[Mb-hair] FW: Essay by E. L. Doctorow

[Jules Fisher]

Thought you might appreciate this from a wonderful writer.
Love, Jules

Subject: Essay by E. L. Doctorow


Friends --



Essay by E. L. Doctorow

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 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 it 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 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 preemptive 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.

* * * * 

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.