Waiting for George to Head Down to the Well
Our clicker inadvertently snagged on the VP giving something resembling a eulogy to Gerald Ford this evening. I probably watched more cheney than I have previously been able to keep down without Pepto-bismol or other artifices.
But it was an uncanny performance. I detected few if any of the usual grimaces, vaderish malevolence, or body language that has always so clearly limned cheney's by-now well-documented evil pact-with-the devil personality. Whether it was a body double or simply the cadaver shot full of leftovers from a Six Feet Under outtake, I found it genuinely surreal.
As of course is the sudden elevation of Ford to sainthood. It's true that compared to swine like Nixon, Reagan, and Bush (two, filed under category Betraying Country for Self), Ford was almost as likeable, charming, and probably effective as a president as, say, Chevy Chase would have been. But the veneration does the usual job of making this whole ceremonial business stink to the rafters.
The only way I can accept it is if it compels our swagger-chimp with the pneumatic codpiece to consider an early out. Injection, bungy-jumping with expired rubber, actually piloting a high-speed aircraft, who cares. The troubling part is that he already seems attuned to the idea that death erases all the mediocrity. Though come to think of it that's my take based on Ford model. George must be thinking of it in a different fashion, since mediocrity is the best he has on record!
So it's really a matter of arranging an intervention to get him to realize he's no longer in the grade- and performance-inflated environments he enjoyed at Yale and Harvard and Texas. Back in those Glory Days he had multiple generations of owned fawning chums of gramps and dad and all prepared to lose his records, take care of the troubling credentialing processes, buy him companies, and even buy back the companies at inflated prices after he'd confirmed his absolute incompetence and lack of interest.
But the more troubling bit is that George hasn't seemed to grasp the essence of great referenced number by the Boss, which rings in my ears after hearing it twice on the radio this week. In essence, "time slips away and leaves you with little more than Boring Stories." History seems unlikely to credit ghb with any no-hitters or great speedballs. Memory is fallible, but the record seems way too consistent on what this guy has meant to the US of A. He may have been born here, but he is so clearly not Of Here. And no "immigration policy" will make him an American patriot, never mind retrofit a record of anything but shame. On him, on his family, and on our country.
David Kurtz, posting today at Talking Points Memo, has some related reactions to the Ford remembrances, of heightened relevance these days, that I second:
As painful as it was, I watched a bit of ABC's coverage of the arrival of President Ford's remains at the Capitol this evening. Among the guest commentators were David Gergen (that hipster--he's got his own website) and Richard Norton Smith, both the sorts of conservatives that Democrats and the media love to have around for their tempered views. Still, to hear Gergen and and Smith chatting it up with Charlie Gibson and Barbara Walters (who was vacationing in the same locale as Henry Kissinger when word came of Ford's death) about the poisonous atmosphere that existed in Washington around the time Ford took office--how there were protesters with the temerity to stand outside the White House gates and scream that Nixon be impeached, how buses were lined up along Pennsylvania Avenue as barricades, how troops were stationed around Washington to put down any insurrection, how the country was at war with itself--you get the sense that in their minds the unwashed masses were just as much to blame for the tenor of the times as the suited white guys in the inner sanctums of the White House. I had always thought that to the extent Ford had, in the oft-used phrase, restored confidence in the Presidency he had done so by elevating the conduct of those in the White House, raising the office above the shabby habits of his predecessor's men. It had not occurred to me (although it probably should have) until listening to Gergen and Smith that for many people Ford's signature service to the country was calming the waters so that the rabble quieted down and went home. It is in that sense that the pardon of Nixon helped "heal" the country (clearing the way three decades later for Smith to reminisce about the Ford children playing in Statuary Hall on Saturdays in a quaint Washington of a different era). All these years later, you can still discern a liberal from a conservative by whether she perceives the protesters or all the President's men as a greater threat to democracy.
But it was an uncanny performance. I detected few if any of the usual grimaces, vaderish malevolence, or body language that has always so clearly limned cheney's by-now well-documented evil pact-with-the devil personality. Whether it was a body double or simply the cadaver shot full of leftovers from a Six Feet Under outtake, I found it genuinely surreal.
As of course is the sudden elevation of Ford to sainthood. It's true that compared to swine like Nixon, Reagan, and Bush (two, filed under category Betraying Country for Self), Ford was almost as likeable, charming, and probably effective as a president as, say, Chevy Chase would have been. But the veneration does the usual job of making this whole ceremonial business stink to the rafters.
The only way I can accept it is if it compels our swagger-chimp with the pneumatic codpiece to consider an early out. Injection, bungy-jumping with expired rubber, actually piloting a high-speed aircraft, who cares. The troubling part is that he already seems attuned to the idea that death erases all the mediocrity. Though come to think of it that's my take based on Ford model. George must be thinking of it in a different fashion, since mediocrity is the best he has on record!
So it's really a matter of arranging an intervention to get him to realize he's no longer in the grade- and performance-inflated environments he enjoyed at Yale and Harvard and Texas. Back in those Glory Days he had multiple generations of owned fawning chums of gramps and dad and all prepared to lose his records, take care of the troubling credentialing processes, buy him companies, and even buy back the companies at inflated prices after he'd confirmed his absolute incompetence and lack of interest.
But the more troubling bit is that George hasn't seemed to grasp the essence of great referenced number by the Boss, which rings in my ears after hearing it twice on the radio this week. In essence, "time slips away and leaves you with little more than Boring Stories." History seems unlikely to credit ghb with any no-hitters or great speedballs. Memory is fallible, but the record seems way too consistent on what this guy has meant to the US of A. He may have been born here, but he is so clearly not Of Here. And no "immigration policy" will make him an American patriot, never mind retrofit a record of anything but shame. On him, on his family, and on our country.
David Kurtz, posting today at Talking Points Memo, has some related reactions to the Ford remembrances, of heightened relevance these days, that I second:
As painful as it was, I watched a bit of ABC's coverage of the arrival of President Ford's remains at the Capitol this evening. Among the guest commentators were David Gergen (that hipster--he's got his own website) and Richard Norton Smith, both the sorts of conservatives that Democrats and the media love to have around for their tempered views. Still, to hear Gergen and and Smith chatting it up with Charlie Gibson and Barbara Walters (who was vacationing in the same locale as Henry Kissinger when word came of Ford's death) about the poisonous atmosphere that existed in Washington around the time Ford took office--how there were protesters with the temerity to stand outside the White House gates and scream that Nixon be impeached, how buses were lined up along Pennsylvania Avenue as barricades, how troops were stationed around Washington to put down any insurrection, how the country was at war with itself--you get the sense that in their minds the unwashed masses were just as much to blame for the tenor of the times as the suited white guys in the inner sanctums of the White House. I had always thought that to the extent Ford had, in the oft-used phrase, restored confidence in the Presidency he had done so by elevating the conduct of those in the White House, raising the office above the shabby habits of his predecessor's men. It had not occurred to me (although it probably should have) until listening to Gergen and Smith that for many people Ford's signature service to the country was calming the waters so that the rabble quieted down and went home. It is in that sense that the pardon of Nixon helped "heal" the country (clearing the way three decades later for Smith to reminisce about the Ford children playing in Statuary Hall on Saturdays in a quaint Washington of a different era). All these years later, you can still discern a liberal from a conservative by whether she perceives the protesters or all the President's men as a greater threat to democracy.
posted by Sir Gumbo at 10:24 PM
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