Doctorow: Bush Dissembles Feelings, Cannot Mourn (Reprint)

[BQueen]

A reprint, but so apt and beautifully written:

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/editorial/outlook/3309407

OUR UNFEELING PRESIDENT
Bush cannot grieve because he doesn't know what death is
By E.L. DOCTOROW


Editor's note: The article below was written by novelist E.L. Doctorow for The East Hampton Star, and was originally published on Sept 9, 2004. Since that time the number of American war dead in Iraq has risen to more than 1,800.

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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 or 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.
*****
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....
****

Hard to edit -- a bit over the limit, but read it all -- "goosebump" good.

[Hekate]

1. It's a great article

Bush is a scary, scary man. Deeply crippled somehow, whether sociopathy or pre-senile dementia, possibly some combination of the two -- and all the more dangerous because of that and the people around him.

Thanks for posting it.

Hekate

[BQueen]

2. Very scary man

He's just vacant somehow, and not just in the intellectual sense.

Justin Frank has a post at Huffington Post Blog saying he thinks maybe Bush is "a new kind of bi-polar: the poles being indifference and destructive violence." He wants vets families who had the meet-and-greet to post their stories for the record in the comments section.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/justin-frank/unmasking-george-w-bush_5704.html

[Loge23]

4. "...mourn for ourselves."

Terrific read. Doctorow is one of our greatest writers - we so need this opinion now. I urge everyone to go to the link and read the entire text.

[BQueen]

3. self-kick

this is too good to sink, even Buzz Flash referenced it. so I'm kicking my own thread. :P

[FrankLee]

5. The Houston Chronicle actually published this a few days ago

That surprised me. Below is a link to the LTTE's in response.

http://www.chron.com/CDA/umstory.mpl/editorial/3313463