El Doctorow
eloquently says what so many of us feel. We need to mobilize and use
our minds and our strength to take back this country.
Jen
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.
>
>
> =====================================================================
>
>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
>
>