Nothing Special, Just E.L. Doctorow

Twice this week I've received, via email, an essay purported to be by E.L. Doctorow explaining his position on the psychology of George W. Bush, specifically, how the President deals with death -- the title on the email was "A Very Special Essay by E.L. Doctorow". It was interesting, and even mildly provocative, and here is a link to it in case anyone is interested -- The Essay


A Few Comments by Gerald Michael Rolfe on E.L. Doctorow's Essay on President Bush and Death


I'm not sure what particular specialness the title of this email is referring to when referring to Doctorow's essay below. It could be the quality of prose, I suppose, which, if not exactly special is certainly in keeping with what one would expect of someone who has spent his professional life writing successfully -- Doctorow is unarguably an accomplished craftsman of rhetoric. Or it could be the message itself that is supposed to be special although the message is not in short supply from other sources. There's nothing new about the notion that a Republican might be heartless and there's plenty of written opinion stating just that. I'm going to guess that it's the prose itself that is ostensibly special. But though I'm trained to expound at length on things literary, and I can think of ten or twenty mini-theses to argue with regard to Doctorow's prose, I've decided that I prefer instead to talk about his message. It's more interesting to me.

At first blush, Doctorow would seem to be talking about the absence of George W. Bush's brain -- after all, he (Bush) doesn't know what death is. "He hasn't the mind for it." And this wouldn't be a special observation at all, of course, because there has been an unprecedented amount of opinion disseminated over the last six years telling us that the present President is stupid. But Doctorow isn't talking about the brain. (at least that part of the brain that's normally attributed to rational thought and the collection and synthesis of knowledge). No, he's talking about Bush's heart. His conscience. His capacity for empathy, or at least an infinite lack thereof. And that's special because?

See, I've always thought that it was common knowledge that Republicans were heartless, that because they (supposedly) put rationality ahead of empathy they are therefore able to espouse 'wrong-headed' ideas like free market capitalism, trickle-down economics, tactical nuclear war, private healthcare and privatized social security. I've always thought this because brilliant writers like E.L. Doctorow and Noam Chomsky have told me this. Republicans are the ones who will unblinkingly tell a poverty stricken old woman, "Gee, I'm sorry ma'am, but you should have planned better." Right? I'm sure Tom Daschel and Al Gore would back me up on this.

I don't mean to make light of the more sensitive message in Doctorow's essay. I understand that he is taking great umbrage at the seeming injustice (dare I say evil?) of a President initiating wars of dubious merit while simultaneoulsy lacking the capacity for grief, without paying the same emotional price that basically bankrupted the spirit of Lyndon Johnson because of Viet Nam. I don't know if it's really true that Bush is bereft of a connection to the "oversoul" as such (and Doctorow's essay provides no salient evidence to support that), but I do acknowledge that if it was true then it would be disgusting.

I could take issue with many of the things in his essay, and if I didn't have a day job I would. I could effectively argue against at least a dozen premises upon which depend the thrust of Doctorow's point, and thereby undermine his argument. And I would do it from a non-Republican point of view (that's why it would be effective) because I am certaintly not a Republican.

But I don't want to.

I don't care if people think George Bush is good or evil. I don't care that E.L. Doctorow blithely drops assailable premise after assailable premise (all of them very worn out platitudes of the left) as he marches toward making a point that is really no point at all -- that we should mourn ourselves. Democrats have been teaching us that we should feel sorry for ourselves for as long as they have been pushing statism under the guise of compassion. No, I don't care about those things because they are a commonplace part of the American poltical landscape and I have been worn thin by them. For me it's enough to just rub off a little of the patina of specialness that has been attributed to the essay by others subsequent to its writing. I don't think his essay is 'very special', or even just special for that matter.

It's long been asserted that if you are a Republican at 20 you have no heart, and if you're a Democrat at 40 you have no brain, and while that's just a cute little saying, it also intimates some fundamental differences between members of the two dominant political parties in the United States. I happen to think, generally, that arguments in favor of Republican points of view pander to our rational side and those pushing Democratic points of view pander to our heart strings. This essay by Doctorow is exemplar of the latter. He brings us to the living room of the grieving families and our feeling soul is therefore supposed to buy every idea he sells us in that emotion's name. Many of us do. I try not to. The self-righteous derision of the left for George W. Bush is so transparent these days that it's a cliche. I'm not buying.

During the Clinton-hating years, Republicans were the ones who wrote these hand-wringing essays in abundance. And they too were usually a mess of reshoveled bullshit that had been passed around for generations -- too many unsubstantiated assertions that we had all heard before. But I remember one fascinating article by Nora Ephron in the mid-nineties (I'm pretty sure she's no republican) that appeared in Reason magazine. It was long, well researched, well-written, and its point was essentially that Bill Clinton couldn't think. Seriously. What's more, her argument was that Hillary did his thinking for him. I wouldn't necessarily call her article special, but I think that if you find it and read it you will see that it is far more special than Doctorow's essay here -- her argument was supported by facts and evidence -- so much so that this skeptical reader's only comment upon finishing it was, "Wow!" To this day I wonder if Bill Clinton has a thinking disorder.

So. Two writers. Two presidents. Ephron shows us the president who cannot think. Doctorow shows us the president who cannot feel. And in the meantime people are born and people die, even people who have volunteered to serve their country after having sworn to uphold the constitution of the United States and to serve the commander in chief of the military toward that end. Even people who mind their own business and treat people with love and respect until the day some asshole flies a jetliner full of other people into the side of the building where they work. Even some poor old lady in Baghdad selling pots in the street until a suicide bomb goes off next to her, or some innocent young girl who was raped in Kabul and who had to therefore be put to death by the Taliban because of the shame she supposedly brings upon her family. People die. We all know death. Some of us more than others.

And if any one of us thinks that our mortality is dependent upon who is the President of the United States then we are missing the big picture. Yes, one can find abundant anecdotal evidence to 'prove' that it does matter, that because George W. Bush is President therefore soldier A died, just as someone can also provide evidence to 'prove' that because soldier A died he made the world safer for Iraqi citizen B and American citizen C who both therefore lived and on and on. We can at least be sure that Saddam Hussein and his sons haven't killed anyone for a while.

Some people think that because America is responsible for removing the Iraqi tyranny then Americans are now therefore in greater danger. And they may be right. But do we err on the side of tyranny in the name of safety? I don't know. I don't know if Americans are more important than Iraqis. I don't know if the fact that US soldiers dying has saved Iraqi lives is a good thing or a bad thing. I know that if it's my son dying it's a bad thing. I know that if I'm an Iraqi mother whose son was released from an Iraqi torture prison it's a good thing.

And so it goes, Linda Ellerbee. People die of murder and of cancer and of suicide and of stupid accidents. People die through no fault of their own and people die because they are careless and people die because they want to and people die because they risk their lives for fun or adventure or, yes, even duty. While E.L. Doctorow is right to deride a President if he thinks that a President is subverting his own duty and thereby causing the unjust deaths of those sworn to obey him, and right to deride him still further if he thinks that president is morally bereft, he would also do well to consider that many of those soldiers believe in the mission that puts them in great peril. To tell an honorable soldier that he risks his life for nothing more than that he blindly follows a moral reprobate into fruitless battle is to tell him he is nothing -- that he is a fool. To tell that to grieving families, many of whom also believe in the rightness of the mission that cost them their beloved, is to spit in their faces. Honor bought with blood is a weighty commodity. It is heavy enough to bear for a grieving mother or wife or child without some morally outraged intellectual attempting to strip away meaning while psychologizing. I would hope that 'very special' essays pontificating on the incapacity for feeling by some, while portraying its writer as someone so full of feeling that he wants us all to mourn, would at least offer a caveat that allowed for those grieving families whose solace indeed depends upon the fact that their loved one's death had meaning -- that they are not fools. Because they are not.

And so, Mr. Special Essay Writer, forgive me for not mourning for my self. Forgive me for seeing the hollowness of your mourning, the calculated politics of your rhetoric, and the fairly well-disguised petulance in your voice (oops, I wasn't going to go into the literary critique!) Forgive me for not jumping onto your self-pity train and forgive me for not piling on the President for which neither one of us voted. Join me instead (and you can bring all your oversoul cohorts with you) in celebrating the bravery of those dead service men and women, in mourning them while marveling at what a counfounding thing is honor. Join me in celebrating the demise of two different kinds of tyranny in Iraq and Afghanistan, and of the rebirth of hope in those lands. We can mourn our dead, as we always do whether we want to or not, as we must do because of our humanity and despite the fact that some never will because they lack the capability. But if we must stoop to mourning ourselves, then we really have dropped out of the best of what it means to be human, and we might better join Abbie Hoffman and Sylvia Plath and my aunt Phyllis and my darling Beckie's brother and all the other tortured souls who hurt too much and for too long to face another day.

Call me Pollyanna -- I think we have a duty to find something positive to say.

Peace,

Gerald Michael Rolfe