Cassie Lewis, on her weblog The Jetty has a nice observation: "Sometimes I think that war's structure mimics that of some 'mean average' inner life. How countries act could be much more adaptive than this." You may see the comment in context here.

This got me to thinking about the author Robert Johnson, a Jungian theorist who has done a great deal of work considering human psychological development in terms of myth (see He).

I had the pleasure of hearing Mr. Johnson give a presentation several years ago, while he was in the process of completing Contentment (linked to the author’s name, above). According to Mr. Johnson, the typical male in Western society goes through four stages:
1)youth (2)adolescence (3) majority (4) old age.
At any stage it is possible for things to go wrong. In youth, one can see the glowing possibilities of majority too soon, and attempt to seize them before he is fully ready. In old age, one can become a sage or a tyrant.

I asked Mr. Johnson if this model applied to societies as well as individuals; he replied that it did. I followed up by asking what stage our society was currently in. He replied "old age."

If Mr. Johnson’s assessment is accurate, it would seem America is acting more like a tyrant than like a sage. A sage, you see, recognizes that his strength is declining with age, and shares such wisdom and experience as he can with the coming generation.

Not too clear what the agenda of the current administration is, but "sharing wisdom" would seem to be far from it. The pre-attack attitude of "my way or the highway," along with the current strutting of "bring it on," seems reflective of a tyrant. A very powerful tyrant who is likely to continue getting his way until he has remade the world in his own concrete Disney-land image.

One theory, which I mentioned below, is that our Fearless Leader buys into fundamentalist theories of Armageddon, and is working to stimulate the beginning of the end. While I remain skeptical that our Fearless Leader is capable of believing much of anything, I do wonder how he would envision the post-Apocalyptic world.

One assumes, of course, that most American fundies believe Our Righteous Nation is the New Jerusalem. Therefore, the post-Apocalypse world will look very much like Disney land as managed by Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and their ideological brother Osama ben Laden.

Robert Johnson’s mythic exemplar of tyranny is King Lear. And only King Lear in his madness would seek a paradise such as this.