Contrast

I received an interesting forward via Email today regarding the old EL Doctorow essay he wrote on 9 Sept 2004.

Contrast this quote from the NYTimes with the excerpt that follows:

"These are my boys. I trained with them since January. Every one of them was like my sons, every single one. I was responsible for them. I still feel that responsibility." LARRY BOWMAN, gunnery sergeant, on recent deaths in the Third Battalion, 25th Marines.

Doctorow Excerpt:

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 weapons of mass destruction 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 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.

Interesting contrast, no?