Via Backword Dave, i was directed to Bush's "Wolves' campaign film. For some reason I was unable to get sound and was plunged into a dark, dense wood and then saw several wolves running across a landscape. I was reminded of nothing so much as the Wolfman's famous dream as reported to Freud, wherein the subject is stared at by several wolves perched on a tree:
Freud is quick to seize upon the details of the dream that occlude its main thrust: the wolves become the wolf in a picture-book used by his sister to scare him as a child; their bushy tails are drawn from a story grandfather told him about a tailor who caught a wolf by the tail and pulled it off; and they look like the sheep dogs he had seen copulating in the countryside. Most importantly, their number - six or seven - does not refer to the wolves themselves but to the goats eaten in the fairy-tale 'The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats' (1991: 260-262). In other words, Freud translates the Wolf Man's terror at seeing wolves at his window at night (a pack, a multiplicity) into a fear of the big bad wolf himself- the castrating father.
Ok, so tail ( = 'Bushy') removed and, Bush's, erm, tailor recently got him off the hook by explaining the curious bulge [!?] in his back which some thought might be a prompting device and would, if proven to be so, have proved rather emasculating. Is the President using campaign broadcasts to express a political castration anxiety? Or would it make a difference if I heard the soundtrack?
(One might also take in to account Deleuze's criticisms of Freud's reading of the dream:
he transcribes the varied, multiple and fragmented elements of the Wolf Man's existence into the singular significance of the dreadful phallus. The Wolf Man's sentient body, tortured by its multiple inhabitants and terrified by the prospect of becoming a multiplicity, remains silenced and misunderstood by Freud's univocal translation of its meaning. The dream of the wolves watching and desiring the Wolf Man, whose very name implies that he is between wolf and man, suggests a fear of becoming wolf- of joining the pack and becoming indistinguishable from it- of becoming a kind of singular multiplicity.
The President is supposed to be the single and univocal 'Daddy', the Master. In reality, the sentient being who occupies the symbolic mandate "President' is tortured and confused by the multiplicities of mandates, voices, of the 'Peoples' (African-American, Hispanics etc) he ostensibly represents.. )