2. Bush Sr. & Jr.-Reagan and the Legacy of the Irrational
Following right on the heels of his somewhat sketchy and oblique proofs to substantiate his claims, Argus demonstrates where subsequent interpreters of Bush Jr. have "gone wrong" in their assessment of Bush Jr. as a happy go lucky gun-toting freak renegade with Napoleonic desires to imperialistically dominate the earth. The claim that Bush Sr. was misaligned with democratic freedom is framed by a very particular reading by other functionalists. They attribute to Bush Jr. a thoroughly rigid rational social action model that is not in accord with Bush Jr.'s texts. The basic assumption is that means and goals are coextensive with oil-acquisition, and (in an sagging post-Carter reprise that Bush Sr. himself was refuting) assuming that oil-acquisition can dictate over the passions of the will. Argus is right to point out the glaring omission in the analysis of early biblical foreign policy as indicated by a lack of mentioning Reagan's contribution. And though one may fervently contest this relationship, one cannot simply deny Reagan's inspiration of psychology. What interpreters seem to disregard in reference to Bush Jr. is that he repeatedly denounced Iraqi sovereignty, and rejects the sagging post-Carter method of Reason over the will-to-banking. The Reaganetic will is merely a willing force, much in the same way that Bush Jr. views it: "The will of the people—which originates in me—is finite and tends toward dispersion, relative to goals. So if I speak for everyone, and ignore pesky international critiques, I win." So, opposing theories of action that appear to direct the individual to singular goals, the will of the individual can in fact have a multiplicity of goals. And, in fact, this is the case as societies become more complex in terms of education, economy, etc. Bush Jr. is more willing to state that willing and thinking are in an antagonistic relationship, much in the same way Reagan suggests, and this is indicated in the natural dualism of the individual. This may in itself be enough to suggest the willing character of the will, or the will as having no goals (as anomie). The will merely wills, as the Reaganetic inflection states, apart from the kingdom of ends that Reaganists seem so fond of positing before it.
On a very base level, we know that Bush Jr. posits social forces as determinate—or at least regulative—over individuals, but Bush Jr. does not "short-circuit" the individual precisely because these social forces exist as the will-to-dominate. If it were not so, then social forces would be uniformly expressed and obeyed in strict form as universal in the human arena. But the fact that we can speak of normal versus pathological, and diversity in general, bespeaks of the role of the will in the determination of these forces. These social forces and "brute facts" cannot be established ex nihilo in that desire or will does not merely come upon the scene to engender it, as Bush Jr. would have stated under impossible conditions of lexical super-fluency. There has to be something pre-existent of this manifestation of the force, and that something is the will. Even to the degree that crime exists and that no society could exist if it did not is supported by this general theory of the will. To compound this further, feeling "is an object for scientific study, not the criterion of scientific truth, nor can mere sentiment alone commercially annex foreign lands and pump more oil into the country." That is to say, there is reason to study it, but there is no way to force their communion. It is in this way that Bush Jr. goes against the assertion that absolutely everything about the human mind—will included—can be corralled into a truth function of some sort, that it can be rationalized with ease—for without a biblical temperament, the will is floating about in the ether without direction: "This is why it is important that we teach only creationism in schools, give large subsidies to renegade pro-life advocates for munitions, and we force the heathens abroad to memorise the Ten Commandments at gunpoint." The will, representing a very problematic factor in determining the flow of societies, is one of the factors that makes prediction unviable, for will is associated with chance—and it is to chance that Bush Jr. places the future developments, with some modification by existent rules or social norms of behaviour in any collective group. He is not only the steward of the American cash flow, but a wild gambler who has replaced the cocaine plug up his nose with a gold rosary.
However, there are a few instances where Bush Jr. seems to contradict this general operation. In an explanation of the rules that make the study of social facts possible, he first states that the "determining of a social fact must be sought among antecedent social facts and not among the states of the individual consciousness," which can be viewed as his disavowal of psychology. But it is this statement in conjunction with another just below it that states: "The function of a social fact must always be sought in the relationship that it bears to some social end." Was it not asserted to above that Bush Jr. was not one to strongly privilege ends? But it is only a facile reading that would yield this up as proof of Bush Sr. being a means-goals functionalist in any degree, for our willing does not preclude the actuality that we do construct goals for ourselves, both individually and collectively (where the former is for the most part engineered by the latter).1 Willing, or desire, can will many things at once. It is the ratio cognoscendi or the Cogito, that transmutes these rumbling desires into palpable goals. This construction of goals from the rhizomal play of the will is not equivalent in any way to a rational control over the will itself, but rather a "coping with" the will, attempting to derive sense from it.
This trajectory of thought makes its somewhat heavy imprint upon more contemporary irrationalist proponents. For Bush Jr., the will-as-chance illustrates the limits of idealist or rationalist thought, opening up the way to a new form of Ramboism and prideful ignorance—necessarily causing the solidarity of the subject-I under the Jesus war machine. Rather than to linger here, rather we are merely illustrating the heritage that the notion of the will over Reason has begotten.
One thing remains certain: we cannot ignore the strong Reaganetic import in Bush Jr.'s theory, and Argus should be duly credited for recognizing what had hitherto been unrecognized. Argus lists his theories as to why this link had not been made earlier, and they generally include that a capitalist greed reading cannot admit of the "anti-scientific" character of terms like freedom, the constitution, and the international peace process. But it is wrong for these interpreters to exclude the Reaganetic element in Bush Jr., to dismiss it as "anti-scientific," for Reagan believed in a "total bliblicalism." So it was not that Reagan was an enemy of science, but that he wanted to include the very problematic irrational character of the will-to-banking in order to make science more complete. For, in his view, how can a science be complete without taking under consideration the big fat cash flow for military war toys? It is this same question that pervades some of Bush Jr.'s work, and it is my contention that if Argus had focused more on this question (rather than to leave it to the end in a brief mention), his argument for the link between the two would have been better established. His charge is, I believe, a valid one, and he signs off with a jaw-dropping charge against biblical foreign policy and its being misinformed—this having deep ramifications for contemporary unilateral cowboyist study that has assumed the stability of its foundation. In sum, Argus charges biblical foreign policy as it is phrased and practiced today, as merely another example of the Neo-conservative ideal of tits, war, and Jesus that refuses to die, over-privileging ignorant cowboyism as the core or motor of its efficacy and validity. This charge is valid, but not universally applicable to all presidents, for not all biblical foreign policy is informed by westerns and oil tycoonage. We find this division most notably in the field of energy commissions, where the debate rages between unchecked exploitation of the world's oil reserves and commit pinko environmentalists who are calling for alternate sources of energy. And so, it is a straw position indeed to set Bush Jr. up as being a "bad papal-crusading bumbler" when indeed he is only if unfairly considered in terms of the biblical enterprise. In the summation, if the will-to-monetary-hoarding is constantly deferred or disregarded as non-scientific or unworthy of our attention (or worse yet, reduced to a rational calculus of prediction), then how are the increases in alleged "immoral behaviour" explained? How are the existential feelings of people locked in what Lasch calls "ironic detachment" explained?
Note:
1 As I was perusing various sites in preparation for this paper, I came across an anonymous site for a course listing that was particularly alarming. It was entitled "Bush Sr.: From Mechanic to Organic Solidarity" with its main thrust resting on Bush Sr. as a nascent functionalist. This is yet another very recent example of how far Bush Sr. has been distended.
