Who Gets the Mantle

You will never convince me there aren't huge father issues at the heart of our darkness. All the recent Republican candidates for the presidency--running to be the national dad--have had very powerful fathers against whom, presumably, they were unconsciously weighing and finding themselves wanting. And then there were Obama and Clinton, who came from nothing.

Republicans wanted to destroy them before they were even in office. They were the usurpers, the false daddies, not because they weren't competent but because they were, thereby challenging the advantages of privilege. It operates independently of competence. Witness George Bush, being rehabilitated as we speak, a man of inconceivable functional worthlessness.

But he's our national dolt and so we find ways to try to like him to spare ourselves an audit of his crimes. They are our crimes now and the most important thing is to avoid a reckoning. And notice how this corresponds with Calvinism and its arbitrary form of salvation. It must be shown that good works never get you anywhere, so Calvinists are reassured by incompetence.

Everything is about luck, inheritance and the self-justifications of wealth and worldly success, the opposite of the founding ethos of the American State, whose originators knew the failures of primogeniture, hereditary rule and unaccountable authority. So there's a social corollary to these individual problems, what group among our generation gets to run the show.