Originally published in Arthur No. 5 (July 2003)

YOU AND WHOSE ARMY?: Is George W. Bush Addicted to Cocaine?
A “Camera Obscura” column by Paul Cullum

CAMERA OBSCURA is a regular column examining the world and its lesser trafficked tributaries, recesses and psychic fallout through the filters of film, video and DVD.

DVDs/videos discussed in this column:
o Horns and Halos, directed by Suki Hawley and Michael Galinsky
o Journeys with George, directed by Alexandra Pelosi
o Uncle Saddam, directed by Joel Soler
o What I’ve Learned About U.S. Foreign Policy: The War Against the Third World, compiled by Frank Dorrel
o Unprecedented: The 2000 Presidential Election, directed by Richard Ray PÈrez and Joan Sekler

“If George W. Bush has not used cocaine, he ought to say it. If he has, he ought to say it and then say how he overcame it.” —Sen. Orrin Hatch (R.-Utah)

Is George W. Bush a pederast? Neo-fascist? Born-again zealot? Serial rapist? The question itself brooks no compromise; to raise it is tantamount to treason. The exact incidence and degree of oral-genital stimulation tolerated by a standing president may be suitable for the Congressional Record, but try suggesting we have a Crackhead-in-Chief, and see how far it gets you.

Yet given our president’s globally mystifying behavior of the past two months, no less than the paragons of the Fourth Estate have at least flirted with the concept in polite company. Following Bush’s televised press conference on March 7t, Maureen Dowd in the New York Times labeled him “the Xanax Cowboy” and observed that, “Determined not to be petulant, he seemed tranquilized.” Tom Shales in the Washington Post put a finer point on it: “It hardly seems out of order to speculate that, given the particularly heavy burden of being president in this new age of terrorism … the president may have been ever so slightly medicated.” Another New York Times editorial, by Paul Krugman, compares Bush’s pre-war behavior to that of Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny, famously fondling marbles and paranoidly raging about missing strawberries.

That national leaders can be addicted to drugs may be less an aberration than the historical norm.