A peculiar president

I'm reading Gavin Souter's 1968 book, A Peculiar People, which is about William Lane and New Australia -- the brave but flawed attempt by about 600 Australian working class people to set up an agrarian communist society in Paraguay in the 1890s.

Even in late-19th century Australia it was seen as dangerous if a leader claimed to be receiving instructions from a deity. Some of Lane's most fervent supporters abandoned the project when Lane started crediting God with some of his actions.

James Murdoch, a classics scholar, arrived at New Australia in early 1894 intending to become the commune's school principal. When he met Lane, who told him that he was consulting God about the affairs of New Australia, Murdoch immediately decided he had to return to Japan. He later wrote, "When the leader professed to be ordering his movements and policy by the instructions of a supernatural being, New Australia was no longer any place for James Murdoch". (Murdoch went on to write a three-volume History of Japan and hold the chairs of English Literature at the University of Tokyo and Oriental Studies at the University of Sydney.)

Perhaps more than any one thing, it was the religiosity and fanaticism which Lane developed after he had founded the community that freaked out his followers, even his lieutenants, with resignations en masse eventually leading to the ruin of the project.

Now, 11 decades later we learn that Dubya gets his orders from an imaginary friend who apparently tells him to slaughter scores of thousands of innocent men women and children in a foreign land most of his subjects can't even find on a map. How long can this last in modern America before someone or some movement stops him?

Theocracy Watch on Bush

Is Bush Crazy?

Tagged: bush, god, religion, fundamentalism, christianity, mental+health, iraq, war, progressive