(!) An Essay on Death and President Bush
- From: Ninurenohate@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (• Ninure Saunders)
- Date: Sun, 22 Jan 2006 16:40:32 GMT
(!) An Essay on Death and President Bush
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 BookCritics 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.
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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 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 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 the safety
regulations for coal mines to save the coal miners' and that he is
depriving workers of their time-and-a-half benefits overtime because this
is actually a way to honor them by raising into the professional class.
And this litany of lies he will versify with reverences for 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.
E.L. Doctorow
--
Pax Christi,
? Ninure Saunders aka Rainbow Christian
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