As you can tell from yesterday's post, I spend a lot of time (editor's note: He means wastes a lot of time.) analyzing the psychologies of fictional characters. Not just characters in books, either. TV characters and movie characters obsess me too, and I wonder about them, and worry about the implications of their temperaments, pathologies, motivations, and actions. Mostly, this is a harmless personal mania, a bad habit of mind developed over years of writing, directing and acting in plays in high school and college and many more years of writing stories. It's professional play, like a ball player bouncing a ball off a wall. I almost never forget and start thinking of these characters as real people. (editor's note: He means, please don't send the rubber truck yet.) One of the characters I've thought too hard about is Frank Burns from MASH. I should say two of the characters, because the movie MASH's Frank Burns and the TV MASH's Frank are two different people. 
The TV Frank is often despised and dismissed by Hawkeye for being a bad doctor. But Frank isn't bad in the sense that he's inept. He's mistake prone but not inept. If he was, Henry Blake wouldn't have kept him on his staff. (I've done a lot of thinking about Henry too. But just the TV Henry.) Henry Blake was a joke as a military leader but he was an excellent doctor and hospital administrator. He built the 4077th and he was very proud of its record ("North, south, east, or west, we're the MASH that is the best!") and he wouldn't have tolerated Frank for a second if Burns was not pulling his weight. He even defended Frank's surgical skills to Hawkeye from time to time. He never said Frank was as talented as Hawkeye, Trapper, or BJ, but he called him competent, and he didn't mean it the way it's usually used as euphemism for mediocre. He meant Frank could do the job. Frank was a bad doctor in that he was not in any way outside the operating room a healer. He didn't just have a less than comforting bedside manner. He had a bedside manner that was deleterious to his patients' recoveries. What made him so awful when he put down a scalpel also prevented him from doing a better job with one, that is kept him from being better than just competent---his priorities were screwed up. He became a doctor for the money and status not from any love of medicine, and even over in Korea, in the middle 
of a war, his mind was usually back home in Ft Wayne, Indiana, not because he was worried about his wife or children, but because he was worried about his practice and how much money he was not making while he was not there. And when he was not worrying about money, he wasn't worrying about his patients. He was obsessed with Army rules and regulations. More than he wanted to be a good doctor, he wanted to be a good soldier. Once, in an argument over how to deal with the lunatic CIA officer Col. Flagg, Henry had to remind Frank where their priorities lay: "I'll not have anyone tortured at the 4077th, Frank. We're a hospital!" To which Frank replied calmly, as if offering a reasonable rebuttal, "We're also Army." "You're Army!" Henry exploded, "I bet if I cut you, you'd bleed khaki." And Frank said, "And proud of it." Which is why Frank was a menace around the place. Army regs and medical imperatives were at odds. 
But he was not a villain. The producers of the show didn't even think of him as a particularly bad person. He was not a good or admirable man, but the writers were often forgiving toward him, especially when it came to his affair with Margaret, which was never treated as an act of hypocrisy. Frank and Margaret were often hypocritical about their affair, but the writers treated theirs as a real love, comic and doomed---by Frank's cowardice---but often sweet in its way, and, finally, the best thing about either of them. The movie Frank was a villain. Partly the difference between the two Franks is due to the fact that the movie Frank was played by Robert Duvall, who even when he plays thoroughly good guys and heroes reveals an undercurrent of malice that is truly frightening. Secondhand Lions works as well as it does because with Duvall playing one of the old coot
uncles you can never be sure if they were the heroes of Michael Caine's outrageous tall tales or the gangsters their relatives believe them to have been but you know that whichever they'd been, Duvall's character was a cold-blooded killer. But the surprising thing when you go back to watch MASH is how small a part Frank Burns actually is in the film. This is surprising even when, like me, you've seen the movie 26 times and know it's a small part. Again, this is Duvall's doing. Burns has only four short scenes, and in only one of them is it established that he is not just like the TV Frank a poor excuse for a man, he is out and out despicable. The scene takes place in the recovery ward. Frank is making his rounds and comes across a patient who has taken a sudden and dangerous turn for the worse. Frank sends a simple-minded orderly named Boone off to fetch a needle with something Frank thinks will help the patient. But the patient dies before Boone can get back. When he rushes up to the bed though, Frank turns on him. "It's too late, Boone," he snarls, and then flipping a blanket up over the dead man's face he says, "You killed him." Boone believes him and wanders away in tears. Fortunately---for the audience, because we want to see Frank get his---Trapper was watching. He takes Frank into a store room and, after making sure Frank's shift is over, because Trapper, being a good doctor, doesn't want what he's about to do to hurt any patients, clobbers Burns with a punch right to the top of the head. Later, defending Trapper to Henry, Duke sums up the danger that it is Frank Burns. "The man's a menace, Henry. Everything that goes wrong is either God's will or somebody else's fault." It's easy to see the possibilities for evil in such a man, who never takes responsibility for his own actions, who in his own mind is always excused for any mistakes before he makes them, who is absolved of all his bad actions because whatever he does must be what God wants him to do and therefore can't be considered bad either in the sense of having a wrong outcome or in having been perpetrated by a bad person. There is no reason for such a man to think before he acts or care about what he does. He can, in fact, do whatever he wants. We run into types like Frank all the time. They're easy to spot and they cause trouble wherever they go. We dread having to work with such a character. We despair when we get one as our boss. We know the type and we loathe them. So how is it we went and elected one President of the United States? George W. Bush is the Frank Burns of modern politics. Everything that's happened over the last four years is God's will or somebody else's fault, usually Bill Clinton's, but also Osama's, Saddam's, and, lately, John Kerry's. I haven't gotten around to reading Ron Suskind's article "Without a Doubt" in the Sunday New York Times. The left side of the blogosphere has been focusing on the parts of the article that emphasize this side of Bush's character. (See, for example, Matt Yglesias, Brad DeLong. Kevin Drum, though, is critical. And Michael Berube is Michael Berube-ish. editor's note: he means Berube-esque.) It's not news. The evidence has been on display for as long as George W.'s been a public figure, going back to when he was throwing his weight around as the arrogant and obnoxious Dauphin during his father's reign. It got lost in the turmoil of election night, but it was the first thing reported about him as the putative president-elect. When NBC and CBS called the election for Gore by calling Florida for Gore, Bush's first response was to call up his brother Jeb and yell at him. He blamed his brother for losing him the election. "It's too late, Boone. You killed him." And the whole God's will excuse has been a mainstay of everything he's said about what he's done since September 11. All the "clash of civilizations" talk, the use of the awkward but Biblically charged "evil-doers," and his reflexive resort to the word "Crusade," are all admissions that he thinks that whatever he does is sanctioned and excused by God. All those dead soldiers and marines? All those dead Iraqis? God's will. Somebody else's fault. So Suskind isn't telling us anything we didn't already know. But apparently he's been able to lay it out in a way that is damning and makes it impossible to deny. I should read the article. But I probably won't. I've already seen the movie.
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