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Theme : PoliticsWar's Bottom Line: Deathby Jimmy Breslin You study the faces on television. I would not hire the press guy for the president, Ari Fleischer, for a job in a funeral parlor because he is too somber. I single him out because he is on TV a lot at this time. Death. But when you study faces anywhere, you can't find a smile. The faces tell you the time in which you're living. The government is talking about a war with Iraq as if discussing a commuter train home. When we have the war, when we get the 101st Airborne in place, when the carrier group arrives, when the war starts at the end of February. The 8:42 to Long Beach. The government talks about a war in terms of personal insults, deliberately keeping us waiting, by Saddam Hussein, of whom we're all sick and tired. No one so far has talked about the number of people who will be killed in Iraq. We will lose great young people. Oh, there has to be tens of thousands of Iraq civilians killed. How can they bomb and invade without killing tens of thousands? Particularly those school children whose mothers dress them for the day and send them off to be blown apart by a smart bomb that turns dumb on the way down and hits a schoolhouse. Saddam Hussein and his sons and generals don't seem to care how many of their people get killed. Their record seems to show that. The blood of children, however, is not on his hands. It is on ours. The questions will be asked at the end of life and the answers - "I didn't do it. Bush did it and the guys flying the planes did it" - are not going to do much good for you. Even if people don't dwell on this, still in there, mixed with their blood count, is the low moan of a horror they can't see yet, but know that it is out there. Dead babies make war good and real. Of course, people display gloom. When you're in something this lousy it tells on everybody. The soul shows. Bush talks about this war as if he is driving us to it on a one-way street. We bomb them. We flatten them under tank treads. What happens then? Why, America wins again! The Bush people want the thrill of the invasion news without having to read the casualty lists on the following days. Neither he, nor anybody else, mentions the obvious fact that an attack on Iraq will cause a response someday. Maybe a month, a year, five years. They will come. And the only place they will attack is New York. That came to mind naturally yesterday during a walk along the fence of the old World Trade Center site. No suicide bomber wants to go Waco, Texas. Nobody tries poison gas on Denver. They can't wait to hit New York again. And if there is one sure thing, this Bush and his southern Republicans will simply shuck off the news of anything happening to New York. But the city is a marvelous set for political gain. Bush came to the World Trade Center three days after the attack. As did Bob Beckwith, who at 69 was a retired firefighter and had been 40 miles away when the attack came. But Bush found him and stood on top of a fire engine and put his arm around Beckwith's shoulder and it was his war-hero picture. Untrue, phony, but it was on every magazine cover. As darkness fell yesterday, making it even colder, there was an anti-war demonstration, the second of the day, on 47th Street, off the United Nations. There were only a few hundred people, but even that was an enormous crowd in this weather. Bundled to the eyes, Malachy McCourt got up and sang an Irish war song for them, "Johnny, I hardly Knew Yeh." He sang of "drums and guns, guns and drums." I had to give it to him, getting up there in air that froze the throat. But he sang with great cheer and a fine smile on his lips. When you're doing something good, it breaks out all over your face. In the crowd was an icy Barbara Horn, who teaches English and women's studies at Nassau Community College. I asked her if she had been in peace demonstrations before this. She smiled. Of course. She was 57 and around during Vietnam. Then Annette Cammer gave her name as she shivered. She is 59. "Have I been in demonstrations before? Of course. I was at Berkeley." That made her laugh. Of course. She was there to protest bombing people to death. Original address of this text : |