Casey's Ghost

The blogosphere is now All Cindy All the Time, and my initial reaction to the overkill is: ABOUT FUCKING TIME! It is fitting we discuss this war through the prism of a single grieving mom. I was wondering when we'd get around to weighing Bush's Folly against the individual lives it has destroyed. I was wondering when we would focus on the retail cost, when fine words like "hero" and "noble sacrifice" would burn off like morning mist to reveal the human faces underneath. I am grateful that this conversation has begun. Cindy deserves our thanks for forcing it on a reluctant press and an even more reluctant President. Her proximity is clearly cramping the President's style. This woman is shamelessly tainting the joy he takes at playing ranch: the brush clearing, the pickup truck driving, the fund raising, the brush clearing. Yet try as I might, I find it hard to grieve for his lost vacation.

Ah, the vacation... It may appear to be a separate issue, but I believe it is intimately related to the tragedy of Cindy Sheehan's loss and the broader tragedy of our impending failure in Iraq. To paraphrase James Carville: It's the vacation, stupid. Bush's refusal to meet with Cindy Sheehan is unseemly, but no more so than his refusal to attend the funerals of our servicemen and women killed in Iraq, lest in attending one he find himself compelled to attend them all. Attending death, in the sense of acknowledging its true meaning and full weight, is what Bush fears most. To do so would force him to consider the dead in the same way the families do, not as symbols useful for propping up his deranged vision, but as a long and painful series of facts. Human facts. We all know how the President feels about facts. He's been on vacation from them since the beginning. This trip to Crawford is only the most recent physical enactment of an ongoing mental event. Facts don't fit this President's worldview. They must be ignored, kept at a safe distance. And they have been. George Bush is a shallow man, and like most shallow men, he knows better than to set foot in the deep end. So he avoids a confrontation with Cindy Sheehan at all costs, because behind her he sees the ghost of her dead son. George Bush isn't avoiding Cindy. He's avoiding Casey. He is avoiding them all. George Bush sees dead people.

Whether or not anyone else sees Casey's ghost, we all sense a failure of moral imagination in the President's refusal to meet with her, and this sense is magnified because, in theory, he has nothing better to do right now, nothing but time on his hands. Why can't he walk, jog or mountain bike down the driveway and talk to this poor woman? So what if he talked to her before? She's changed her mind about the war and about him. That makes her what? Like a lot of other Americans? She gave her son. She gave the President a piece of her heart. She's earned the right to give him a piece of her mind.