THE UNFEELING PRESIDENT by E.L. Doctorow

THE UNFEELING PRESIDENT
By E.L. Doctorow

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 fathers
or wives and children who will suffer to the end of their days a
terribly torn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsol-
able 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.

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 -- 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 inappro-
priate. 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 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 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.