Me Thinks the President Doth Protest too Much

Recently, President Bush held a 40-minute news conference during which he kept repeating, "I care, I really do care." He also said: "Death bothers me." But, of course, our commander-in-chief protests too much.

Listening to Dybya pronounce words that mean caring and compassion is like listening to a student in a Berlitz class recite words of Greek to get ready for a trip to Athens in two weeks. Caring, as a word and as an action, are Greek to him.

No wonder he recently read Camus's "The Stranger." As New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd notes in her August 15th column, "Camus Comes to Crawford," the alienated hero Meursault, who didn't know the day his mother died, is a perfect character study for our fearful leader. After all, Meursault is as much a sociopath as Bush, killing an Arab for no reason other than the intense heat and sun of an Algerian afternoon. Bush, too, is caught in the same disconnect from the violence he plans or, at least, approves. I'd like to blame has callousness on the Crawford sun, but these decisions are made indoors, usually in the Ofal Office. In any case, a presidential seal is a presidential seal. And he must be held irresponsible for his acts.

As you can see, George Bush tests a lot of resolves and reserves in me. If this is all one entablature of light, as Sufis believe, then our president is participant in this mystery and must somehow be regarded in terms of that membership. Nevertheless, I think him guilty of daily war crimes and worthy of successful impeachment and imprisonment. And I will forgive him when the body of his acts is a completed sum with no possibility of continuance.

Here's American poet Charles Olson on a real leader. Call him Christ. Call him Martin Luther King: the life is the same--and so is the fate. Earlier in this poem, Olson decribes the hero as "eucharistically present," but not to be eaten or devoured--only listened to and learned from and emulated. That never seems to happen. So spend another pre-Sabbath Friday afternoon at a lynching and later love the dude for escaping the fate of being forgotten. Christ didn't need to be swaddled in the butchery-followed-by-resurrection myth. But the church imprisoned him in that time-worn template. So we got ourselves a fisher-king, or whatever they designate the returned one.

I strand you in the middle of this poem where Olson describes the mission of the hero up to the moment he sees his face in the falling axe. Watch what happens. A couple of miles upstream, the hero is already back at work, this time with a receptive audience. Meanwhile, the disciples of the slain hero are brandishing canes and handing out permanent Cain marks to the lynch mob. It's an incredible poem. By the way, note how our hero, like Meursault and Bush, braves the sun but nevers for a moment thinks of pulling the trigger.

Why they are, and he not loving anything but
his own life, that generousness, that he give
with no expectation of anything back--he,
up to then, often, in the glaring sun had sat
singing out his love, nor found
tranquility to ease his yearning, always
sleepless cares within his soul wore him
the while he looked for woman's rosy countenance. Instead,
such as these crowded around
and in foul odor and with loud whetted axes

He moved up, out of the shadows
of the lower river, past the white sand,
up ten miles where the water had cut the most
down through the rock, and bottom land,
ten feet off the stream bed, grew peach trees
which glowed from the sun which fell down the sides
of the pinnacle--there, he sang such songs women,
in whose cheeks men's risks raised color,
listened

while back where he had been his fellows
branded those others that they, disfigured,
would never forget their deed
of hate

--Charles Olson, "The Leader," from The Collected Poems of Charles Olson, University of California Press, 1997