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| January 3, 2007 Red Alert by Soren Wuerth Lovers in Heaven: Gerald and Saddam
“God is a comedian playing to an audience that is afraid to laugh.”
- Voltaire
In a hushed voice, the radio reporter related the scene from Ford’s funeral, the voice descending like the casket itself into earth, into silence. “Whether we live therefore, or die, we are the Lord’s,” said the man at the pulpit. Biblical quotes flecked, as they always do, the eulogies. Isaiah assured us that Ford will fly with angelic wings to Heaven above, stopping along the way, by chance, to gaze reverently at his old putting range. There are some striking similarities between the early days of the Ford Administration and these. Like Bush’s recent statements on conditions in Iraq, Ford, too, was staunchly sanguine in his surmise of the Vietnam disaster. “I am absolutely convinced if Congress made available $722 million in military assistance by the time I asked—or sometime thereafter—the South Vietnamese could stabilize the military situation in Vietnam today,” he said in 1975, two weeks before Saigon fell to the North. Speakers at Ford’s funeral turned Ford into a doctor in a Norman Rockwell painting, his stethoscope dangling around his neck, steadfast in the political turmoil swirling around him. “Dark clouds of political violence descended over our country,” said George Bush, Sr., “Gerry Ford’s word was always, uh, good.” The fossil Henry Kissinger, Ford’s secretary of state, included Ford in a group of “ten just individuals,” (God’s servants) “who redeemed mankind.” (On the heels Vietnam, it was Kissinger who told the Washington Post that the U.S. should engage in another ‘act’ to “continue to be a world power.”) When Dubya finally took the podium, he said Ford brought, “calm and healing to one of our most divisive moments in our history ... Gerald Ford was a rock of stability.” “He made the tough and decent decision to pardon Nixon,” G.W. pointed out. Well, Nixon himself assured us, after all, he “is not a thief.” Bush can easily sympathize with the political exuberance of those strained years. In A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn notes that during the Ford Administration, public confidence in the military fell to 29 percent, and confidence in Congress and the President dropped to 13 percent. (I once heard Howard Zinn say Ford’s presidency was probably the least damaging of all the presidents. “Why?” a reporter asked. Zinn replied, “His was the shortest term.”) A week earlier, I was in the Sea-Tac Airport waiting at a gate for my plane. The storyline for the Saddam execution played out on the airport’s loudspeaker above us, the punitive voice of a reporter—the sound of a pretend sergeant trying to psych up his languid unit—tells the fable of Saddam. It is a version of a version of a story. Saddam captured in a Spartan “spider hole,” he does not “fight for life,” his beard-slathered mouth is examined—accompanied on the broadcast by game show cheers, the trial on charges of mass murder. Made-for-TV drama. A woman behind us coughs continually; others in the gate sit staring at the floor. Two teenagers are consumed with their fast food. I look around me and see only a tired crowd of holiday travelers, deadened to the invented, painful narratives fed to them by that glowing screen. The latest polls on Bush’s Iraq quagmire show more than 70 percent of us disapprove. New Year’s Eve revelers, meanwhile, woke up to the sobering headline that the U.S. casualty rate topped 3,000. Then the New York Times bureau chief told NPR that killing Saddam was, to paraphrase, incredibly stupid. For the Sunni, Saddam is now a martyr, and sectarian violence will only increase. Thank God for Gerald Ford! Soren Wuerth is perhaps Alaska's best known community activist, and is the winner of the Alaska Press Club's 2006 'Best Columnist' award. He resides in an undisclosed location in rural Alaska and can be reached at soren@insurgent49.com. 'Red Alert' appears on insurgent49.com every Wednesday. |
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