[Mb-civic] <no subject>

[Allison Burnett]

GUESTWORDS: By E.L. Doctorow

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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