An Essay on Presidential Feelings
E. L. Doctorow, 2005
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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 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 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
war-making, 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
Added Note
W. A. Barrett
Another president comes to mind who showed
intense feelings for the sufferings of his troops in time of war -- Abraham
Lincoln.
Lincoln not only wrote personal notes of
comfort to every widow and mother whose name came to his attention, but he also
never refused to see anyone willing to come to his door. Some were even from the confederate side,
and Abe didn't hold that against them.
It's ironic that Lincoln is invoked by the
Republicans as the first leader of their party, yet the GOP came up with this
pompous, posturing, simple-minded twit of a president now in charge in the Oval
office. Dubya has no doubt slept in the
Lincoln bed without the slightest awareness of what Lincoln's legacy really
entailed.