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Posted
Tuesday, April 08, 2008 12:28 PM
| By
Hanna Rosin
Two things dominated my psyche yesterday: that excruciating Max Moseley video showing the famous son of Nazis engaging in some concentration camp orgy, and Steve Coll's The Bin Ladens, which I am currently reading. Coll's book is like an epic Russian novel you can't help but follow to its tragic end. The book is amazing for many reasons, and one is the way in which it describes Osama Bin Laden in terms of his lifelong search for a father figure to replace his own father, who died when he was young. Jacob Weisberg's book, "The Bush Tragedy," takes a similar approach, exploring Bush's personality as a reaction to his distant, waspish father. This triumvurate of seemingly unrelated psychological probings, plus an offhand comment from Tim Noah, led me to an insight about great men and the burdens they inherit through the paternal line: Osama's daddy complex led him to blow up the World Trade Center, and Bush's led him to launch the Iraq war. Compared to that, Moseley's method of working out his Oedipal issues seems pretty harmless.
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