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Recharge (+/-).  I'll be on vacation for a week and don't expect to be posting to the weblog in that time.  I need some time on the beach, and I have to work through the printer's galleys for "The Man Who Rowed Lake Pontchartrain and Other Stories."

The grapes are sweet, says Bush.  Because much of Freud's psychoanalytic writings follow upon his pre-analytic Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895), in which he attempts to set down a scheme for a neuroscience of mind, the popularity of his "defense mechanisms" ends up disguising the reductionist basis of his explanation of familiar patterns of behavior that occur in normal coping situations. This isn't to say that he didn't discover and name genuine pathology, but only that he renamed and tried to give a mechanical picture of something known at least as far back as Aesop. We all know Aesop's fable of the fox and the "sour grapes": a fox tries but fails to reach thirst-quenching grapes and in the end says "they're probably sour anyway." In modern psychology that is an example of rationalization. The flip-side of "sour grapes" is called "sweet lemons," where what is attained is considered at least to be very adequate.

Now isn't this what Bush is doing in his declarations about his administration's decision to invade Iraq, to put US and coalition soldiers in harm's way for an indeterminate period of time, to spend $280 billion rebuilding another country in our image? "Although we have not found stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction, we were right to go into Iraq," he said in a speech at Tennessee's Oak Ridge nuclear facility on Monday. "We removed a declared enemy of America who had the capability of producing weapons of mass murder and could have passed that capability to terrorists bent on acquiring them." [Source: New York Times, July 12, 2004]

My point is not that he isn't entitled to his frank expression of sweet-lemons rationalization; he is, for I don't think we need to deny him his humanity and prevent him from coping for personally causing the single most costly blunder in 21st century America. My point is that we must recognize that he is talking more about himself than about the reality of his deed. When he starts in on his mantra about the sweet rewards of an invaded Iraq, he is not really talking to us, but to himself. Perhaps it is a mechanical defense of Bush's ego; perhaps if he says it enough times, it will all be okay and we too will believe that a lie can be very adequate.

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