Tuesday, October 25, 2005

GW Bush as Evidence that We Inhabit an "Alternate Reality"

There’s a lot of speculation about how the whole Traitorgate and Iraq catastrophe came about. Wasn’t there some adult supervision of the regime? Some may hold that the current troubles are all part of a cunning evil plan whereby the Bush crime family seizes even more power, but I am doubtful. Some other possible explanations are more attractive to me.

Amanda at Pandagon explains the apparent rank stupidity of the Bushites by speculating that Bush thinks he is in a movie (http://www.pandagon.net/archives/2005/10/strike_the_impe.html#trackbacks). Specifically, he thinks he is the president played by Bill Pullman in Independence Day. It’s all a game to him. He is utterly delusional and surrounds himself with people who go along with the delusion.

David Brin (http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2005/10/holodeck-scenario-part-ii.html) speculates that the whole world is just GW Bush’s holodeck fantasy and that his future self is living out the life that Bush dreams that he would have lived if he hadn’t squandered his real life on whiskey and whores. He is living out a sophisticated simulation, and we are all just subroutines. Given his complete lack of character and skills, it is improbable that a real universe would be configured to allow GW Bush to live his seemingly charmed life.

I’m drawn to the “many worlds” scenario where every possible event that could have happened did happen in some universe. That way, I get to be more than a bit player in GW Bush's elaborate fantasy. There is an infinite number of alternate universes, some of which differ trivially but some of which contain what appear to us to be extremely improbable configurations, like the universes in the TV show Sliders. My consolation is that our universe in which GW Bush and his ilk prosper is an outlier and that in the “mainstream” universes he is a hobo or institutionalized.

More evidence for the many worlds scenario may be found in instances where we seem to move between closely related universes, such as when I slide from the universe where I put my keys on the dresser to one in which I placed them elsewhere. Apparently, Senator Hutchison has experienced a slide out of a universe where she has never considered perjury a serious offense. Dick Cheney slid in from the evil alternate universe from Star Trek where he pushed for a full on occupation of Iraq back in 1992.

No other explanation works!

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