[lit-ideas] Guest words
- From: "Andreas Ramos" <andreas@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Lit-Ideas" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 26 Sep 2004 10:50:25 -0700
>> GUESTWORDS
>> http://www.easthamptonstar.com/20040909/col5.htm
>>
>> The Unfeeling President
>> 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, 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 he 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.
>>
>> The novelist E.L. Doctorow has a house in Sag Harbor.
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