closer to the world of Tiberius and Caligula than it is to the world of the American
Revolution or the Constitutional Convention of 1789. The leitmotiv of modern American
presidential politics is unquestionably an imperial theme, most blatantly expressed by
Bush in his slogan for 1990, "The New World Order," and for 1991, the "pax
universalis." The central project of the Bush presidency is the creation and consolidation
of a single, universal Anglo-American (or Anglo-Saxon) empire very directly modelled
on the various phases of the Roman Empire.
There is one other aspect of the biographical-historical method of the Graeco-Roman
world which we have sought to borrow. Ever since Thucydides composed his
monumental work on the Peloponnesian war, those who have sought to imitate his style -
-with the Roman historian Titus Livius prominent among them-- have employed the
device of attributing long speeches to historical personages, even when it appears very
unlikely that the protagonists could have made such lengthy orations at the time. This has
nothing to do with the synthetic dialogue of current American political writing, which
attempts to present historical events as a series of trivial and banal soap opera exchanges
which carry on for such interminable lengths as to suggest that the authors are getting
paid by the word. Our idea of fidelity to the classical style has simply been to let George
Bush speak for himself wherever possible, through direct quotation. We are convinced
that by letting Bush express himself directly in this way, we afford the reader a more
faithful-- and damning-- account of Bush's actions.
George Bush might agree that "history is biography," although we suspect that he would
not agree with any of our other conclusions. There may be a few peculiarities of the
present work as biography that are worthy of explanation at the outset.
One of our basic theses is that George Bush is, and considers he to be, an oligarch. The
notion of oligarchy includes first of all the idea of a patrician and wealthy family capable
of introducing its offspring into such elite institutions as Andover, Yale, and Skull and
Bones. Oligarchy also subsumes the self- conception of the oligarch as belonging to a
special, exalted breed of mankind, one that is superior to the common run of mankind as
a matter of hereditary genetic superiority. This mentality generally goes together with a
fascination for eugenics, race science and just plain racism as a means of building a case
that one's own family tree and racial stock are indeed superior. These notions of
"breeding" are a constant in the history of the titled feudal aristocracy of Europe,
especially Britain, towards inclusion in which an individual like Bush must necessarily
strive. At the very least, oligarchs like Bush see themselves as demigods occupying a
middle ground between the immortals above and the hoi poloi below. The culmination of
this insane delusion, which Bush has demonstrably long since attained, is the obsessive
belief that the principal families of the Anglo-American elite, assembled in their
freemasonic orders, by themselves directly constitute an Olympian Pantheon of living
deities who have the capability of abrogating and disregarding the laws of the universe
according to their own irrational caprice. If we do not take into account this element of
fatal and megalomaniac hubris, the lunatic Anglo-American policies in regard to the Gulf
war, international finance, or the AIDS epidemic must defy all comprehension.