Rula Halawani has sent us an article by the novelist E. L. Doct0row, about Bush.
\nThanks, Rula<\/p>\n
I fault this president for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the
\ndeath of our 21-year-olds who wanted to be what they could be. On the eve of
\nD-Day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young
\nsoldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was. Even in a justifiable
\nwar, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was
\nalmost more than Eisenhower could bear.<\/p>\n
But this president does not know what death is. He hasn’t the mind for it.
\nYou see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the weapons of
\nmass destruction he can’t seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to
\nthe stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling
\nand waving, triumphal, a he-man.<\/p>\n
He does not mourn. He doesn’t understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied
\nduring the course of a speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and
\nspeak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their
\ncountry.<\/p>\n
But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion
\nwhich he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacity
\nfor it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the 1,000 dead young men
\nand women who wanted to be what they could be.<\/p>\n
They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and fathers or wives and
\nchildren who will suffer to the end of their days a terribly torn fabric of
\nfamilial relationships and the inconsolable remembrance of aborted life . . .
\nthey come to his desk as a political liability, which is why the press is not
\npermitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq.<\/p>\n
How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets nothing.
\nHe does not regret that his reason for going to war was, as he knew,
\nunsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that his bungled plan for the war’s
\naftermath has made of his mission-accomplished a disaster. He does not regret
\nthat, rather than controlling terrorism, his war in Iraq has licensed it. So he
\nnever mourns for the dead and crippled youngsters who have fought this war of
\nhis choice.<\/p>\n
He wanted to go to war and he did. He had not the mind to perceive the costs
\nof war, or to listen to those who knew those costs. He did not understand that
\nyou do not go to war when it is one of the options but when it is the only
\noption; you go not because you want to but because you have to.
\nYet this president knew it would be difficult for Americans not to cheer the
\noverthrow of a foreign dictator. He knew that much. This president and his
\nsupporters would seem to have a mind for only one thing — to take power, to
\nremain in power, and to use that power for the sake of themselves and their
\nfriends.<\/p>\n
A war will do that as well as anything. You become a wartime leader. The
\ncountry gets behind you. Dissent becomes inappropriate. And so he does not drop to
\nhis knees, he is not contrite, he does not sit in the church with the
\ngrieving parents and wives and children. He is the president who does not feel. He
\ndoes not feel for the families of the dead, he does not feel for the 35 million
\nof us who live in poverty, he does not feel for the 40 percent who cannot
\nafford health insurance, he does not feel for the miners whose lungs are turning
\nblack or for the working people he has deprived of the chance to work overtime
\nat time-and-a-half to pay their bills – it is amazing for how many people in
\nthis country this president does not feel.<\/p>\n
But he will dissemble feeling. He will say in all sincerity he is relieving
\nthe wealthiest 1 percent of the population of their tax burden for the sake of
\nthe rest of us, and that he is polluting the air we breathe for the sake of
\nour economy, and that he is decreasing the quality of air in coal mines to save
\nthe coal miners’ jobs, and that he is depriving workers of their
\ntime-and-a-half benefits for overtime because this is actually a way to honor them by
\nraising them into the professional class.<\/p>\n
And this litany of lies he will versify with reverences for God and the flag
\nand democracy, when just what he and his party are doing to our democracy is
\nchoking the life out of it.<\/p>\n
But there is one more terribly sad thing about all of this. I remember the
\nmillions of people here and around the world who marched against the war. It was
\nextraordinary, that spontaneous aroused oversoul of alarm and protest that
\ntranscended national borders. Why did it happen? After all, this was not the
\nonly war anyone had ever seen coming. There are little wars all over he world
\nmost of the time.<\/p>\n
But the cry of protest was the appalled understanding of millions of people
\nthat America was ceding its role as the last best hope of mankind. It was their
\nperception that the classic archetype of democracy was morphing into a rogue
\nnation. The greatest democratic republic in history was turning its back on
\nthe future, using its extraordinary power and standing not to advance the ideal
\nof a concordance of civilizations but to endorse the kind of tribal combat t
\nhat originated with the Neanderthals, a people, now extinct, who could imagine
\nensuring their survival by no other means than pre-emptive war.<\/p>\n
The president we get is the country we get. With each president the nation is
\nconformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable national soul. He
\nproposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives
\nand invoke our responses. The people he appoints are cast in his image. The
\ntrouble they get into and get us into, is his characteristic trouble.
\nFinally, the media amplify his character into our moral weather report. He
\nbecomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail. How can we sustain
\nourselves as the United States of America given the stupid and ineffective
\nwarmaking, the constitutionally insensitive lawgiving, and the monarchal economics
\nof this president? He cannot mourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to
\nmake us mourn for ourselves.<\/p>\n
E. L. Doctorow is an American novelist. His works are noted for their
\nmingling of American history and literary imagination through the interaction of
\nfictional and real-life characters.
\nCopyright \u00a9 2004 East Hampton Star<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Rula Halawani has sent us an article by the novelist E. L. Doct0row, about Bush. Thanks, Rula I fault this president for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our 21-year-olds who wanted to be … Lees verder