The nutter that rules the world
Harold Hark
3 July 2003

George W. Bush said to Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas:

"God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me tostrike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them."

There is a lot of "God" talk coming from so-called leaders these days. Australia's Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, Peter Jensen, is one of them. He is using "God" as the reference point for his church-sundering homophobia.

Invoking the "gaseous windbag on high" is a sure way to stun the peasants into an abiding fear of everyone that looks different or suffers a different religion, but as the source of policy, foreign or domestic, it is sheer medieval madness that can only lead to chaos.

Frederick Brass, who passed on the article with the above quote, comments:

"Bush now claims that 'god told him' to smite the terrorists in Al Qaida and Iraq. Does god now tell him to bring peace to the Middle East? We have a nut case in the White house listening to disembodied voices. People who usually claim to kill because of hearing from god get a padded cell -- when is Bush going to get his?"

In reply to Brass, this from Delaware Express:

"I'm talking to Carol, the schizo-monitor (aka therapist), and she said about the comments that Bush made, 'You've got to be kidding; that's a classic textbook symptom of paranoid schizophrenia. God talks to them very frequently. Usually in the context of telling them to hurt others--as in God told Bush to get Saddam.. The paranoia comes in with getting them before they get you."'

In his lecture on Neuroscience - the New Philosophy, Vilayanur S Ramachandran has this to say:

[Schizophrenics] hallucinate, often hearing voices. They become delusional, thinking they're Napoleon - or George Bush. Or they're convinced the CIA has planted devices in their brain to control their thoughts and actions. Or that aliens are controlling them.

Psycho-pharmacology has revolutionised our ability to treat schizophrenia, but the question remains: why do they behave the way they do? I'd like to speculate on this based on some work we've done on anosognosia (denial of illness) - which you see in right-hemisphere lesions - and some very clever speculations by Chris Frith and Sarah Blakemore. Their idea is that unlike normal people, the schizophrenic can't tell the difference between his own internally-generated images and thoughts versus perceptions that are evoked by real things outside.

If anyone of you here conjures up a mental picture of a clown in front of you, you don't confuse it with reality partly because your brain has access to the internal command you gave. You're expecting to visualise a clown, that's why you see it and you don't hallucinate. But if the mechanism in your brain that does this becomes faulty, then all of a sudden you can't tell the difference between a clown you're imagining and a clown you're actually seeing there. In other words, you hallucinate. You can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality.

Similarly, you and I momentarily entertain the thought it would be nice to be Napoleon. But in a schizophrenic this momentary thought becomes a full-blown delusion instead of being vetoed by reality.

What about the other symptoms of schizophrenia - the fact that aliens are controlling you? When you move your finger voluntarily, you know you sent the command, the motor centres in the brain sent the command. So you experience willing the movement. You don't say, Oh the finger moved on its own. But if the mechanism that performs this comparison is flawed, you no longer experience YOU willing the movement. So you come up with this bizarre interpretation. You say your movements are controlled by aliens or brain implants - and of course that's what paranoid schizophrenics do.

Bush may be a clown, but in this case the clown is "God". Now it is possible that Bush is as normal as you and I, (well, maybe you), and that he is using "God" as a political football. Then again, he may once upon a time have used "God" as such a device, but no longer remembers, confusing the lie with genuine belief.

At any rate, this loony has captured America (containing the world's greatest collection of loonies, it must be admitted) and is doing an Alexander the Great on the rest of us.

How embarrassing is it then for Australians, whose Prime Minister--none other than John "Humpty Dumpty" Howard--slavishly follows George W. Bush's every whim? How Dubya's ventriloquists, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney, Perle et al, must be snickering as the dummy from the Antipodes kicks his little legs with glee while they work his lifeless jaw.

The origins of John Howard as Humpty Dumpty:
David Campbell: Humpty Dumpty told a big lie

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