Your humble Madman found himself wandering in a dream through the Capitol Rotunda, surprised to hear a muffled voice coming from a coffin laid out in full State-funereal splendor.
“Mmmmmm, mmm, UMMM, mmmmm!”, he heard.
Nonplussed, yet having read far too much Carlos Castenada when he was younger, the Madman bought into the spirit of the vision and wandered closer, asking, “Excuse me?”
“My throat is a little dry, but that shameless toady Woodward will fill you in on what I want to say!”, he heard a rasping voice declare, as a desiccated figure burst up out of the coffin. The Madman had never noticed before how much our only un-elected President looked like the Crypt Keeper.
“Wha?!!?”, he exclaimed, taken aback, only to find a ghoulish man dressed in an ugly suit standing beside the coffin, like magic, with a self-satisfied smirk on his face.
“Oh, Woodward, I recognize you from those circle jerks on Sunday mornings!”, the Madman declared. “What’s up?”
The grave robber began to declaim:
Former president Gerald R. Ford said in an embargoed interview in July 2004 that the Iraq war was not justified. “I don’t think I would have gone to war,” he said a little more than a year after President Bush launched the invasion advocated and carried out by prominent veterans of Ford’s own administration.
In a four-hour conversation at his house in Beaver Creek, Colo., Ford “very strongly” disagreed with the current president’s justifications for invading Iraq and said he would have pushed alternatives, such as sanctions, much more vigorously. In the tape-recorded interview, Ford was critical not only of Bush but also of Vice President Cheney — Ford’s White House chief of staff — and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who served as Ford’s chief of staff and then his Pentagon chief.
The flack’s voice was kind of strange, as though it was coming from someone not quite human, which fit, considering it was coming from a soul-less flack. It felt to the Madman like Woodward was speaking to an invisable camera over his right shoulder. He looked back, expecting to find “Tweety” Matthews and “Timmeh” Russert standing beside him. Woodward continued:
“Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. They put the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction,” Ford said. “And now, I’ve never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error in how they should justify what they were going to do.”
The Madman felt some anger building up inside. He shifted his gaze, looking at the bag of bones encased in an expensive tailored suit, and asked, “WHY DIDN’T YOU SAY IT PUBLICLY?!?!”
The dead golfer was silent, refusing to look your humble servant and astrally-projecting Madman in the eye, only nodding at the circus geek-cum-journalist standing by his side.
“Well, I can understand the theory of wanting to free people,” Ford said, referring to Bush’s assertion that the United States has a “duty to free people.” But the former president said he was skeptical “whether you can detach that from the obligation number one, of what’s in our national interest.” He added: “And I just don’t think we should go hellfire damnation around the globe freeing people, unless it is directly related to our own national security.”
The Madman couldn’t take it anymore. “What about the OTHER corpses, the other coffins?” he declared, full of anger, disgust, despair at confronting yet another cowardly tool of the ruling class, one SO cowardly that he would only speak truth through a circus geek, and from beyond the grave. His rage, in the logic of dreams, brought forth flickering images of the damage wrought.
“What of THIS lost soul?” the Madman demanded, as a ghostly image slipped into view:
“What of the three thousand or more like it? What of the mothers and fathers and wives and husbands and children and siblings left bereft?” the Madman cried!
The Madman continued, tears of rage and grief filling his dreaming eyes, “Or THESE wretched souls, who we don’t even feel worthy of counting, who you and your ilk barely look upon as human?!?!”
“Isn’t it too late to share what passes for your wisdom?” the Madman demanded. “Isn’t it too late, as the casualties pile up, as the crimes spread, as our Constitution crumbles?”
The Crypt Keeper chuckled, settling back down into comfortable repose, knowing that he will be the center of attention for the next several days, knowing that his pet shill will burnish his image as a “statesman” and a “healer”. The dead man knew that he was doing in death what he’d done throughout his public life, providing cover for tyrants and criminals while somehow conning the press into presenting him as an elder voice of reason.
The dry, rustling, disturbing chuckle filled the Madman’s ears as he started awake in a sweat, knowing that even dreams such as those were preferable to the continuing national nightmare.
this nation worships death, and dead faux heroes.
Your thesis might be right, but if you’re using the national response to the death of Gerald Ford to support it, you’re on mighty weak ground.
Haven’t you noticed? Nobody cares about Ford’s death except those who were close to him.
Of course there’s all the pro forma media attention. Despite all that, have you actually talked to anybody who was moved by this event? In your daily dealings with people, has anybody even brought it up?
Otherwise than saying, “Oh, did you hear Gerald Ford died?”
With respect to this event, the American populace can be divided into two sets: the people for whom the name “Gerald Ford” means nothing (by far the larger class), and the people for whom it means something.
The second of these classes divides into: those who remember the pardon and regard it as unforgivable; those who vaguely remember Ford as the cause of Chevy Chase’s briefly seeming to be funny; and a statistically insignificant “other” (which includes those who remember the pardon and also remember his performance in the Warren Commission).
Seriously, have you found anybody not solemnly intoning before a television camera who attached any significance to this? I sure haven’t.
Regarding Ford’s failure to speak out against the war in Iraq, I think it’s to his credit that he knew he was insignificant. Who would have cared what he had to say at that time?
actually, several people at work did, saying that he was a “good” President and a nice man.
Fair enough. That still sounds like the kind of casual conversation I would expect. (“Ford dead? Was he still alive? Oh. Well, he was a decent guy. I always thought SNL was a little too hard on him — but you gotta admit, it was funny. Anything else happen yesterday?”) And I still think it’s a great exaggeration to call him a “dead faux hero” — because of the “hero” part, not the “faux”! — and an object of posthumous worship.
Reagan, yes. But not Gerry. Again, does anybody (other than his family) express any real feeling of loss, or any conviction that this was a great man, as distinguished from a “good man” — modest in demeanor, talent, and ambition; spectacularly unspectacular — who, precisely in virtue of the traits just mentioned,, was the “right man” for the job at the time?
I find it illuminating to compare the quotations (in various relevant news articles) from people attending Ford’s viewing to those who lined up to pay tribute to James Brown. The former (from what I’ve seen) generally say they showed up because, well, a former president’s lying in state is a piece of history. No real feeling for Ford himself. With James Brown, it’s a rather different story. To be sure, these “randomly” selected person-on-the-street quotations fall far short of scientifically-conducted polls and should be viewed with suspicion, but here I think they probably pretty well capture the moods of the respective crowds (and wouldn’t it be nice to see some solid assessments of the sizes of those crowds)?
Again, this is not to dispute your claim that the nation (like any other, perhaps?) worships dead faux heroes, but merely to deny that the national response to Ford’s passing is a convincing example of this.
you underestimate how the Right has used these fake elevations to advance their agenda. It doesn’t matter what “normal” people say in the end … the problem is that this kind of coverage, advanced by BOTH parties and most of the talking heads, allows the right to gloss over the damage he did, Reagan did, Bush Daddy did … not to mention all of their toadies.
rather than say that this is faux hero worship I would say it is faux centrism worship.
Ford is a hero to the Broderists because he didn’t allow DC to embroiled in a show trial of a former President. It’s not that he let Nixon get away with his crimes, it’s that he prevented something unseemly and demoralizing to the Georgetown culture.
As I say below, I think you’re dead on here.
That seems to me a different point, and a fair observation (assuming we construe “the Right” broadly enough, as I’m quite certain you do). Perhaps I misunderstood your claim about “this nation” as a generalization about, among others, “normal people”. If that was a misunderstanding, we don’t much disagree. In fact, the beliefs I’ve already expressed are precisely why I find myself mightily amused by all the media attention, the headlines about the nation’s mourning, etc. This is certainly faux worship — maintaining the pretense that the death of a president, any president, is a matter of colossal significance to “the nation” (the “normal people”). The principal aim of which, I would say, has less to do with Ford or Reagan as contrasted with Carter or Clinton, more to do with the mystical elevation of “the Presidency” as such, something one sees in many aspects of our public (that is, broadcasted) discourse. (To be sure, this facilitates the covering up — and the continued commission — of a great many evils.)
I also think BooMan’s comment is right on the mark. It’s the Broderists — and, I suspect, only the Broderists — to whom Ford really is a hero, for exactly the reason Boo states.
Some things never change. The “good ol boys club” will always and forever cover each others butts first. Anyone who expects it to work any other way has simply not been paying attention at all.
LOL, love the “Hack” posts, i’m hoping for a series 🙂
It’s just a little more of his healing.
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WASHINGTON (Scotsman/Reuters) Dec. 29 – Former President Gerald Ford told an interviewer last year he pardoned Richard Nixon in part to spare his friend the stigma of a criminal conviction for the Watergate cover-up, the Washington Post reported.
The explanation goes beyond Ford’s previous insistence that he issued the pardon to move the United States beyond the partisan divisions of Watergate.
Destroying The Constitution ...“I looked upon him as my personal friend. And I had no hesitancy about granting the pardon because I felt that we had this relationship and I didn’t want to see my real friend have the stigma,” Ford, who died at age 93, told journalist Bob Woodward in a 2005 interview.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Personal/partisan loyalty trumps law. No big surprise there.