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.
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