Two Jeremiads for the Price of One!
This is a piece written by novelist E.L. Doctorow. It first appeared in the September 9, 2004 issue of the Easthampton Star:
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 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 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 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 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.
OK--back to your blog-author, Mr. Dryden again:
Nice piece, Mr. Doctorow--I think of Lincoln, and Wilson, and FDR/Truman, and those who really agonized over their decisions to kill not just our own men, but hundreds of thousands of others. And I remember Lee saying that it is a good thing that war is so terrible, else we should love it too much. Bush gets the latter, but not the former. Except that of course I've never really sensed that Bush is the one who really made this war, anymore than Johnson 'made' Vietnam. Admittedly, his was the final call, and for that all CoCs take the blame, if any, for this decision. But I think of the shuddering evil of Cheney's Halliburton contracts, worked out LONG before the troops hit the ground, I think of Karl Rove recognizing that the post 9/11 glow was fading and we hadn't caught Osama yet and so needed another way to keep Bush on top--I think of the men (and women, if we included Dr. Rice) who WANTED to go to war to solidify their power, and I can't entirely blame Bush who, let's face it, does what he's told if he's told it forcefully enough. I really do think this is our Vietnam--that it is a quagmire into which we are sinking (pardon the pun) our credibility and our resources and which WE CANNOT WIN, short of killing, Holocaust-style, a huge portion of the populace. Hell, I'll just come right out and say it: there cannot be democracy--not 'Western Style' democracy in Iraq. It Can't Happen. Why? History.
The Greeks fought back the Persians in 479 B.C. (B.C.E., for you politically correct types, of which I am not.) And with that original division between East and West established, Athenian democracy--that great experiment--was forever free to flourish (until they got too big for their britches and wound up getting taken down by the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War.) But even with the fall of Athens democracy--the idea of rule by the many--even though it went underground, was in the bloodstream of Western thought for the next 2300 years, until the era of the French Revolution really brought it to the fore and it increasingly became regarded as the only 'civilized' form of government, much to the smug satisfaction of the Swiss, who'd been practicing it for centuries. But anyway--Point is, we of the West have internalized the ideology of secular democracy so completely that it really is a part of who we are. We think that Church and State should be separate--even the most rigorous fundamentalist, when pressed, will concede that it's better not to have a state religion, lest he find himself forced to worship in a way he doesn't care for. We think rule by the many is the only way to prevent tyranny. (We're probably right.) In other words--we ARE democratic. In our core selves. Now--go back to 479 B.C. Beaten back, the Persians retreated into their own culture--and guess what? IT WAS NOT AND HAS NOT BEEN DEMOCRATIC--MUCH LESS SECULAR--IN ANY WAY. For 2500 years, the 'Middle East' has been a collection of various forms of dictatorships, large and small, more often religious than not. The idea of individual liberty--of that whole Lockean 'inherent freedom of man' thing--it's not there. I'm not bashing these people--I'm just saying, their view of themselves as human beings, and as political beings: it ain't democratic. They're missing 2500 years of philosophy and instruction and cultural development of this idea. (Not to say that they haven't developed quite nicely in other ways, though.) But you're trying to graft something that won't grow in this soil. Criminey, have we learned nothing from Africa and the hideous results of our attempts to allow its people to be 'independent' after centuries of abuse? Do we really think that Iraq will fare ANY better? I could go on. But let me add this--for those who think that the region will 'stabilize'--unemployent in Iraq is somewhere around the 2/3 mark. Two. Thirds. Imagine an America where that was the case--how long would it take us to slide into 'Road Warrior'-like behavior? Six months? A year? I weep for this world, I really do.
But on the subject of weeping: I question one aspect of Doctorow's jeremiad--the idea that the mourning is widespread. The sickening thing about all this is that the people don't care. They don't care about Halliburton. At all. It simply does not trouble them that the Veep (remember when Agnew had to resign for actions that make this look like nothing?) pre-planned to make serious money off a war that we now know he knew to have been unneccessary. That's evil, pure and simple--no matter what culture we're talking about, from those that condone pornography to those that commit atrocies like 'female circumcision', the tenet that Killing People For Money Is Wrong is universal. (Calling it 'female circumcision,' by the way, strikes me as verbally sound as calling chopping off a foot a 'pedicure.' In any case--) We don't care. And the media, sensing that we don't care, ignores it. Which brings me to my own horrific realization:
Machiavelli was, improbably, optimistic about human nature. He said that it was important for a ruler to appear virtuous to the people, so that he could BE less so and run things efficiently. But Bush & Co. have proved that we're worse than that. We don't care if they seem virtuous. We know that they're not. We see the greed and the incompetence and the monstrous indifference and our reaction is to say, "Eh, not my problem--to hell with the Iraquis. Hey, the fewer brown people in the world the better, right?" The oozing, slithering quality of this administration isn't the horrible thing--I mean, at heart, most administrations are going to have some aspect of that--it's the fact that they've managed to combine a pretext for that corruption (the war) that perfectly shields them from facing any consequences of that corruption. It's--oh, Satanic is such a strong word--but it's Mephistophelean in its brilliance, really. And we see it, and don't care. Jonestown was not a fluke. We're all lined up for the Kool-Aid, we know it's poison, and our attitude is, "Well, I'm pretty far back in line--maybe they'll run out before I get to the front."
As for America becoming a rogue state, oh, I think it's much worse. I think we're entering into our Nero-phase as world rulers. Remember, the number of Roman Emperors who came to the throne and were evil bastards from the get-go is very small. (Actually, I can't think of any--Domitian may have been one, and also Heliogabalus.) But even Caligula--even Caligula--began as a reformer. One of Caligula's first acts as Emperor was to burn all of Tiberius's secret files on everybody and declare a general amnesty on the treason trials. He was a degenerate, yes, but he knew that he would last longer as a good Emperor than as a bad one. But then--and this happened to him, and to Tiberius, and to Nero, and to all those with such absolute power--he began the slide. See, when you're told you can do anything--anything--with impunity, you don't quite get it. You don't quite believe it. So you continue to act and think pretty much like you did before. Then, one day, out of pique or desire or curiosity, you push it a little bit--you try something a bit naughty, a bit over the line. And you wait for the reaction. And there is none. So you try it again. Again, no reaction. And again. No reaction. And from then on, it's off to the races. Like a sore tooth you can't keep poking, you've got to keep testing the limits--plus which, having begun to do whatever you want, you've also begun to expect that you can do these horrible things and have your butt kissed in return--because you'll never know for sure that you can do anything you want unless the things you do become increasingly more and more outrageous. Caligula made his horse a Senator. Why? Because he was crazy enough to think the horse would make a good politician? No--Because He Could--or rather, He Needed To Know He Could. We're in Iraq not because we should be, but because we want to be--because if we can just, on our own initiative, invade a country we don't like and turn it upside down, treating it the way the Who treats a hotel room, and no one says Boo to us (and they're not...), why, then, we really are the only superpower on Earth--we really do rule the planet. Worry, folks. Worry about what we do next--not because it needs to be done, but just because we can do it. Or rather, don't worry. Because that would require emotional involvement. And Lord knows, we wouldn't want to trouble ourselves.
My, but I'm bitter.