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Balance. Bush and
his coterie chose to portray the image of presidential leadership as resolved, firm,
unshakable. This has played well during uncertain and fearful times, up to a
point. He has, owing to lack of depth, been unable to balance this act to avoid
the growing perception that he doesn’t realize the consequences of his choices,
even when reality intrudes on the self-triumphalism. He can say, “I’m sorry” to
mourners, but he can’t apologize for the mistakes that got us to this point. This
diminishes the sacrifice and undermines confidence. The White
House’s cheerleaders have made a big fuss over the president actually speaking
for the first time the latest number of those killed in the Iraq war (no
mention of the dead civilians in Iraq), as if verbalizing the number of KIA
equates with the burden of responsibility a war president bears. When a
presidency is carried by style rather than substance, especially in war, the
mirage cannot survive. Forwarded to
me this morning: Essay on President Bush and Death
An essay by E.L Doctorow Edgar Lawrence Doctorow occupies
a central position in the history of American literature. He is generally
considered to be among the most talented, ambitious, and admired novelists of
the second half of the twentieth century. Doctorow has received the National Book Award, two National
Book Critics Circle Awards, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Edith Wharton Citation
for Fiction, the William Dean Howell Medal of the American Academy of Arts and
Letters, and the residentially conferred National Humanities Medal. Doctorow was born in New York
City on January 6, 1931. After graduating with honors from Kenyon College in
1952, he did graduate work at Columbia University and served in the U.S. Army.
Doctorow was senior editor for New American Library from 1959 to 1964 and then
served as editor in chief at Dial Press until 1969. Since then, he has devoted his time to writing and teaching. He holds the Glucksman Chair in American
Letters at New York University and over the years has taught at several institutions,
including Yale University Drama School, Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence
College, and the University of California, Irvine. 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 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. 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 he 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 over soul 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 war-making, 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. |
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