circumstances exist, that "bad guys" abound and will continue to exist indefinitely, must be viewed with vigilant skepticism. For Outlivers find nothing more convenient to justify the exercise of their power than the specter of omnipresent enemies.

Denouncing bombings in Baghdad, the President declared of the perpetrators, "They hate freedom, they love terror." (October 28, 2003) As one whose speeches constantly parade various threats before his countrymen and who urges Congress to pass another, even more intrusive and confining "Patriot Act," Bush's typically simple formulation would seem to apply at least as revealingly to his Administration as to those who carried out the attacks in Iraq.

What can we who unhappily watch the spectacle of our bellicose government and its nominated enemies do about all this? For starters, we must still remember-whether George Bush manages to claim the White House again or not-to cherish the civil liberties that remain to us and to guard against the unstinting promoters of "fear itself," be they foreign or domestic. For die Überlebende must by their very nature truly "hate freedom love terror."

Indeed.