fiction, history

[pynchonoid]

[...] I've seen this storyline somewhere before: A
president who had been a feckless, party-loving,
hard-drinking man, is visited by a messenger of God
and suddenly changes his ways. Thereafter, he knows
what is right and will listen to no one who suggests
otherwise. This president, convinced that he is doing
God's work--that he is God’s spokesman on
earth--suspends civil liberties to fight crime. He
repudiates international treaties and announces that
the United States will build new weapons to put itself
in a position of world dominance. He orders other
nations to follow American dictates, or else. That the
"or else" means using American military might for
preemptive war is made clear to world leaders when
they are assembled and shown a demonstration of
American military power. They all immediately agree to
do what the United States (and God) demands.

Then it hit me. The plot that sounds so much like the
way George W. Bush sees himself and his presidency is
that of a now obscure 1933 film produced by William
Randolph Hearst's Cosmopolitan Studios, Gabriel Over
the White House. In it, an irresponsible man named
Judson Hammond, played by Walter Huston, is elected to
the presidency on promises he doesn't intend to keep.
"Oh, don't worry," an aide tells him, "by the time
they realize you’re not keeping them, your term will
be over." Then, driving his car recklessly, President
Hammond has a tire blowout at 100 mph. He apparently
dies from his injuries, but is transformed by divine
intervention and emerges, literally born again, as a
supremely confident leader who has no doubts in the
rightness of his course. He demands that Congress give
him dictatorial powers and then adjourn, so that he
can solve all domestic and international problems. He
once was lost; now he's found. But what has he found?

President Hammond's approach to the world, like that
of George W. Bush, fits with neither traditional
Republican isolationism nor the Wilsonian
internationalism practiced by most presidents from
Franklin D. Roosevelt through George H. W. Bush and
Bill Clinton. Rather, the film, with the assurance
that God is on the side of the United States, advances
an approach to the world that might best be termed
"isolated internationalism." With God on our side,
this nation should neither withdraw from the world nor
work out agreements with other nations to form
cooperative international coalitions. Rather, the
United States should simply declare what it will do
and expect others to do. Other nations are welcome to
join in a Coalition of the Willing, meaning those
willing to follow unquestioningly the divinely
inspired Leader of the United States.

Mr. Hearst's simplistic views of the world and of the
solutions to its problems eerily foreshadow those that
hold sway in Mr. Bush's White House today. God spoke
through Hearst's fictional President Hammond;
similarly the Bush who now occupies the presidency
confuses himself with the one that burned in Exodus
3:2. "I pray to be as good a messenger of [God's] will
as possible," Mr. Bush told Bob Woodward. [...]

...read it all:  
Does Bush Think He's Channeling God?
"http://hnn.us/articles/8146.html
by Robert S. McElvaine, at History News Network

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