This is a beautifully written essay. obviously people who agree with it's premise will find that it resonates, and people who agree with the president won't find it convincing at all, but for construction and the use of language, it's a lovely piece of writing- though maybe only people who agree with it will really be able to appreciate it:
............................
I fault this president for not knowing what death is.
Essay by E L Doctorow on G W Bush
This piece written by novelist E.L. Doctorow, appeared in the September
9th issue of the Easthampton Star, and elsewhere.
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 to 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.
Yet 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 spontaneous 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 |
