Wednesday, July 6, 2005

The hollow man: Redux

Sometimes that shark looks right at ya. Right into your eyes. And the thing about a shark is he's got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll's eyes.

Comes now Cindy Sheehan, invited to the White House for a private meeting with President Bush two months after her son died in Baghdad in April 2004.

A year later, she's shaken it off enough to tell the tale:

His mouth kept moving, but there was nothing in his eyes or anything else about him that showed me he really cared or had any real compassion at all. This is a human being totally disconnected from humanity and reality. His eyes were empty, hollow shells and he was acting like I should be proud to just be in his presence when it was my son who died for his illegal war! It was one of the most disgusting experiences I ever had and it took me almost a year to even talk about it.

By the end of this meeting, Sheehan and her daughter appeared to have upset Bush, or at least his self-serving pageantry. (Turns out that even the privateness of that private meeting was probably about political manipulation, not decency and tact. Read the article, and you'll see.)

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

[. . . ]

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.



Bush is a hollow, hollow man.

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