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Edited on Sat Jan-21-06 12:59 PM by auntAgonist
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
those who retire only to lose pensions; 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 every soul
to 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 throughout the
world 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
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