It’s always a momentous occasion when an ex-president dies. Invariably, the major news media provide us with a highly instructive look back at our political history — through a fun-house mirror, you might say. It’s a particularly odd phenomenon in the case of Gerald Ford because, as 
unremarkable a leader as he was, he seems like a freaking prince compared to the current numbskull-in-chief. (Who wouldn’t? Reagan? Polk? William Henry Harrison?) I had to laugh this week when it was announced that Ford had expressed his contempt for the war in Iraq in a recorded interview with Bob Woodward that was embargoed for release until after Ford’s death. So even as Bush tried to glom onto Ford’s relative popularity as an ex (and essentially forgotten) president, the guy was dropping a bomb on him from beyond the grave. Ouch! Dubya’s becoming more than a bit like that Bifflestick guy in Li’l Abner who always had a dark cloud over his head.
What about the Ford presidency? Well, he had a defense secretary named Don Rumsfeld and a chief of staff named Dick Cheney, for one thing. He also had a secretary of state named Henry Kissinger, who was very busy over Ford’s brief tenure. None of the various news timelines thought to make mention of it, but it was during Ford’s presidency that Indonesia invaded East Timor and began a brutal occupation that continued for the next 25 years and resulted in the deaths of 1/3 of that nation’s population. The invasion began practically the moment Kissinger and Ford flew out of Jakarta after meeting with Indonesian dictator Suharto and giving him the green light to proceed. Other highlights of the Ford era include the “dirty war” against South American dissidents pursued by various tin-pot dictators the U.S. had helped to install — a bloody campaign of torture, disappearance, and assassination that stretched from the Chile to Washington’s Embassy Row, where former Chilean Ambassador Orlando Letelier and his American associate Ronni Moffitt were blown up in their car by agents of Pinochet in 1976. Then there was Ford and Kissinger’s backing (in coordination with apartheid South Africa) of madman Jonas Savimbi and his UNITA rebels in Angola, resulting in probably half a million casualties over the following 20 years.
Devil’s in the details. Still, even with all that, Ford’s brief tenure seems statesmanlike in retrospect, at least by U.S. standards. But how much praise can we heap upon a president — or anyone, for that matter — for what he didn’t do? Is absence of a vice a virtue? Is Ford a man of integrity because he didn’t trash the Constitution, the Geneva Conventions, and a raft of international treaties all in a row? Is Ford to be honored because he didn’t order illegal surveillance of Americans or authorize the detention and torture of individuals on the basis of secret evidence (or lack of same)? Is Ford a Lincoln because he didn’t start a major war on patently false pretenses by knowingly deceiving the American public? Perhaps all in politics is relative… or maybe it’s like that old Richard Farina title: we’ve been down so long, it looks like up to us.
Saddamned to hell. Guess they were in kind of a hurry to execute Saddam after all. I’m sure he wasn’t expecting a square dance. Still, they will be burying a lot of crucial history with him… and maybe that’s the idea. Breathe easy, unindicted co-conspirators.
luv u,
j
Put it all in one stack. That’s right. Now step down hard. Harder. Harder still. Good, good. Nope, that’s too hard. Too hard, damnit! I said too fucking… oh, what the hell’s the use?
My apologies. Back to our story. What was I trying to accomplish, exactly? Well, as you know, we denizens of the Big Green franchise are pretty much left to our own devices when it comes to producing, publishing, and distributing our wares. Crikey, we have to make all our own noises, play our own horn parts, bang the drum (slowly), mix our own bloody songs, press our own CD’s, design our own labels… even build our own customers, like Marvin (my personal robot assistant) who owns all of our albums. (Okay, so there’s only one so far. There’ll be others!) That’s what makes us, well… different. Is that the word I’m looking for? Or is it… stupid? Has a more familiar ring. Anyway, we are the DTY band, for sure, and that requires a broad range of skills with which we have only a passing acquaintance, at best. And as one of the primary decision makers in the group (I’m the decider!), I’m tasked with training foot soldiers like the man-sized tuber (though, technically, he’s a root soldier).
Yup, last week it was moving the mill around to find the best reverb chamber effect. This week, we’ve been working on our process for pressing our own CD’s. Pretty simple process, from what I understand. Here’s how it works: you take the “music”, which is essentially a physically intangible entity, shape it into a ball, place it on a blank compact disc, and press down just as hard as you can until the two objects become one. Foolishly simple, right? So here’s the question — why the hell can’t the man-sized tuber do it? I keep handing him disc after disc, and he applies his mighty bulk, to no avail. The disc remains blank, lifeless, empty… like a vacant house on a deserted street in a forgotten country… (sounds like home to me). Perhaps I’m being too hard on the tuber. Perhaps I’m not shaping the intangible ball of music in exactly the right manner. (It’s actually harder than it sounds… not the music, but the technique… or as Matt would say, “techy neeky”.)
making the same kinds of noises. It’s what they consider political expedience, as the conventional wisdom suggests that no one in America wants to take responsibility for this “catastrofuck”, as Jon Stewart calls it; that defeat is always an orphan; that no politician can succeed by being the bearer of bad news, even if it is the truth. Now that Iraqis are dying in the hundreds of thousands, our “leaders” are encouraging us to weasel our way out of our obligations as an occupying power and a nation that has committed an extremely grave breach of international law. This phenomenon includes people like Democratic presidential hopeful Tom Vilsack, who speaks of breaking the Iraqi’s “culture of dependency” on American power, applying the language of self-help to a major conflagration for which we are primarily responsible. (What… is this some kind of co-dependent abusive relationship?)
Evidently, there’s still plenty of neocon Kool-Aid to go around in our nation’s capital. Dubya himself is getting, if anything, more bizarre than ever in his various public appearances, this week lurching from the possibility of defeat to the certainty of victory. Dick Cheney described his former mentor Rumsfeld as the finest secretary of defense America has ever had — a comment even Bill Kristol thought was over the top (and he’s obviously out of his mind to the point where he apparently thinks this is the only time Cheney’s been wrong about anything). Meanwhile, over on PBS, Condi “supertanker” Rice was talking about how Syria could stop destabilizing Iraq anytime they want by simply not allowing weapons and fighters to enter via their border. I mean, that just has to be destined for some kind of world-class irony award. What a bunch of freaks! How could even our own flabbergastingly credulous media take anything they say at face value? Even so, I think the handwriting is finally on the wall for this war, as a substantial portion of the permanent establishment is slowly beginning to catch up with the super-majority of Americans that thinks this is a hopeless mess.