A Hero and a Story

[FC]

http://www.wtv-zone.com/Mary/THISWILLMAKEYOUPROUD.HTML

 

A guy who is elderly, who visits gun sites sent me an E.L. Doktorow assault upon the President. He is a democrat. They claim the Pres. doesn't care, and they claim they want U.S. soldier lives saved- I don't believe them. I believe they hate the Pres. because he is a republican and want the republicans to fall. Their Vietnam-like protests are giving comfort and assistance to the enemy, which results in more of our people getting killed. I'm thinking, gee, maybe I need to go to Crawford and support the President. I don't always like his decisions, but I am sick and tired of the piss ant weenies bellyaching about our national policy.

 

This is the E.L. Doktorow tripe he sent to me:

An essay by E.L Doctorow

 

Edgar Lawrence Doctorow occupies a central position in the history of

American literature. He is generally considered to be among the most

talented, ambitious, and admired novelists of the second half of the

twentieth century. Doctorow has received the National Book Award, two

National Book Critics Circle Awards, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Edith

Wharton Citation for Fiction, the William Dean Howell Medal of the American

Academy of Arts and Letters, and the residentially conferred National

Humanities Medal.

 

Doctorow was born in New York City on January 6, 1931. After graduating with

honors from Kenyon College in 1952, he did graduate work at Columbia

University and served in the U.S. Army. Doctorow was senior editor for New

American Library from 1959 to 1964 and then served as editor in chief at!

Dial Press until 1969. Since then, he has devoted his time to writing and

teaching. He holds the Glucksman Chair in American Letters at New York

University and over the years has taught at several institutions, including

Yale University Drama School, Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence College,

and the University of California, Irvine.

 

=====================================================================

 

I fault this president (George W. Bush) 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 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.

 

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 spontaneously 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

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.

 

E.L. Doctorow

 

 

 

 

[Doble Troble]

The false premise is that the President isn't mourning the deaths of our soldiers. I am sure that he is, and to assume that he isn't is to imply that he is insane, which is stupid (but stupidity is required to be a member of the Democratic Party and so this is not surprising).

 

The issue left unaddressed is vindication for the thousands of innocents lost to terrorism over the last few years. We all have mourned for them, but mourning isn't enough. We need to: (1) punish those responsible and; (2) assume responsibility for doing all we can to eliminate murders in the future.

 

Democrats hate responsibility - especially when it involves sacrifice. This is why our responsibility to defeat terrorism is always left out of their arguements against our operations in Iraq.

 

 

[Jimro]

President Bush cares for us servicemen more than Clinton ever did. He's been there running with the amputated, visited the maimed, and thanked us for our service. The bulk of the "essay" was nothing but a character attack. No one knows the inner heart of a man, no one is a mind reader to accuse another man of not caring, of not "knowing death".

 

This is the worst kind of BS, cause I can't even fertilize anything with it.

 

Jimro

[FC]

This is the body of the message I sent to the thirty or so recipients of the email:

 

Those who are bellyaching about the war generally haven't been there, and I have.

The news cites only the bad- killings, destruction, etc. It gives inordinate attention

to whiners who flock to Crawford. Do you know what they accomplish? Encouragement

to the terrorists in Iraq who kill our soldiers. I met the Pres. here in the hospital

at Ft. Hood, TX in 2004, Easter. He is a good man. I know that he has given a private

phone no. to injured soldiers in case they need anything, or don't receive good

treatment.

I'm fed up with this Vietnam-ish crap.

 

[Ghost Dog]

This is the body of the message I sent to the thirty or so recipients of the email:

 

Those who are bellyaching about the war generally haven't been there, and I have.

The news cites only the bad- killings, destruction, etc. It gives inordinate attention

to whiners who flock to Crawford. Do you know what they accomplish? Encouragement

to the terrorists in Iraq who kill our soldiers. I met the Pres. here in the hospital

at Ft. Hood, TX in 2004, Easter. He is a good man. I know that he has given a private

phone no. to injured soldiers in case they need anything, or don't receive good

treatment.

I'm fed up with this Vietnam-ish crap.

 

I got tired of it before I volunteered to go to Nam. Actually long before I went into the Corps. These are some very stupid people and the news media is controlled by their leaders.

 

This woman carrying out her protest shames the memory of her son but she doesn't care about his memory. He volunteered for the military and the military exists for war. War means killing and dying. What the hell did she expect?

 

Jim