[Peace-discuss] [Fwd: An Essay by E.L. Doctorow]

[chason at shout.net]

an edited version of this could be turned into a pamphlet/handout?



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Subject: An Essay by E.L. Doctorow
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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.
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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 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  preemptive 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


  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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