It’s the evening of July 8 th as I write this, with today’s Chicago Tribune before me, serious in tone, as befits the somber news of London’s bombings. The recurring note is one of great respect for the English tradition of coping under the most diabolical circumstances, with emphasis on the leadership of Winston Churchill during World War II.

Yet, this is not World War II, and if we hide our questions, our confusion, and our fears behind that heroic period, we will be sucked into an intellectual and spiritual quagmire as real as anything our troops are sloughing through in Iraq or Afghanistan.

What we must guard against is equating intellectual and moral passivity with patriotism. It is not enemy bombs that will destroy us, but our cowardice in refusing to acknowledge and to correct our downward spiral into self-destruction under the leadership of the present administration.

To improve our vision, we can turn to the excellent book by Dr. Justin A. Frank, M.D., Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President. Frank is a clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry at George Washington University Medical Center. Since 1980, he has been a teaching analyst at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute. A former president of the Greater Washington Chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility, Dr. Frank lives and practices in Washington, D.C.

Frank points out that when George W. was six years old, his sister, Robin, with whom he was quite close, died of leukemia after countless efforts to find a cure. She died on the East Coast, where she had been take for treatments. After a memorial service, the parents returned to Texas, while the child’s body was buried in a Connecticut family plot, without a funeral. This tragedy must have been traumatic for George W.

The author refers to one of Bush’s cousins who also lost a sibling at an early age, and said, “We’re both clowns. I think kids who lose a sibling often try and find ways to, you know, make things easier on the family.”

Mrs. Bush recalled that she overheard her son decline an invitation to play because his mother needed him, and said of the incident: “I was too much of a burden for a seven-year old to carry.”

Frank goes on to tell us that a child experiencing too much stress sees all new stimuli as a threat, limiting curiosity in the outside world. Today, Bush might have been diagnosed as a child with a Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Those who knew him in grade school described him as an antic, energetic and defiant clown who threw a football through his third-school window after the class had been told to stay in from recess.

The writer tells us that the adult suffering from ADHD will be impulsive because the individual is too impatient to work through the information needed to make a responsible decision.

Bush’s aides are quoted as saying he “never anguishes over decisions.” His days are punctuated with brief meetings and exercise periods.

While the president’s dyslexia has not been officially documented, Frank says his reading habits suggest the problem. He seemed proud of the fact that he doesn’t read newspapers when he told Diane Sawyer that he “gets his news from people who don’t editorialize.” A president who doesn’t read newspapers should keep Democrats, Republicans and Independents fingering their worry beads non-stop, especially when bombs begin going off in London’s tunnels and on buses.

At another time, Frank quotes Bush as saying that his generation of the Bush family are “not real serious, studious readers. We are readers for fun.” He doesn’t take notes during debates or press conferences, and often asks his aides to read through material he finds too much to handle.

Frank also finds it remarkable that so little attention has been paid to Bush’s twenty-plus years of problem drinking, which the president has described as heavy, daily, and an interference with his family life. David Frum, a former speechwriter, said that after reaching the Oval Office, Bush asked for prayers of religious leaders, saying, “I had a drinking problem. Right now I should be in a bar, not the Oval Office.”

This meaningful assessment is made by Frank about Bush’s problem:

But while it is valuable to know whether or not he was or is an alcoholic, the more pressing question involves the influence his years of heavy drinking and subsequent abstinence still have on him and those around him.Bush’s drinking history compels us to consider the prospect that his thinking, behavior, and relationships with his family and the world may be deeply influenced by an alcoholic personality ... one that is continually trying – allegedly successfully, though possibly with reduced capacities– to keep the compulsion to drink under control.

George W. Bush is depicted as finding in religious fundamentalism a source of calm once found in alcohol, using religion to simplify, even to replace thought, so that he doesn’t even have to think.

Fundamentalist religion, writes Frank, narrows the universe of possibilities. It divides the world into absolutes of good and evil. This gives Bush more strength than many might suspect.

Before the 2000 election, Bush told Texas preacher James Robison, one of his spiritual mentors: “I feel like God wants me to run for president. I can’t explain it, but I sense my country is going to need me...I know it won’t be easy on me or my family, But God wants me to do it.” No room for self-doubt there. Kind of scary to listen to a president so sure he is listening to God.

Besides alcoholism, Frank explores Bush’s propensity to lie. At one time or another, each of us has met up with a congenital liar. Often, the prevaricator doesn’t even realize he is lying, so accustomed has he or she become to evading the truth, running the gamut from submitting false income tax returns to name-dropping about one’s non-existent dinner companion. While the first offense might eventually merit a hefty fine, or worse, the second would be of little consequence beyond possible embarrassment.

Frank warns us, though, that: “George Bush’s inability and/or unwillingness to maintain fealty to the truth is so essential to his presidency and political life that it has inspired a growing number of courageous, important books, most notably: Al Franken’s Lies and the lying Liars Who Tell Them and David Corn’s The Lies of George W. Bush.

Frank explains that Bush doesn’t tell the truth because he doesn’t have to. We are reminded that he has distorted or lied about his military service, his business dealings, his arrest history; his Texas political record, his campaign opponents, his rationale for war.

The writer’s book is chilling in its revelation of what kind of man inhabits the White House, a leader who has sent us over the cliff into the pit of a war from which there appears to be no exit, a leader who hides from the price of war, as our dead are brought home under cover of night, with cameras forbidden to record the event for the newspapers.

We should worry about such a man. We should worry more for ourselves, who stand still for such lack of national courage and compassion for the families of our fallen men and women.

We should worry about a free press that grows less free by the day, forcing us to seek for truth in the foreign media.

We should worry about the lack of response to the Supreme Court’s decision to allow our private homes to be taken away under the whim of any contractor with the political clout to do so.

We should worry about our young people’s finding stimulation in drugs because real life doesn’t offer the challenge to flex their intellectual and moral muscles to train for a fulfilling life in a nation where creating jobs abroad for foreigners takes precedence over serving the needs of our own workers.

We should worry about how to strengthen our national will, our first step toward true national defense.

If Bush can get by with doing and saying whatever he wants in the Oval Office, it is because we are silent outside it.

In the midst of fear and confusion, let us pray for one another, for this nation we hold dear, and for our world, paradoxically fragile and secure.

Blessings on each of you and your families, as we prepare today for a better, more perfect Union tomorrow. Amen.

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