The Unfeeling President
Find a Conversation
| Wed, 09-22-2004 - 1:37am |
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, this 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.

Pages
The original editorial was a bit too emotionally dramatic for my taste.
I live in a military town and my husband works on the base. I am happy to say we have yet to encounter a Kerry supporter among them. They are resiliant to the slanted media's coverage and proudly serve what they know to be a noble and just cause. They go to Iraq and come home with wonderful stories of accomplishment and progress there. Yes, we lose men and women from our base all the time. But it has not affected the moral of the military here. They know why they are going there, they are proud of what they are doing IN SPITE OF what Kerry and the liberal media say!
Also, George W. Bush is a Christian man with strict values and morals. I more than disagree with the assumption that he has taken us into the war the Islamic Radicals started with us with a light heart.
Second, are you saying it is un-American to dissent? I have never felt so demoralized as an American than I have in the past 4 yrs. Record deficits, a dim-witted leader who has given about 5 different reasons why we invaded Iraq (talk about flip flop), a declining economy, job losses, tax cuts for the rich (hey thanks for the new in-ground pool george!), let's see what else, increased terrorism on Americans, a failure to find bin laden, a failure to react to the USS Cole bombing once intel confirmed who was responsible, a 7% increase in federal govt. As an American I think it would be un-American to do everything I could to boot this sorryas* excuse for a leader out of office before more damage is done to our country and more service men and women killed.
Do you really think that he thinks his actions are justified after he misled us into war? Even if he does think his actions are justified, in which case he is delusional at best, it is the perfect argument for firing him and giving Kerry the job. Kerry knows combat, george dodged the draft. While Kerry was volunteering to serve his country, george was getting arrested for drunk driving probably on his way to score some coke.
First, an unprecedented number of wartime families that have loved ones in Iraq are against the war. Second, who said we are over there fighting for democracy? We were supposed to be over there because george told us that Iraq was planning to buy uranium an yellow cake from sudan and that hussein had wmds. Well, both turned out to be false. As far as fighting for democracy (george's flip flop for going to war with iraq), he said he would never enter the U.S. into nation building.
So, why are we spending so much American money and U.S. military lives on Iraq? Why? Also, and I bring this up in sooooooo many posts, if w is so strong on security why didn't he retaliate for the USS Cole bombing?
I have a few close friends who have loved ones there.
Of course when our military is called to defend our country they are going to face danger. Can this be a surprise to anyone? I haven't visited your website, I don't deny that there are those in the military and their families who oppose the war, but the majority support it. Ever wonder why the majority who actually have to bear the costs support it? Of course like any group of hundreds of thousands of people there are differing viewpoints, but to say that anyone who supports the war must just be ignorant of its costs is erroneous. There are plenty whose family members have paid the ultimate price who STILL support President Bush and our actions in Iraq.
Edited 9/22/2004 10:35 pm ET ET by liveanew
There is no evidence that he "misled us" into war. Yes, I do think his actions are justified, for a variety of reasons I have reiterated over and over here.
I suppose you voted for Bush Sr, then, since he knew combat while Bill Clinton (admittedly) dodged the draft. George W. Bush at least served in the military, and there was a possibility (though I'll concede unlikely) that he could be sent to Vietnam. I don't question Kerry's military service, but I do question what he did when he got home given that many of his fellow soldiers were interred in POW camps.
Got any evidence to back up these baseless claims?
Edited 9/22/2004 10:36 pm ET ET by liveanew
The majority support it.
Actually, the yellowcake allegation, it turns out, was true. Ask Joe Wilson, he says so in his book. The WMD allegation is still in dispute, although none have been found there are still questions as to whether in the months (wait, make that years) that the UN failed to enforce its resolutions against SH, he managed to hide them so well we just haven't found them yet, or ship them off to neighboring countries (plenty of evidence to support that theory). But once again I'll explain as President Bush did in his speech, given that Saddam would not allow us to verify that he HAD no WMDs, and given that our inaction against another growing threat resulted in the deaths of 3000 people, and given that SH defied resolution after resolution demanding that he disarm and account for the chemical and biological weapons we know that he at one time possessed, we could not TAKE THE RISK that our intelligence was wrong.
See above.
I don't know, do you ask the same question about President Clinton in sooooo many posts? The standard line is that we had no proof that Al Quaeda was responsible. But I believe both Clinton and Bush failed in not retaliating for it. The question is, do you think John Kerry would have?
The borders of the United States are so pourous that an estimated 3 million people cross over unidentified every year, too bad the troops in Iraq couldn't be used for protecting us on THAT front.
I believe we had to go to Afghanistan for reasons of self defense,not so with Iraq. I'm glad we went to Afghanstan, too bad we didn't use more resources there, and do the job right. This war has more similarities to Viet Nam than I want to even think about. The only end in sight, is the end of the beginning, and it didn't have to happen that way.
Pages