Posted on 09/26/2004 3:55:07 AM PDT by Stirner
The Unfeeling President
By E.L. Doctorow
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 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 weapons of mass destruction 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 1,000 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 35 million of us who live in poverty, he does not feel for the 40 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 1 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 quality of air in 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, this 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.
--published in the East Hampton Star, week of 9/20/04
"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight; nothing he cares about more than his own personal safety; is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better persons than himself."
John Stuart Mill, 1806-1873
Doctorow is wrong, as usual.
His intelect and analysis is like cat vomit in a crystal goblet.
Both disgusting and completely unnecessary.
Oh wait, don't want to give any other NEA funded artists any new performance art ideas!
Doctorow is wrong, as usual.
His intelect and analysis is like cat vomit in a crystal goblet.
Both disgusting and completely unnecessary.
Oh wait, don't want to give any other NEA funded artists any new performance art ideas!
What a wordsmith! (sarcasm off)
"The face of our sky"....... "the *ss of our left".
Doctorow, examine thyself.
I found this. http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0920-13.htm
I'd say it's real...real short-sighted. Doctorow is worried about 21-year-olds? I know from experience that those 21-year-olds are more worried about generations to come and about loved ones at home who may get blown up by a bus bomb. Liberals think "war is bad," but a lot of people in Iraq and Afghanistan will thank us for it, just as the Germans and Japanese did.
Sorry about the double post.
In central Florida and DSL kind of flakey right now.
lol! What a self-absorbed deludinoid is Doctorow! He owns the corner on "grief". Only "HE" understands it all. What a pig.
"If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without blood shed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves."
- Winston Churchill
The guy who cleans toilets where I work is a far better dissenter.
bump
Sipping Merlot as he wrote this.
Few writers have succeeded as E. L. Doctorow has at creating stories (largely based in 1930s New York) that evoke both warm, personal memory and a grander national portrait. Doctorow doesn't always promise historical veracity, but he captures our imagination of the past flawlessly.
From 'Meet the Authors', B&N website.
Doctorow has always been like this: arrogant, presumptuous, self-absorbed, and doctrinaire; not just pro-communist, but now that communism is not dominant on the world stage, he is simply anti-American, as at heart he always has been.
I like the bit about the "spontaneous demonstrations." In Doctorow's ideal country, things would be controled by well organized mobs parading around, every day a May Day.
Why does a small suburban newspaper carry articles like his? Notice the very elite neighborhood (eastern Long Island) served with this rot.
He's getting the president mixed up with Teletubbies.
Consider the consequences of following a Neville Chamberlain path of appeasement leading up to a potentially world-encompassing conflict with Islam.
The pre-emptive decimation of Afghanistan and Iraq to prevent World War, and the resultant emancipation of 50 million of its enslaved citizens, is not an act of anger.
President Bush's War on Terror is singularly the most humane act of kindness the world has ever known.
Because the commies running the marches advertised them for months in advance, and the presstitutes were only too happy to carry their water for them?
"Spontaneous"...
(eye roll)
GWB is fighting the WOT, where maniacs wish to slaughter millions of us. The dims and idiots like this are fighting the War on Bush.
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