Read the Part 1 of a truth-searching perspective here on “How Far Will Bush Go,” which includes the following:
What really drives him? Oil? Power? A simplistic, overly militarized view of how to fight ideologically driven terrorists? Revenge for Saddam’s contract on the elder Bush? A son’s desire to finish what his father failed to complete? Or, heaven forbid, the voice of “a higher father?”
I have no idea how to disentangle the mix. I doubt Mr. Bush does either. I can only admit to a deep-seated dread when I read in an online newspaper from Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County what the president told Old Order Amish farmers. “I trust God speaks through me,” he said. “Without that, I couldn’t do my job.”
In The Brothers Karamazov, Doestoevsky has one of his characters – Ivan – argue that without God and the threat of Divine Punishment, human beings would have no reason to refrain from doing whatever they wanted. Without God, all things would be permitted.
Watching Mr. Bush, I fear the reverse. With his certainty that some divine power guides him, he becomes free to do what he will, much as do radical Islamic terrorists. They – and he – become Supermen, above any moral law that most of us would recognize. Anthropologists tell us that men create gods in their own image. In that sense, the president’s “higher father” looks sadly like a moral midget.