[Rhodes22-list] The unfeeling president by E.L. Doctor (Political, not humor)

[R22RumRunner at aol.com]

The Unfeeling  President


I fault this president for not knowing what death is. He does not  suffer the 
death of our 21-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  weapons of 
mass destruction 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 1,000 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.


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 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 35  
million of us who live in poverty, he does not feel for the 40 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 1 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 quality of air in 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.


The novelist E.L. Doctorow has a house in Sag  Harbor. 

What Doctorow points out is what Cindy Sheehan  - the mother of the soldier 
killed in action - discovered when she met with Bush  for "condolences."  The 
man has the cold dead eyes of a shark; he doesn't  care about the troops - he 
doesn't care about Americans.   
He is the worst kind of sociopath...the kind  who can fake it well enough to 
make it.  So are the rest of his amoral  circle. 
When will the rest of America wake up and get  this?