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Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Hypergonadalism

Thembarassing thang bout Bushes thway he tawx. “Strategery,” he said, and he still got elected. Tsall tmuch fer meeda git.

Kathleen Parker says it’s because he’s trying to talk Washingtonese rather than Texan. When he was governor there warnt none of all that. Could be. My own take is that he has a learning disorder. Not an insult. Not an imputation of low intelligence. Just a possibility. I’m too lazy to do the research to get the stats right, but boys have vastly more such problems than girls. Boys have more dyslexia, more ADHD, more behavioral problems of every description except anorexia. It’s harder to be a boy than a girl. Boy babies die more than girl babies, even though more boy babies are conceived. They die more in the womb, too, you see.

I suspect it has to do with testosterone. Masculine brains are more highly compartmentalized than feminine brains. MRI scans show that male brains light up in a highly localized spot, very brightly, when working on vocabulary tests, say. Female brains light up more dimly, but over a wider area. Just as much energy, but different application. It’s like that all down the line. I once took a test that purports to measure the gender bias of the brain, and I was skewed almost to the extremity of the masculine end of the continuum. The point is, this compartmentalization occurs when the fetal brain of a certain number of weeks is exposed to testosterone. The more T exposure, the more compartmentalized, which is just another way of saying the more masculine. Testosterone maculinizes a brain by compartmentalizing it.

Again, at puberty, the corpus callosum -- the cartilaginous-like bundle that connects the two halves of the brain -- actually degenerates, becomes thinner and less functional, in males. This would have the effect of lessening the communication between the two halves -- one rather horrifying approach to controlling epilepsy was to sever this structure. Yikes. Some studies suggest the thinning is illusory, but there are certainly morphological differences, which must account for differences in male/female behavior. And it is certainly true that women are much better at multi-tasking. They really are. Women are a floodlight, men are a spotlight -- or a laser beam. And what is it, at puberty, that would cause the apparent degeneration of the corpus callosum? You got it. Testosterone.

So there it is. Bush is a macho cowboy. Yeeha. For all my many feminine traits -- poetry, compassion, good manners -- I too am a victim or beneficiary of hypertestostronism. As I’ve complained, I was in second grade twice. I’m a truly awful speller, although a side benefit of the spell checker is that it's actually a pretty good teacher. And I’m still not a very fast reader. With middle age, testosterone levels are supposed to fall. I would hope that spelling ability would go up concomitantly. In my case, great blond beast that I am, my T levels are still as high as ever. I’m like a teenager. Hide your women. And animals. Grrr. Oh, am I talking about myself again? Back to Bush. Or did I ever stop taling about Bush, since I 've been talking about hiding your women hahaha.

My point is that there is no correlation between learning disabilities and intelligence. Bush is not an idiot just because he seems so inarticulate. I'm inexpressably articulate, but that's not what makes me so wonderfully intelligent. [And a small smug smile flits across my lips.] Strange, isn’t it, that the lefty bleeding hearts who bend over backwards (when they’re not bending over forwards, ha, ha) to excuse antisocial behavior, are the same people who mock Bush’s vocabularitalistic inventorosity, which has the same original impetus. Bush, instead of becoming a criminal, channeled his energies into the sort of leadership that a vast majority of Americans, at one time, supported -- three times the 30% who supported him only a short time ago. Ah, how fleeting is popularity. The lefties would say Bush is the criminal, and in a curious reversal, I’m saying he’s the victim of a learning disability. That’s just ironistically bizaritudinous.

The obvious lesson to walk away with is that it isn't the incidentals of expression or even of character that make a president great or small. clinton was a pig because of his character, but with his gifts he could have been a great president, instead of a place holder. Bush is the president he is not in the slightest because of the way his brain is wired to his mouth. A president is more than the wiring of his brain to his mouth, or to his penis. A president is his policies and his ability to enact them. As to that, history will be the decider.


J

1 comment:

Teresa said...

Last year my son went to Washington and actually met President Bush. He was one of the 2 presidential scholars from our state. (2 seniors are chosen from each state and are given a free trip to Washington along with various dinners and award ceremonies)Bush spoke to the scholars and my son said everyone, even the liberals, were impressed. They almost all agreed that Bush came across as very intelligent and spoke much better in person than he does on TV.