[Dialogue] As Bush Loiters: A Christmas Toll

[Harry Wainwright]

Published on Friday, December 15, 2006 by Candide's Notebooks
<http://www.pierretristam.com/>  

As Bush Loiters: A Christmas Toll 

by Pierre Tristam

 

It's turning into an interesting Christmas season for those mothers,
fathers, wives, sons and daughters who'll get to lose a husband, a father, a
son in the next few weeks (and of course years) as the American death tally
in Iraq ho ho hoses it to <http://www.icasualties.org/oif/>  3,000 while our
Lord and Savior president and decider decides not to decide what to decide
next for Iraq until - maybe to please Jenna and the other one - "after the
holidays," as the phraseology of the corporate cruiser goes. As long as the
Dow keeps
<http://today.reuters.com/news/articleinvesting.aspx?type=bondsNews&storyID=
2006-12-14T180033Z_01_N14315752_RTRIDST_0_MARKETS-STOCKS-UPDATE-7-SNAPSHOT.X
ML>  breaking records, why worry? This is the man about whom Peggy Noonan,
the Bush family publicist, once said
<http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=95001799>  that
"eloquence is in his plainspokenness, in the fact that each word is a simple
coin with a definite worth." What, at this point, is moral bankruptcy worth?
But this is the same man who once explained his style to Bob Woodward this
way: "I'm the commander-see, I don't need to explain why I say things.
That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs
to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel I owe anybody an
explanation." This is a man who values the worthlessness of his silence. Who
makes the soldiers he never was die for it. And who still struts, with
pride, "in his chesty way, with what seems a jarring peppiness" (Peggy
<http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/?id=110009355>  Noonan's
words again, four years too late, like all the other rats bailing from the
USS W.) So for the last few days he's created his own little parade of
generals and "experts" to give the appearance of receiving advice without
needing to consent to more than what Laura Bush will suggest he should get
Barbara and George Sr. for Christmas, no doubt to pacify them. 

Meanwhile, what has happened on this presidential clock, as we near
Christmas, if we were to take just a few of the latest 1,350-odd days-a span
longer than America 's involvement in World War II, and soon World War I,
combined? Here's what: On Tuesday, Army Sgt. Brent Dunkleberger was killed
by a grenade fired at his Humvee as he patrolled in Mosul . He was 29. He
was the father of four children, none of them older than 11. He was a
firefighter back in his hometown of New Bloomfield, Pennsylvania, where, as
Baby New Year 2000, he'd "played the role for the borough's New Year's Eve
huckleberry drop at the Perry County Courthouse-complete with sash, cloth
diaper and bottle of champagne" (as the Patriot-News
<http://www.pennlive.com/news/patriotnews/index.ssf?/base/news/1166068520149
720.xml&coll=1>  described it on Thursday). It was shortly after that role
that he announced he'd be joining the military. 

On Monday, Marine Lance Cpl. Budd M. Cote was killed when his Humvee hit a
roadside bomb. He was 21. He'd just married his 19-year-old high school
sweetheart back in Marana , Arizona . He'd been a Home Depot stocker before
enlisting, but figured four years in the Marines would follow in the
footsteps of his father, who'd served in Vietnam , and help him get a leg up
on joining the sheriff's department at the end of his tour. Two other
Marines died in the same bombing, one of them 23, the other 25. Then there's
Marine Master Sgt. Brian P. McAnulty. When he was growing up in Vicksburg ,
Mississippi , he survived a car wreck that killed his best friend and soccer
teammate. He was a passenger. It happened just before Christmas, when he was
18. That was twenty-one years ago. He died in a helicopter crash just after
takeoff on Monday. He was a passenger in that one, too. 

McAnulty exhibits an enormous smile in his picture, the kind of smile that
announces lives and loves, although so far he seems to have had no life back
in Vicksburg : no telephone number bearing his or his family's name.
Something will turn up, and his brief history will be recorded in a matter
of inches in one newspaper or another, his memorial held, the waste of his
life dulled by talk of service and heroism, or talk like this, by the
president, after another helicopter crash with many lost lives in January
2005: "We mourn when our soldiers lose their lives. But our long-term
objective is to spread freedom." In case the rest of us didn't know. 

Those back-stories of young men's lives are all distinct and all the same.
They're all individuals and yet all, without exception, human beings with
lives rooted in the lives of others-families, friends, enemies, companies,
communities. Provincial newspaper stories capture shreds of those lives but
couldn't possibly capture them in their totality, in the true effect of a
lost life's shock to a human ecosystem that quivers down to the
uncomprehending eyebrow of a four-year-old inflicted on his father's
funeral, or that intrudes an emptiness sudden and total and astonishing on
an eight or nine year old, whose pain isn't yet mature enough to feel what
will come with age: sorrow that doesn't-unlike the fortune cookies'
predictions-heal with time, but only deepens. It's those burdens that the
newspaper stories cannot convey, that all the fraternal love and camaraderie
of military units cannot possibly take on, that presidents, and this
president in particular with his chesty way and jarring peppiness, this
president who has yet to attend a single serviceman's funeral, think grave
words in speeches alone can carry. It is those burdens, magnified a thousand
fold with every life lost as the president delays and prevaricates and poses
for his subservient storytellers, that, gathered together in an indictment
of their own, amount to a different kind of war crime that will never be
prosecuted because they're here, dispersed and diffuse all around us in
small hearts and souls only solitude can grasp. 

And the irony of all these lines here, these lines you're reading now, is
that they're focused on an infinitesimally small, almost self-indulgent part
of the tragedy. We write about the lives lost, the names, the high school
sweethearts, the children left behind, because these are American lives. But
what differentiates them from the lives being lost on the other side, the
Iraqi side, if not the most puerile and ridiculous difference-a difference
of geography, of culture, of nationality, differences that have nothing to
do with the human loss, to say nothing of the humanity being lost. Here we
are, mourning an American loss or two or three or four every day as if it
were the limit of the unbearable. And yet two days ago, in a single bombing
in Baghdad -one bomb, one explosion-seventy Iraqis lost their lives. The
equivalent of a heavy month's total losses for the American military. And
that bombing was just one of several that day. And those bombings were just
a few of the many means by which hundreds of Iraqis found their end that
day. What newspapers are telling those stories? What encyclopedias of the
dead will tabulate those losses, the effects on those human ecosystems? Who
ever speaks of a shared humanity when an Arab dies anymore, the deaths-in
Iraq, in Gaza or the West Bank, in Lebanon-being so routine, so disposably
forgettable. (And none of this is nearly as bad as the disposability of
African lives, which run in the millions.) 

But President Bush wants to wait. He wants to delay. He wants to spend his
holidays in peace. He wants us not to know what we've known all along. It
isn't indecision that's keeping him from announcing his new strategy. It
isn't infighting among his staff, or figuring out how to navigate an
opposition Congress. It is certainly not the possibility that he is
incubating a Lincolnesque declaration. (He had his Lincolnesque moment, on
the USS Abraham Lincoln, and look where that led us.) No. What we've known
all along is what he's been all along, in Iraq as elsewhere. Clueless.
Pointless. And now we can safely add, heartless. His best strategy is to run
out the clock on his term, to hand Iraq to the next president in the hope of
making himself not be the president who lost Iraq, even as he's been the
only president, Saddam included, who managed to wreck Iraq. And the worst of
it is to know that as reprehensive as the crimes committed in the name of
"freedom" or "democracy" or "security" have been, they're not nearly as
horrific as the crimes being committed at the expense of Iraqis' and
Americans' humanity, they're not nearly as unpardonable as the crimes that
will go unspoken except in grief's inexplicable blooms, for years to come,
from their little seed in that four-year-old's eyebrow and that
nine-year-old's newborn emptiness. Here and in Iraq . 

Tristam is a Daytona Beach News-Journal editorial writer who was born and
raised in Lebanon. Email to: ptristam at att.net. 

C 2006 Pierre Tristam

###

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /pipermail/dialogue_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20061216/dcc2aa74/attachment-0001.html 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/gif
Size: 6731 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : /pipermail/dialogue_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20061216/dcc2aa74/attachment-0001.gif