E. L. Doctorow: The Unfeeling President

But this president does not know what death is. He hasn't the mindfor it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table forthe weapons of mass destruction he can't seem to find, you see him atrallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of thecarefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man.

He does not mourn. He doesn't understand why he should mourn. He issatisfied during the course of a speech written for him to look solemnfor a moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made theultimate sacrifice for their country.

But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles anemotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being because hehas no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility forthe 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 orwives and children who will suffer to the end of their days a terriblytorn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembranceof aborted life . . . they come to his desk as a political liability,which is why the press is not permitted to photograph the arrival oftheir coffins from Iraq.

How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regretsnothing. He does not regret that his reason for going to war was, as heknew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that his bungledplan for the war's aftermath has made of his mission-accomplished adisaster. He does not regret that, rather than controlling terrorism,his war in Iraq has licensed it. So he never mourns for the dead andcrippled youngsters who have fought this war of his choice.

He wanted to go to war and he did. He had not the mind to perceivethe costs of war, or to listen to those who knew those costs. He didnot understand that you do not go to war when it is one of the optionsbut when it is the only option; you go not because you want to butbecause you have to.

Yet this president knew it would be difficult for Americans not tocheer the overthrow of a foreign dictator. He knew that much. Thispresident and his supporters would seem to have a mind for only onething -- to take power, to remain in power, and to use that power forthe 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 hedoes not drop to his knees, he is not contrite, he does not sit in thechurch with the grieving parents and wives and children. He is thepresident who does not feel. He does not feel for the families of thedead, he does not feel for the 35 million of us who live in poverty, hedoes not feel for the 40 percent who cannot afford health insurance, hedoes not feel for the miners whose lungs are turning black or for theworking people he has deprived of the chance to work overtime attime-and-a-half to pay their bills - it is amazing for how many peoplein this country this president does not feel.

But he will dissemble feeling. He will say in all sincerity he isrelieving the wealthiest 1 percent of the population of their taxburden for the sake of the rest of us, and that he is polluting the airwe breathe for the sake of our economy, and that he is decreasing thequality of air in coal mines to save the coal miners' jobs, and that heis depriving workers of their time-and-a-half benefits for overtimebecause this is actually a way to honor them by raising them into theprofessional class.

And this litany of lies he will versify with reverences for God andthe flag and democracy, when just what he and his party are doing toour democracy is choking the life out of it.

But there is one more terribly sad thing about all of this. Iremember the millions of people here and around the world who marchedagainst the war. It was extraordinary, that spontaneous arousedoversoul of alarm and protest that transcended national borders. Whydid it happen? After all, this was not the only war anyone had everseen coming. There are little wars all over he world most of the time.

But the cry of protest was the appalled understanding of millions ofpeople that America was ceding its role as the last best hope ofmankind. It was their perception that the classic archetype ofdemocracy was morphing into a rogue nation. The greatest democraticrepublic in history was turning its back on the future, using itsextraordinary power and standing not to advance the ideal of aconcordance of civilizations but to endorse the kind of tribal combatthat originated with the Neanderthals, a people, now extinct, who couldimagine ensuring their survival by no other means than pre-emptive war.

The president we get is the country we get. With each president thenation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleablenational soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds oflawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses. The peoplehe appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into and get usinto, is his characteristic trouble.

Finally, the media amplify his character into our moral weatherreport. He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail.How can we sustain ourselves as the United States of America given thestupid and ineffective warmaking, the constitutionally insensitivelawgiving, and the monarchal economics of this president? He cannotmourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn forourselves.