brainrow

Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen:

On the day that The Post carried a story about how President Bush had characterized the present difficult period in Iraq as “just a comma,” Matt Mendelsohn called me. He is a photographer who took the pictures for a new book by his brother Daniel, “The Lost.” It is an attempt to find out what happened to six members of the Mendelsohn family who perished in the Holocaust — the family of great-uncle Shmiel Jager, “killed by the Nazis,” of which almost nothing else was known. There: You went right by it. Shmiel lived between the commas.

In between those commas, of course, is the life of a man. He was scared and he was brave, he was proud and he was shamed, he headed a family and ran a business and then hid from the Nazis until he, along with four daughters and his wife, was betrayed and shot right on the spot. Don’t think of the bullet as a period. It was, worse, a comma.

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Wars are fought with commas. They are essential. Here and there is a world leader who does not care about human life, but most do. The only way they can function is to plant commas around the misery they cause, to subordinate the loss of life to a supposedly greater cause. This is what Bush is doing. If he did not think he is on his way to something grand, that he is doing immense good, then he could not face what is between those two commas — almost 3,000 American lives and immense suffering. He is not a man given to introspection. Still, he could not live without the succor of cliches: breaking eggs to make an omelet and all of that. In between his commas are all those broken eggs. As yet, there is no omelet.

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Most of us yearn to escape our commas, to become something more than a profession (longtime lawyer) or resident (Washington native), to make our mark on the world. A president who has ineptly waged a foolish war instead seeks the solace of commas. It is not so much where he has deposited the wounded and dead but where he hopes he can hide from history. It can’t be done, though: George W. Bush comma — and then his failure in Iraq. The comma is his epitaph.