Doctorow's brilliant essay --The Unfeeling President --appeared originally in the September 9th issue of the Easthampton Star. Doctorow could not have known then that Dennis Kucinich, having introduced some 35 articles of impoeachment, would now say of our 'unfeeling' President: "There has been a breach of faith between the Commander in Chief and the troops."
I fault this president 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 must.
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.
But he will dissemble feeling. A 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.
There is one more terribly sad thing about all of this. I remember when millions of people around the world 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 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.
--The Unfeeling President, E.L. Doctorow
Named for Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Lawrence Doctorow occupies a central position in the history of American literature. On a shortlist that might also include Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, John Updike, Saul Bellow, and Don DeLillo, E. L. Doctorow is generally considered to be among the most talented, ambitious, and admired novelists of the second half of the twentieth century. Long celebrated for his vivid evocations of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American life (particularly New York life), 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 presidentially conferred National Humanities Medal.
Doctorow was born in New York City on January 6, 1931, and, like the novelist Everett in City of God, attended the Bronx High School of Science. After graduating with honors from Kenyon College in 1952, he did graduate work at Columbia University and served in the U.S. Army, which stationed him in Germany. In 1954, he married Helen Setzer. They have three children. 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.
1 | 2
Take action -- click here to contact your local newspaper or congress people:
Impeach and Remove George W. Bush
Click here to see the most recent messages sent to congressional reps and local newspapers
http://existentialistcowboy.blogspot.com/
Len Hart is a Houston based film/video producer specializing in shorts and full-length documentaries. He is a former major market and network correspondent; credits include CBS, ABC-TV and UPI. He maintains the progressive blog: The Existentialist Cowboy
| 4 comments |
|
Retired Educator Who Believes in a Constitutional Government of equal citizens.I d/p>I believe in the right of an active informed Citizenry to formulate responsible policy. I believe in hand counted paper ballots. We need small group meetings where a citizens can gather periodically give voice to their concerns, make decisions and act politically to implement their decisions. |
Bush, an example of nepotism that is poisoning us Bush jr. is still adrift. Bush Jr. has been used by his daddy and his class, the plutocracy, to foster their own agenda. Some of these plutocrats learn to operate without a conscience. They are capable of anything. George jr. radiates the sense of entitlement they convey - entitled to lie to the rest of us without batting an eye. A "born again Christian" with compassion eh! While governor of Texas his state set a record for executions. Over 150 of the unmoneyed class were never even considered by him for a governor's pardon. Further to that he was never elected by a majority either time. The votes were rigged by the servile minions who suck up to his plutocracy. A plutocracy who see themselves as America's aristocracy. To me, when I consider George jr. and his roots, the meaning of aristocracy becomes clear. It is just another word for nepotism. George jr.s nepotism is what is poisoning us. Were George jr. to be "born again" in the same trailer park Bill Clinton was he would probably still be a man true to his class, in a place where his lack of conscience couldn't poison a whole nation. . by
Bucky the Commoner (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 44 comments)
on Monday, July 14, 2008 at 10:32:26 AM
|
|
Male, 50, Texas. White with white hair (for 20 years)
|
Bush and company are psychopaths. So they act like them too. No empathy, thirst for power and aggrendized all that it entails. Not all psychopaths are serial killers, some of them are leaders of entire countries and kill via armies. We have that problem now. Ponerology, the study of evil. Not in the religious sense but the biological sense. We are in a psychopathic union run by these dangerous people. They promote others who have affinites they can use and other normals to emulate what they lable as 'cool' and 'the best possible' way to live. It poisons not only our society but every other one they touch or rise to prominence in. Without empathy anything can be done for any reason. The tropes of religion, nationalism and ideology are just what they wear to get what they want. They can't be reasoned with or pleaded with. Just removed by any means necessary for our collective survival. by
nightgaunt (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 251 comments)
on Monday, July 14, 2008 at 5:13:16 PM
|
|
|
puppet governments I used to believe that the US sent 'election monitors' to other nations to make sure that the process was 'democratic' and the elections 'fair'. In light of what happened in the US in the year 2000 and considering what the history of CIA interference in the free and fair elections of other nations all over the world, there is only one reasonable conclusion: the US does not send 'election monitors' to ensure that elections are fair or reflect the actual vote or will of the people. The US sends 'monitors' to make sure that the election process rubber stamps a US puppet government. by
Len Hart (132 articles, 174 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 550 comments)
on Tuesday, July 15, 2008 at 12:48:50 AM
|
| 4 comments |
|
||||
|
||||||||||||||
Must Read (
Well Said (
News (
Touching (
Funny (
Supported (
Interesting (
Inspiring (
Valuable (
