Thursday, January 27, 2005

Soul, or the lack thereof

Wolcott:

[. . .]

When Bush did address the soldiers' deaths, he said that we "weep and mourn" when Americans die, but as he was saying it his hand was flatly smacking downwards for emphasis, as if he were pounding the table during the business meeting, refusing to pay a lot for a muffler. The steady beat of his hand was at odds with the sentiments he was expressing--he didn't look or sound the least bit mournful or sombre. And why should he? Death doesn't seem to be a bringdown for him. There isn't the slightest evidence that he experiences the anguish LBJ did as casualties mounted in Vietnam. His record as chief executioner in Texas is of a man for whom the death of another is an administrative detail, a power exercise. As Sister Helen Prejean wrote in The New York Review of Books:

[. . .]


Bush has no soul and looks at our troops as numbers in a ledger. He doesn't care how many die, how many American lives, and families, he destroys, let alone all of the innocent Iraqis killed in the last 2 years. At risk of sounding like a Jesuslander, Bush is the Devil's henchman.

No comments: