Bill Frist, Volcano

“Besides the healer and the karate expert, he’s also the rodeo rider, the pilot, and the marathoner with the single kneecap . . .
Too bad Frist never took up boxing. The top picture of Frist is unusual because it shows him actually displaying an emotion related to his body in public–pain and discomfort. If he has only one kneecap, what’s he trying to prove by entering these races? Frist looks old and haggard in this photo, photographed in natural light, minus the usual props he surrounds himself with to advertise his wealth and status. The ordinary citizens on the street seem indifferent to him (without his external trappings of power, he’s easy to ignore). Does anyone know the name of the statue behind Frist and what it signifies?
The bottom photo shows Frist and his Senate henchmen. Rick Santorum on the left, wears a jazzy, metrosexual pink necktie and a vivid blue shirt. If Rick knew that Reid was going to pull the “stunt” he did, I’m sure Santorum would have dressed a more conservatively for the TV cameras. Santorum looks sour-faced and is in a snit. Like Frist, he’s a man who carefully controls his facial expressions (or are both he and Frist botoxed?) Trent Lott, partially obscured by a shadow, stands further back, to Frist’s left. Lott, the white supremacist, is from an earlier time. His wrinkles show. Lott’s looking off into space with a grim expression on his face as if his mind were elsewhere. Maybe he’s pondering where in Frist’s back to stick the knife.

I like your take on this BAG. As an aside, I’ve come to the conclusion that Nixon was probably Aspergers Syndrome: highly intelligent, manic knowledge of football statistics, without moral compass, antisocial, inappropriate behaviors (my favorite photo of Nixon “relaxing” on the beach in San Clemente with tie, jacket and shoes).
I’d like to know more about schizoid type vs. narcissistic. Can you provide a link or something? I’m enjoying the high level of political satire the administration is provoking these days with their self-destruction on view.
BAG, can you give us something on the 7 days of riots in France by the Muslim youth there, which is not being covered by our navel-gazing press?

“It was, of course, a heinous and dishonest thing to do.”
I think the word “dishonest” and its placement in the sentence is interesting, as in scary-interesting, because it makes the adopting of the cats from shelters for the purpose of experimenting on them (the “dishonest” part) equal to the killing of them (the “heinous” part “of course”). Lying and killing are not morally equal, but Frist apparently doesn’t know that, which he proves by saying “a few sentiments” weren’t going to stop him. He also never says he didn’t mean to kill the cats. That’s because he DID intend to kill them, so it doesn’t even occur to him to feel sorry about it. Also, he splits himself into “little Billy Frist” by day — he was in fact an adult in medical school at the time — and “Dr. William Harrison Frist” by night. Frist is describing a Jekyll-and-Hyde split in himself, a good-vs.-evil split. “In short, I was going a little crazy.” I think that’s the understatement of 1989, when the book came out. Too bad he still is crazy and in a position of power.
And please, Kevin, psychopathic behavior does not equal “gay”!
(Speaking of “gay,” a funny detail about the top picture is the grafitti on the statue behind Frist, which says “DYKES”-something.)

Looks ever so much like a p/o’ed middle aged Ted Bundy.

Funny picture of the three leaders (of the Republican coalition), they are part of a stagnent leadership:
Rick Santorum – the zealot, if he were in the Taliban he would be the first one out there measure mens beard length
Trent Lott – the racist who rose to power from the Southern Stragegy
Bill Frist – the criminal and flip-flopping panderer big business, pinch of evangelical, touch off upper class warrior, and spritz of every other part of the Republican coalition
In the congress the Republicans have Tom DeLay… bah ha ha that is scary.
In the white house Bush, Dick, Rove, and Libby, throw Rummy and Condi in and it only gets worse.
They should be running from the coming onslaught of horse hoves that are going to trample them in publicily of their own making. (Like Frist in the first picture).
Santorum is a joke who thinks he can be president, his advisers need to dump a glass of cold water down his pants. Trent Lott knows he stumbled one to many times and got toppled by the now more powerful forces of the Republican coalition. Bill Frist is not stupid, he knows the allegations that surround his 20/20 vision blind trust stock (insider) trades has got enough mud on him that his enemies will be able to protray him as the right wing version of John Kerry (and Frist has no moral high ground to run to…actually Bush has set up a gulag on the moral high ground).
All their faces just blur into a talking head. I had a good laugh when they show Santorum nodding his head like with a maniacle grin, like a bobble head doll on the dash of the General Lee during Bush’s mistaken 16 word SOTU speech.
I think an interesting analysis would be to feature images of power, and spin from the different branches of government. Pop in some pictures of DeLay and his replacement, and pop in some Bush, maybe even a few SCOTUS nomination pictures, and if you can find them some of these K street hustlers (like Abramoff).
You could have the imagray of a party in total political control, what they do with it, and how they present themselves. You would also see terrible leaders, criminals, apologists, and perhaps the party faithful who still love them simply because they have an (R) next to their name.
If you wanted to add another layer you could add in the Democrats from each of the respective branches and how they are doing (better, worse, and indifferent) on the same fronts.
I bring this up because that is what I see in the picture of those three, and I did mock Frist when he was talking about a “personal insult” (same as Trent Lott said when he though he could hold onto Senate leadership). Of all the things to be insulted by…
What I see is a failure of every leader they have, their leadership is more skilled at “the game”, and has a lot more power…but they are terrible leaders. Of course when big business is backing you, and you have a parallel “media” me thinks its not to hard to climb on their backs.
Republicans have made it clear that they are not interested in accountability or American values, they are willing to be lead by anyone and will not hold those people accountable for anything. Here we have an investigation that they are trying to bury for good, or at least until after the elections in 2006 (no doubt why the deal starts looking at things Nov 12th… so that it will take at least 1 year… a good week after the elections). Katrina was a double disaster, the strategy in Iraq has been deadly, the lies leading up to the war criminal, DeLay and his K Street folks are a cancer to fedral and state politics, Santorum wants to control the way I raise my family, Lott thinks segregation was/is a good thing, China is buying up the worlds oil, we are choking the environment to death… I could rant on for a few pages, but here are what we have for solutions from the Republicans:
0. We won’t hold any of -our- people accountable
1. Dont ask us questions
2. Dont offer us suggestions
3. Get blacklisted if you dissent (or (character) assasinated)
4. Talk about God a lot
5. Cut Food Stamps
6. Turn down the thermostat in the White House to 72
7. Harbor criminals for years with jobs in the White House and security clearance when they are invovled with leaking covert CIA agents names
8. Rig up some photo ops
9. Do the oppposite of what you say, and accuse your opponent of what you do.
I hope they become small blur, or smudge in history. What I wouldn’t pay for a DVD of the locked down Senate session.

I noticed the comment on favorite picture of Nixon. Mine is the one where his mentor, Prescott Bush is looking down on him with a controlling grin and adjusting his Fedora(?) cap with his finger tips, his other hand in his coat pocket. Prescott is also wearing the same cap, and Nixon is looking up with an expression that reads “doormat”.
I have never seen such a picture in American politics. The photo says I control you in 1001 words.
I really wish Bag would run that photo some day.
Here is the only place I can find it:
http://www.jfkmurdersolved.com/images/prescott-nixon.jpg

I think it may well be true that most serial killers start with small animals and work their way up to humans.
In his boyhood years, Bush Jr. had a hobby of blowing up frogs with firecrackers, so yeah, there’s probably a pattern here.

Nixon used to refer to himself in the third person also…

Monsieurgonzo, are most of the young people of those areas not French citizens? I just assumed that their parents had come there from North Africa when workers were needed, and that the young men were born there and had citizenship.
There doesn’t really seem to be a religious factor, does there? For example, today is one of the two big annual Muslim holidays, and I haven’t even heard that mentioned in reports from Paris.

Just to touch on a couple comments. Psychologically, Frist really is a mixed-bag. The torturing of animals is one of the main criteria for a childhood diagnosis of “Conduct Disorder.” If it persists into adulthood, as RR alludes, the person generally develops into a sociopath. Just because we tend to identify sociopathy with criminality, that doesn’t mean it can’t express itself in other ways and degrees. I had been focusing on Frist’s tendency to live by his own rules as an expression of narcissism. I hadn’t considered his problems with rules and limits as reflecting a fundamental amorality. As I said above, though, Frist is complex and I’m still doing my homework.
Regarding lemondloulou’s “pre-emptive” analysis comment, I don’t take likely this rather public critical psychological analysis of a public figure. In Frist’s case, however, given the Presidential aspirations, I feel the effort can only aid in educating and quite possibly protecting the public.
Regarding RR’s speculation about “abuse,” I would say that there is often a tendency to consider this concept in too literal a way in an attempt to understand (or even dispel) psychological causes and effects. If the question here is how Frist was shaped (or twisted) from childhood, I don’t have much knowledge there yet. From the preliminary reading I’ve done, however, it seems that Frist had a tremendously successful father and older brother to look up to, and — considering his brilliance — perhaps he was consumed with the need to prove himself an equal, and from a darker place, to show them up.

I haven’t read Frist’s book “Transplant,” but I’ve read several excerpts that are consistently quoted. Frist’s cat heart-surgery “experiments” were conducted when he was in medical school at Harvard in the mid- to late-1970s. He was born in 1952, so he was not a child when he killed the cats, he was in his 20s. He describes watching the tiny hearts beating, so apparently the cats were not dead when he operated on them: “[a]s I watched the little strip of muscle beat hour after hour through the night in the basement of the hospital, I felt quite pure, as if I were reaching out and touching some eternal truth of nature.” He went to shelters throughout Boston, adopting cats: “Desperate, obsessed with my work, I visited the various animal shelters in the Boston suburbs, collecting cats.” He then kept the cats for a few days “as pets” before operating on them. There seem to be no records of how many cats were operated on and killed.

Asta: I don’t know what Frist did, if anything, to animals in his childhood. But the thread seemed to be heading in the direction of attributing the cat-killing story to his childhood, so I only meant to clarify dates for the record. Frist says in his book (the same book The BAG quoted for today’s discussion) that he collected cats from shelters in Boston to operate on them when he was in med school. So the cats were a kind of extra-credit project, one that he assigned to himself, however.

The more I read about Mr. Frist, the more he seems to be a wee bit of a psychopath. In fact, Scott Peterson comes to mind. It seems everything is in the world either just for his enjoyment or aimed at causing him trouble, i.e., Harry Reid had no other reason to call for a secret session than to slap Frist in the face. And HE wants to be president?
Perhaps he will. This country has spent 5 years enabling a dry drunk while he tears apart the fabric of governance. Why should we be surprised that we would elect a narcissistic psychopath. The ’schizoid’ would just be a bonus.
Kevin’s thought that he might be gay was interesting, although I’d not heard that mentioned elsewhere. Notice how people who maintain a front for the public while hiding the core of their being, denying to all who they really are, start leaking some bizarre stuff from their edges? Sort of like “jumping the couch.” I just believe one’s truth has to come out, one way or another. However, I’m not so sure Frist is gay; perhaps he just has the usual American male fear of being gay, but he’s so obsessed that he can’t even admit that little bit.
The fear of sleep is interesting because I sense that it is not just a result of being manic, but a fear of letting go. I once had a friend who suffered from insomnia before her divorce because (it turned out) she was afraid that in her sleep she would ‘find’ a butcher knife and kill her husband in her sleep. One wonders about people who are so tightly wound (and in the public eye . . . constantly) that if they let down their guard (i.e., sleep) their enemies are ready to attack them. And for a narcissist, all enemies have only one target, him.
As to the possibility of childhood abuse, I’ve long been interested in pre-verbal experiences. That is, things that happen to a child before it has words with which to identify to them. Michael Ventura has written about this many times but especially in the essay on his mother’s death. It appears to be controversial because of his take on the pre-verbal abuse by a mentally ill mother.
Final point: Don’t people admit to things, in public (eg., a book), things which they think might be (even marginally) acceptable? My question is what else is he hiding that even he thinks is too horrible to talk about?
Just a thought.

Asta: I agree the “little Billy Frist” comment is peculiar; it was made within the context of the cat experiements story, and I took it to mean that he was a “good boy” by day and a “mad scientist” by night. There is certainly room for interpretation, and I’m frankly a little afraid to learn more about Little or Big Billy Frist.
I keep wondering about the editor of Frist’s book and whether he/she had to explain to Frist that he should take a moral position (in hindsight, at least) about the cat killings. I’m imagining Frist had not expressed a moral opinion in his original manuscript and that the editor said, “You have to say SOMETHING!” The sentence “It was, of course, a heinous and dishonest thing to do” rings false because it is stilted and sounds hammered out by committee. The conversation may have gone something like this:
Frist to his editor: How about if I say, “It was a bad thing to do”?
Editor (somewhat exasperated): How about if you say, “It was a HEINOUS thing to do”?
Frist (writing): Okay. “It was a heinous thing to do.”
Editor: Not to mention DISHONEST!
Frist (writing): “It was a heinous and dishonest thing to do.”
Editor: How about this: “It was, OF COURSE, a heinous and dishonest thing to do.” And maybe you should add it was a little on the schizoid side while you’re at it.

I didn’t mean to imply that Frist was abused as a child, there’s no way to have that information.
I brought up abuse as it was usually the catalyst for these multiple personalities to decompense and disassociate. In those cases, the individual started referring to the various personalities as separate individuals (and in the third person, because the original identity had disassociated). Frist’s description of himself in the third person and as separate identities reminded me of the books on multiple personality disorder that I’ve read.
Asta, this link was given on another site talking about Bush’s personality disorder and it sounds very much like what you said:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1033904,00.html

I’m not sure you could graph Frist out from the DSM IV, but hey, your analysis of Frist is at least as accurate as his of a woman who’d been dead for 12 years.

Like Readytoblowagasket I find this sentance interesting:
”It was, of course, a heinous and dishonest thing to do.
It doesn’t so much ring false to me though. Rather, it seems an attempt at making cordial and dismissive something that the author knows will not be comfortably accepted by the reader. The “of course” is both an acknowledgement and an attempt to imply that the reader and author share some common ground. For me it fails because the “of course” weakens the words heinous and dishonest, making this more like an attempt to excuse heinous and dishonest behavior. The paragraph reads to me “ No one would approve of my actions, and it was difficult for me but I feel I was justified. I related to myself both as a perfect infallible child and a cold-but-clear-headed unfeeling man of ambition” Here I can’t help but notice that both of his self-descriptions are idealized in his writing. After all, how does the second part even come close to explaining the first?
This doesn’t so much seem to me as some one who is duplicitous, as one who feels hugely entitled or justified to engage in whatever behavior he sees fit.