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andypanda · Joined: 12 Jun 2003 Posts: 354 Location: Santa Fe, NM

E. L. DOCTOROW ON BUSH

Edgar Lawrence Doctorow occupies a central position in the history of
American literature. He is generally considered to be among the most
talented, ambitious, and admired novelists of the second half of the
twentieth century. Doctorow has received the National Book Award, two
National Book Critics Circle Awards, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Edith
Wharton Citation for Fiction, the William Dean Howell Medal of the
American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the residentially conferred National Humanities Medal.

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. Doctorow was senior editor for New American Library from 1959 to 1964 and then served as editor in chief at Dial Press until 1969. Since then, he has devoted his time to writing and teaching. He holds the Glucksman Chair in American Letters at New York University and over the years has taught at several institutions, including Yale University Drama School, Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence College, and the University of California, Irvine.

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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 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.

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 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
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.

E.L. Doctorow

"If you're standing on the edge of an abyss, the only progressive step is backward."
William Sloan Coffin

SuziQ · Joined: 17 Apr 2004 Posts: 288 Location: Phoenix

Listen to this, and you'll be even more disturbed:

"Naturally the common people don't want war, but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to do the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country."
- Hermann Goering, Hitler's Riech-Marshall, at the Nuremburg trials

Now THAT's frickin' terrifying, because that's exactly what the Bushies did. How's it feel to have a President who takes lessons in crowd control from the Nazis?[/img]

1carol · Joined: 17 Jul 2003 Posts: 1050 Location: Phoenix AZ

I live fearfully while Bush is in power. Dreading what may be next. I try to
convince myself that he's not the Antichrist. That it's not the beginning of the end :(
Bless our soldiers and bring them home safely

SuziQ · Joined: 17 Apr 2004 Posts: 288 Location: Phoenix

Amen to that, 1C! May they stay safe and most especially come home SOON.