Stranger

Covington passed this on to us yesterday, and the title says is all:

"Stranger and Stranger: Why is George Bush reading Camus?"

I can hardly believe it myself. Is it possible that Bush is embracing the humanities? Why is Bush reading one of my favorite books? What could be next: Rove curling up with Artaud's Theater and Its Double (That, actually, is the scariest thing I can conceive of)?

Dickinson posits the idea that Bush thinks of himself as Meursault, the overbored protagonist who shoots an Arab for kicks, and the fact that Tony Snow is tutoring Bush on the history of Existentialism makes me wonder what kind of lesson Bush takes away from the book, and the philosophy behind it.

No doubt that a misreading of existentialism creates boorish, self involved nitwits: Find any hipster with two semesters of philosophy and a shitty attitude if you don't believe me, or a histrionically angsty teenager in all black (I should know). If Existentialism is all about Death and Freedom, then the above are existentialists, no?

No. This is a classic misreading, one that stretches from moody undergrads to their cranky philosophy professors. Existentialism is about the struggle against death, the acceptance of this as one of the immutable truths, and then...GETTING ON WITH LIFE. People who think that existentialism is a death trip are not existentialists, for they fetishize death as the end in and of itself. We call these folks Nihilists, or Christian Conservatives.

The other misreading is that of Freedom. A lot of folks misinterpret this as an Existential Absolute, meaning that one can absolutely do what ever one wants whenever one wants: In short, be a self involved twit. While this may be desirous on a superficial level, such a superficial understanding of Existential Freedom, like Nietzsche's "Will to Power", can have disasterous consequences (see Heidegger and National Socialism).

While Freedom is the end in Existentialism, it is, as the bumper sticker says "not free" in that their is a responsibility in that freedom to always treat other human beings as ends in themselves and not means to an end, and part of that is the liberation of others, because extending freedom makes you more free. On the surface, this might resonate with the neoconservatives, for they would say that this is exactly what the Bush Doctrine is, and while the Bush Doctrine might say this doesn't make it so. Saying it and not making good on it makes one no more than a Mercenary who uses all available means to advance their personal agenda, including such platitudes, to flee from the responsibilities of freedom. In this way, freedom is "not free", but it is cheap, like the quaint saying over the gate of famous work camp "Arbeit Macht Frei".

I would recommend, if you're looking for something a bit more overtly moral, trying on Camus's Resistance, Rebellion and Death or The Myth of Sisyphus. As Bill Cosby used to say at the outset of Fat Albert "Hey hey hey"...

er...I mean..."You might just learn somethin'".