PLEASE Get Our President Some Therapy!

September 30, 2006

The emperor has no clothes! There. Someone had to say it.

What’s more, it’s time we acknowledge that we the people are in a truly dysfunctional relationship with our president, and that far too many of us are “staying the course” in the hope that everything will work out in the end. Guess what. That’s as likely to happen as staying in an abusive love relationship will eventually pay off.

Sadly, we have a president with a classic alcoholic personality (making all the more ironic the 2004 poll results which indicated that a large percentage of voters liked him because they thought he would be more “fun to have a beer with”). We’re told that he quit drinking some fifteen years ago, and maybe the rumors that he’s drinking again aren’t true. It doesn’t matter. Drinking or not, the dysfunctional personality of an addict rarely changes without therapy or the 12 step program used by A. A. They call people who quit drinking without therapy “dry drunks”.

Any recovering addict, and anyone who’s ever lived with an addict, knows the symptoms all too well: the unwillingness to admit a mistake or take responsibility, instead blaming others when things go wrong; angry outbursts and even bullying; lecturing (often about religion) rather than sharing information; secrecy; acting like a petulant child, and – the hallmark of an alcoholic personality – denial. Sound familiar?

Those of us who grew up with an alcohol- or drug-addicted parent (and there are at least 76 million of us) are also programmed to live in denial. They call alcoholism a family disease. No matter how bad things get at home, the unspoken but silently agreed upon position of the family is “if you don’t talk about it, it doesn’t exist”. The addict demands this “loyalty” of us and we assume that others will go along with this charade. As a result, we become Enablers.

Bad enough when we enable those people whose behavior is hurting us at home, but many of us are so deeply mired in our mutual denial we can’t see that it’s extended to enabling the “leader of the free world” – the man who could also push a button and destroy the earth – to operate not with intelligence but by following his personal “instincts”. Simply put, our president is living in denial of reality and he bullies anyone who doesn’t go along with him, using such phrases as “You’re either for us or ag’in’ us”.

Years ago on a talk show, actor John Larroquette made a comment that summed it up perfectly, even prophetically in this case. “Alcoholics,” he said, “don’t have relationships; they take hostages.”

George W. Bush has some powerful Enablers, not only in his cabinet – whose jobs are to enable him – but also in those employees who make up our Congress. The republicans apparently feel duty-bound to support their party at any cost and the democrats have been bullied so much that they’re afraid to speak the truth, lest they (again) be labeled “weak on national security”or worse – and all of them feel obligated to enable the corporations who put them there (many of which are profiting from this war). This president – who once commented how much easier it would be if this were a dictatorship “as long as I’m the dictator” – also bullies the media by threatening to withhold information (amusing, considering how little information is released anyway) and labels as unpatriotic those citizens who disagree with him.

So far, at least, this is still a democracy, and yet we’re letting it get away from us by enabling this dysfunctional man and his administration to – among so many other things – operate in secrecy; to trash international support for America; to launch an ill-planned, ill-equipped unilateral war based on a lie; to “stay the course” against public opinion; to strip away our civil liberties; to take and hold prisoners indefinitely without charge and even torture them (despite the Geneva Conventions and the best intelligence that torture doesn’t work). Meanwhile, over $300 billion dollars have been spent with no end in sight, nearly 3,000 American and more than 130,000 Iraqi lives have been lost, thousands of Americans are permanently disabled and our country is less prepared for disaster than ever.

As reported by Bob Woodward in his latest book, appropriately titled State of Denial, even former President George H. W. Bush is enabling his son by withholding his (informed and valid) concerns about waging war in Iraq because somehow he thought it more important to let the boy “be himself.” Say what?! It seems that Woodward himself might have further enabled Bush by withholding, for his third book, information that might have affected the 2004 election and saved thousands of lives. Is anyone looking out for our country here?

Now, despite escalating chaos in Iraq and a critical shortage of troops, our president is fixated on Iran. Will someone please get this man some therapy before he gets us all killed. That’s not going to happen until we come out of our mutual denial and stop indulging our president’s petulant behavior. As hard as it can be to accept that a loved one has become dysfunctional, how much more difficult it is to admit when it’s our president we’re talking about – but how much more important.

What we need right now is a healthy grownup; one who can admit mistakes and deal with facts. And an electorate who will stop enabling dysfunctional leaders. Maybe we all need therapy.

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