Bush's new desire to strut and posture as a madman on the world stage, as contrasted with
his earlier devotion to secret, behind-the-scenes iniquity has certain parallels in
Suetonius's portrait of the Emperor Nero. Before Nero had fully consolidated his hold on
power, he cultivated outward and public displays of filial piety, and strove to manifest
"good intentions." These were the veneer for monstrous crimes that were at first carried
out covertly: "...at first his acts of wantonness, lust, extravagance, avarice, and cruelty
were gradual and secret...." But once Nero had firmly established his own regime, the
monster became more and more overt: "little by little, however, as his vices grew
stronger, he dropped jesting and secrecy and with no attempt at disguise openly broke out
into worse crime." [fn 1] Something similar can be observed in the case of Caligula, who
had a wimp problem of sorts during the time that he lived on the island of Capri in the
shadow of the aging emperor Tiberius, in somewhat the same way that Bush had lived in
the shadpw of Reagan, as least as far as the public was concerned. In the case of Caligula,
"although at Capri every kind of wile was resorted to by those who tried to lure him or
force him to utter complaints, he never gave them any satisfaction...." Caligula was "...so
obsequious towards his grandfather [Tiberius] and his household, that it was well said of
him that no one had ever been a better slave or a worse master." [fn 2] Later, when
Caligula came into his own, he exacted a terrible price from the world for his earlier
humiliations.
The process of mental and moral degeneration, the loss of previous self-control
observable in Bush during this period is not merely an individual matter. The geek act in
the White House was typical of the collective mental and political behavior of the faction
to which Bush belongs by birth and pedigree, the Anglo-American financiers. During
1989 and 1990, outbursts of megalomania, racism, and manic flight forward were
common enough, not just in Washington, but in Wall Street, Whitehall, and the City of
London as well. These moods provided the psychic raw material for the strategic
construct which Bush would proclaim during the late summer of 1990 as "The New
World Order."
By the autumn of 1989, it was evident that the Soviet Empire, the cold-war antagonist
and then the uneasy partner of the Anglo-Americans over more than four decades, was
falling apart. During the middle 1980's, the Anglo-Americans and their counterparts in
the Kremlin had arrived at the conclusion that, since they could no longer dominate the
planet through their rivarly (the cold war), they must now attempt to dominate it through
their collusion. The new detente of Reagan's second term, in which Bush had played a
decisive role, was a worldwide condominium of the Soviets and Anglo-Saxons, the two
increasingly feeble and gutted empires who now leaned on each other like two drunks,
each one propping the other up. That had been the condominium, incarnated in the figure
of Gorbachov.
Both empires were collapsing at an exceedingly rapid pace, but during the second half of
the 1980's the rate of Soviet decay outstripped that of the Anglo-Americans. That took
some doing, since between 1985 and 1990, the global edifice of Anglo-American
speculation and usury had been shaken by the panic of 1987, and by the deflationary
contraction of 1989, both symptoms of a lethal disorder. But the Anglo-Americans,