Not Knowing Death...Mr. Bush...

[Jennifer]

E.L. Doctorow on Bush

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
father 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 ìmission-accomplishedî 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 ó- 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 ó- 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 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.

E.L. Doctorow

[GravyBoat]

Jennifer,
How can you say that? Bush has stood up against opposition AND the will of the people! I for one support Bush's slaughterfest of over 10,000 Iraqi civilians (http://www.iraqbodycount.net - www.iraqbodycount.net')! Besides, I need to put gas in my car. Go Halliburton! In addition, Jen, in case you haven't noticed, almost half the nation supports Prez Bush in spite of the fact that more than half the nation and the most of the civilized world hate his guts. You've got to be brave to stand up to something like that. I'm also a big fan of Vice Incubus Cheney, so I suggest you stop helping the terrorists scare middle America until they shit their pants.

[GravyBoat]

...wwwWWWAAAAAAAHHHHHhhhhhh... And of course, most of this state supports it, since most don't even delve into politics much. There's got to be something better for us Utahns. I've got it! We build a giant pyramid made of used tires high enough to be seen from anywhere in the state, light it on fire, then display a huge banner coated in asbestos, saying "Give a hoot--look up the issues, Utah!"...well, I don't know about you, but I think that's a step in the right direction.

[Jennifer]

astonamous,
now you're talking----

[billyb0y]

Jennifer,
Bush is cramming for the debates on his ranch in Texas.

[img]http://home.earthlink.net/~m_thomas3/fu ... s/Bush.jpg[/img]

[Jennifer]

billyb0y,
lol