The Dean Scream

Dean's Scream is blessedly immortal. I just hunted down and enjoyed the Falkner remix, Pretty Fly for a Dean Guy, AC/DC/Dean, Dancin' Dean (my favorite), and watched (yes, watched) Dean Scream Reloaded, a drunk visual clash that builds with frenetic energy to match the Scream with images of a nuclear explosion.

I confess I admire the man. Rather, I admire his passion. I believe him when he said he was trying to get his young crowd fired up after their disappointing loss, and that he got a little carried away. I also believe his self description:

"That I don't talk about my background, I have a feeling, is what makes me as passionate and intense as I am. If I laid out the biography for everybody to kind of ooh and ah, it would be gone. I know this is sort of Zen-like. I don't really have this down. The fact is, the experiences that are the most intense in my life are the ones that are not readily available to me, so they come out in a different way. I think that has a lot to do with my desire to have social justice, the passion I have about fairness and truth-telling. The two are connected. The fact that I'm the least autobiographical is very much connected with the fact that I'm the most passionate. Experiences that I don't have access to consciously are what drive me--personal experiences that I can't tell you about because I haven't processed them." The New Yorker, 12 January 2004, pg. 53 (emphasis mine).

Dean's Scream is no mystery. He has inner passions which he has not examined or processed which then burble to the surface in the form of a presidential campaign. When faced with a loss in that campaign, in the form of a scream. Give the man credit for having passions big enough he can't keep them inside--indeed, credit him for being passionate about politics and sharing that with kids. The bloodless Kerry (or Gore) seems to have been drained dry long ago. But the solution for our passions is neither to kill them nor to set them loose, but to harness them and direct them. The good doctor may want to put down his Zen and pick up his Plato. It is only when we have hitched our passions to the service of our reason that we find inner order, know justice, and grow up. Fancy writers on leadership call this "emotional intelligence"; the Old Testament called it "wisdom". Bush showed it when he used his fear of God and disgust at himself to walk away from alcohol on his 40th birthday.

I do admire Dean's passion. But someone with an unexamined inner life exerting unfiltered influence on their words and deeds in ways not even they understand may not be the best commander in chief. Presidents are made of sterner stuff.