In psychiatric parlance, rigid polarities like those the President has made time and again are regarded as pathological: 'splitting'. The patient is unable to tolerate ambiguity and insists on viewing the people in his life through an 'all good' or 'all bad' lens. Bush and his cohorts have been masterful splitters, employing a language that gives no room for exchange and necessarily distorts reality, which, unfortunately, is usually murky. This kind of speech does not recognise an interlocutor, a real human other. It is speech without empathy, and it is startlingly similar to the rhetoric of the Muslim radicals who spew venom on the West and 'the enemies of Islam'.
Siri Hustvedt in the Observer....
who describe her thus:
Novelist, essayist and poet whose most recent novel, The Sorrows of an American, came out this year. Married to fellow writer Paul Auster.
We do truly live in Mad Men, don't we?
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