Knowing Death
By E.L Doctorow
09 September, 2005
Countercurrents.org
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 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.
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 forthe
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 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 safety regulations for
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 spontaneously aroused,
oversoul of alarm and protest that transcended national borders. Why
didit 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 thatprevail: How can we sustain ourselves
as the United States of Americagiven 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.