An essay by E.L. Doctorow
Originally posted by cleverdan (thanks, buddy) –
An essay by E. L. Doctorow
I fault this president (George W. Bush) for not knowing what death
is. He does not suffer the death of our twenty-one year olds who wanted to
be what they could be.
On the eve of D-day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the
lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death
was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a
war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear.
But this president does not know what death is. He hasn’t the mind
for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the
WMDs he can’t seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage
in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and
waving, triumphal, a he-man. He does not mourn. He doesn’t understand
why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for
him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young
Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.
But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an
emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no
capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the thousand
dead young men and women who wanted be what they could be.
They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and fathers or
wives — and children who will suffer to the end of their days a terribly torn
fabric — of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembrance of aborted
life…. They come to his desk as a political liability which is why the
press is not permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq.
How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets
nothing. He does not regret that his reason for going to war was, as he knew,
unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that his bungled plan for
the war’s aftermath has made of his mission-accomplished a disaster.
He does not regret that rather than controlling terrorism his war in Iraq has
licensed it.
So he never mourns for the dead and crippled youngsters who have fought
this war of his choice. He wanted to go to war and he did. He had
not the mind to perceive the costs of war, or to listen to those who knew
those costs. He did not understand that you do not go to war when it is one
of the options, but when it is the only option; you go not because you want
to but because you have to.
This president knew it would be difficult for Americans not to cheer
the overthrow of a foreign dictator. He knew that much. This president
and his supporters would seem to have a mind for only one thing — to take
power, to remain in power, and to use that power for the sake of themselves
and their friends. A war will do that as well as anything. You
become a wartime leader. The country gets behind you. Dissent becomes
inappropriate.
And so he does not drop to his knees, he is not contrite, he does not
sit in the church with the grieving parents and wives and children.
He is the President who does not feel. He does not feel for the
families of the dead; he does not feel for the thirty five million of us who live
in poverty; he does not feel for the forty percent who cannot afford
health insurance; he does not feel for the miners whose lungs are turning
black or for the working people he has deprived of the chance to work overtime
at time-and-a-half to pay their bills — it is amazing for how many
people in this country this President does not feel.
But he will dissemble feeling. He will say in all sincerity he is
relieving the wealthiest one percent of the population of their tax burden for
the sake of the rest of us, and that he is polluting the air we breathe
for the sake of our economy, and that he is decreasing the safety regulations
for coal mines to save the coal miners’ jobs, and that he is depriving
workers of their time-and-a- half benefits for overtime because this is
actually a way to honor them by raising them into the professional class.
And this litany of lies he will versify with reverences for God and
the flag and democracy, when just what he and his party are doing to our
democracy is choking the life out of it.
But there is one more terribly sad thing about all of this. I
remember the millions of people here and around the world who marched against the
war. It was extraordinary, that spontaneously aroused oversoul of alarm and
protest that transcended national borders. Why did it happen? After all, this
was not the only war anyone had ever seen coming. There are little wars
all over the world most of the time.
But the cry of protest was the appalled understanding of millions of
people that America was ceding its role as the last best hope of mankind. It
was their perception that the classic archetype of democracy was morphing
into a rogue nation. The greatest democratic republic in history was turning
its back on the future, using its extraordinary power and standing not to
advance the ideal of a concordance of civilizations but to endorse
the kind of tribal combat that originated with the Neanderthals, a people, now
extinct, who could imagine ensuring their survival by no other means
than pre-emptive war.
The president we get is the country we get. With each president the
nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable
national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that
govern our lives and invoke our responses. The people he appoints are cast
in his image. The trouble they get into and get us into, is his characteristic
trouble.
Finally the media amplify his character into our moral weather report. He
becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail: How can we
sustain ourselves as the United States of America given the stupid and
ineffective warmaking, the constitutionally insensitive lawgiving, and the
monarchal economics of this president? He cannot mourn but is a figure of such
moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves.
E.L. Doctorow