The Dragon Slayer's Guide to Life

An Essay On Our President by E.L.Doctorow

This is an essaywritten last year by Doctorow but I wanted to feature it today as it is a compelling and disturbing counterpoint to The War, Ken Burns' recently released documentary on PBS.  Scott and I went to see Arthur Miller's distressingly timeless play, The Crucible, at the Steppenwolf yesterday, which only intensified the deep sense of unease I have as I watch the political (and religious) machine roll forward, fueled by the terrible power of its convictions.

Edgar Lawrence Doctorow occupies a central position in the history of American literature. He is generally considered to be among the most talented, ambitious, and admired novelists of the second half of the twentieth century. Doctorow has received the National Book Award, two National Book Critics Circle Awards, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Edith Wharton Citation for Fiction, the William Dean Howell Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the residentially conferred National Humanities Medal.

Doctorow was born in New York City on January 6, 1931. After graduating with honors from Kenyon College in 1952, he did graduate work at Columbia University and served in the U.S. Army. Doctorow was senior editor for New American Library from 1959 to 1964 and then served as editor in chief at Dial Press until 1969. Since then, he has devoted his time to writing and teaching. He holds the Glucksman Chair in American Letters at New York University and over the years has taught at several institutions, including Yale University Drama School, Princeton University, Sarah Lawrence College, and the University of California, Irvine.

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An Essay On Our President

An essay by E.L. Doctorow

I fault this president (George W. Bush) for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our twenty-one year olds who wanted to be what they could be.

Hard not to think of Bush and Cheney here...

The Association for Psychological Science's journal *Psychological Science* (vol. 17, #12) includes a research article:"Power and Perspectives Not Taken" by Adam D. Galinsky, Joe C. Magee, M.
Ena Inesi, and Deborah H Gruenfeld. 

Here's how the article begins: "The powerful are often accused of being predominantly concerned with their own desires and well-being, of being insensitive to the social implications of their behavior, and of being poor perspective takers (Fiske, 1993; Keltner, Gruenfeld, & Anderson, 2003; Kipnis, 1972).  Indeed, perspective taking--stepping outside of one's own experience and imagining the emotions, perceptions, and motivations of another individual--seems the antithesis of the self-interested behavior often displayed by the powerful: It has been linked to moral reasoning (Kohlberg, 1976),  altruistic behavior (Batson, 1991), and social competence (Davis, 1983).  In this article, we demonstrate empirically that power is associated with increased difficulty in taking other individuals' perspectives.  Individuals primed with power anchor too heavily on their own vantage points and demonstrate reduced accuracy when assessing the emotions and thoughts of others."