I've come around to the notion that the United States of America deserved Bush and that his rise was an historical inevitability. Disgusting, no? But there's evidence to suggest that the malady now infecting the White House has for an even longer period of time infected our entire culture.

In last April's edition of Harper's Magazine, Curtis White (author of "The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don't Think for Themselves") wrote an essay essentially describing why America is now dysfunctional. We are, White said, a culture torn in two between the impersonal demands of capitalism and the extremely personal implications of Christianity. White says:

"Justice, under capitalism, works not from a notion of obedience to a duty to preserve a social order, or to conscience, or to compassion, but from the assumption of a duty to preserve a social order and the legal `rights' that constitute that order, especially the right to property and the freedom to do with it what one wants."

White calls ours a death culture, where -- to take one example -- suburban McMansions in overly planned, orderly subdivisions serve as living cemeteries of desensitization. Buying a home is, as Henry Thoreau put it, the tenant "constructing his own coffin."

In this context, the only truly Christian notions of sacrifice and service to one's fellow humans are all but forgotten. Fundamentalist Christianity is no more than a peculiar bending of capitalism, which seeks to maximize monetary profit, often at the expense of others.

Add to that a culture that devalues interpersonal communication in exchange for the arms-length imagery of mass media -- a substitute that is thrilling but like a drug gives a person a false sense of possessing knowledge and awareness. As White puts it, American culture "is a culture of distraction."

What do you get? A society and culture in which work is valued but also in which the men and women who do the hardest work are less and less valued or rewarded. And who are, in part as a reaction, more and more inclined to resent it. Yet their resentments are redirected, away from corporate masters and even away (despite all the talk about big government being a problem) from public policymakers, and toward others of their own kind.

It's reminiscent of that old joke about telling your elected representative: "Don't tax thee, don't tax me, tax that fellow behind the tree."

The perfect storm of the Bush administration and neoconservative rule brought all this together into an active force.

George W. Bush himself is the epitome of The Distracted Man: Bound up in his own fears, prejudices and bitter failings. An average or less than average man who revels in same (he proudly advised college-bound students that they, too, could become president with only a D average). "Unpretentious" in the description of his handlers, but visibly out of his league and quite pretentious when he doesn't know what he's talking about, which -- as in America in general -- is more and more of the time. He reaches out to his fellow citizens by joking with them, or at their expense, back slapping and nicknaming as he goes. But this is superficiality. He is of a temper and has been known to be verbally cruel and insincere. He doesn't "care what you think." Being president is a "great honor" but it's also a very big joke, because after all, as he himself knows, HE was able to achieve the presidency.

He surrounds himself with sycophants -- or perhaps they are better termed psychophants, and perhaps he is the psychopant to their manipulation, not the other way around. These neocons, frustrated holdovers from another era of failed leadership, include the likes of Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, men who had a shared vision of how the world should be and who, failing in its realization, kept coming back again and again, effectively appointing themselves as the overseers of the republic, translating their agenda into the superficial backslapping that their nominal decider could process.

So this administration, which obtained power in large measure as a result of a strong plurality of well organized Christian fundamentalists, proceeded to install their anti-life culture into the mechanism of government. Prof. White would argue that the anti-life equation already existed there, a product of both major parties and their more or less equally benign regard of capital(istic) excess.

The news media, too, increasingly thrived on the death culture. If it bleeds it leads. Man bites dog equals dysfunction, and dysfunction equals the daily norm of commerce. In that respect, the Bush administration has really only just been lining itself up with the prevailing cultural norms.

The American Society for Quality was created to foster improved business processes. In this context "quality" means improving workplace efficiency and output in order to add value to a product or service. Unfortunately, the society's view of quality pretty much stops at profit. For the most part, a high quality product is one that is profitable. Which explains how so many products provide short-term pleasure and benefit to individuals at the expense of long-term degradation (even death) in the larger environment.

The point is: Americans talk a good game, about exporting not just democracy but "freedom," and of innovation and service and plenitude. But it's all done on the national credit card. Not just the card that holds the many hundreds of billions of dollars in our foreign debt, but also the card that holds our moral and spiritual defict, the one that has allowed us to more ably ignore the common good in order to maximize our own pleasure and economic utility.

All these cultural tendencies came together -- along with the highly dysfunctional yet superficially swell-looking American electoral system -- to create the Bush administration, and in thine image. "Not in my name," you say? I would agree, yet as Prof. White points out, to the extent that you retreat from the fight, you are, as our countercultural friends from the '60s would say, nevertheless part of the problem.