- Originally published in The Washington Post on September 8, 2003 Copyright 2003
By Courtland Milloy
In the District, President Bush
serves as commander in chief of the
D.C. National Guard, the way governors do in their states. So you might
have expected him to show up yesterday at the funeral for Spec. Darryl
T. Dent, 21, the D.C. guardsman who was killed recently in Iraq.
Canaan Baptist Church, where Dent's funeral
was held, is at 16th and Newton streets NW, not five miles from the
White House. Bush could have jogged to the wake, had a courier drop off
flowers and a card or, at the very least, telephoned the slain
soldier's family.
Call Bush AWOL, missing in action -- or just too busy fundraising. But he blew it.
"We
haven't heard from him or the White House, not a word," said Marion
Bruce, Dent's aunt and family spokeswoman. "I don't want to speak for
the whole family, but I am not pleased."
Several District officials attended the funeral,
including Mayor Anthony A. Williams and D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes
Norton. Dent is to be buried today at Arlington National Cemetery.
During
a nationally broadcast speech last year, Bush referred to Williams as
"my mayor." That being the case, he could have attended Dent's funeral
as a simple gesture of sorrow over the death of a neighbor who also
happened to be a soldier under his command.
Of course, that would not have been as stylish as, say, staging a
landing on an aircraft carrier. And being seen at a soldier's funeral
probably wouldn't make it look like the war was over, as Bush declared
on the flight deck of that ship.
But it would have been the right thing to do.
Perhaps Bush could not figure out a way to make political hay out of
Dent's funeral -- although he does seem to have a knack for turning
sorrow over the casualties of war into talk of more war.
In
March, he and British Prime Minister Tony Blair held a news conference
at Camp David at which they reportedly "exchanged condolences" over
each other's war dead, but then they went on to declare that they would
stay the course -- no matter how much blood is shed.
If
Bush appears to treat the loss of human life like a lost pawn on a
chess board, he has certainly created the backdrop for such
perceptions. With tax cuts for those already at the peak of the
nation's economy and high unemployment for those in the pits -- to say
nothing of the deceptions used to justify a war that has so far
produced little more than fat contracts for Bush's fat-cat friends --
Bush has demonstrated his obvious disdain for average Americans.
During
a visit to Walter Reed Army Medical Center earlier this year, Bush
dropped in on Michael McNaughton, a platoon sergeant in the Louisiana
National Guard who lost a leg when he stepped on a land mine in
Afghanistan. Bush reportedly invited McNaughton to go for a jog with
him once he received his artificial leg.
Surely,
there are better ways for a president to show concern for injured
veterans -- such as advocating for better health care benefits instead
of opposing them, as the Bush administration does.
For
the most part, Bush's appearances in unofficial Washington nearly
always involve using the city as a backdrop for some political scheme.
He'll visit a private school to promote school vouchers or a public
school during Black History Month to show black voters he cares.
But
he missed the opportunity -- if not the obligation -- to show respect
for an African American who proudly gave his life in a war that the
vast majority of African Americans oppose, including many of the
residents in the city where Dent grew up.
It's
one thing for Bush to ignore the District, where he received only about
9 percent of the vote; it's something else altogether when that city
has sent a disproportionately high percentage of its young men and
women into the military.
Dent's elected representative in Congress could not even vote on the
question of going to war. Had Bush attended the funeral, he might at
least have seen the contradiction in Dent's casket -- a man who died
trying to bring democracy to Iraq while being disenfranchised at home.