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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. |
