“All governments are lying cocksuckers” – Bill Hicks
Governments, of course, are PEOPLE, and so one can carry Hick’s observation to it’s logical conclusion. It’s important to remember this, on this day of wretched excess, when a supposedly restrained and dignified orgy of rememberance entered its second week. The best lies, of course, are carefully stage-managed things. Everything in it’s place, the lighting just so, the line-up of eulogies carefully chosen, and rude and disrespectful voices such as your’s truly are nowhere to be found.
Not anywhere on NPR or CNN or MSNBC or any of the major newspapers are we liable to find observations like those offered by IOZ:
Americans, I’m told, used to pride themselves as a practical people, not much given to this sort of impious, imperial stagecraft. Reagan’s funerary procession was more gaudily pagan, but so was his myth. He was, after all, The Man Who Defeated Communism. That communism had long since defeated itself, at least in the USSR, was inconsequential to the legend. The Jerry Ford hullabaloo is more irksome to me. False modesty in an elaborate state funeral is crass, but Les Médias do love themselves some jus’ folks. They loved it in the dauphin when he first ran for office. They didn’t love it so much in Ford back in the day, when modest patrician expectations still held for those in high office, but these days it’s all about reg-uh-lur people, and Football Jerry fits that mold nicely. The music will be Copeland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man.” More fittingly they’d have hired a bunch of former South Vietnamese prostitutes to sing Woody Guthrie songs in traditional dress.
The courtiers in the nation’s capitol, both in the government and in the media, all have agreed that it is for our own good that the prevarications of the last three decades and more be continued, so we’re greeted with the spectacle of Henry Kissinger joining a cast of criminals to wax poetic:
According to an ancient tradition, God preserves humanity despite its many transgressions, because at any one period there exist 10 just individuals who, without being aware of their role, redeem mankind.
Gerald Ford was such a man.
Who would know more about redemption than that bloodthirsty enabler of dictators and murderers, that close friend of the likes of Suharto and Pinochet? Henry Kissinger, standing before us all talking the bright, warm words of decency and the virtues of diplomacy … what could demonstrate more clearly than that how morally bankrupt and divorced from reality our ruling class has become?
Put on NPR, and hear Daniel Shore tell you in that warm voice of his how President Ford stopped institutionalized political assassination. Not mentioned are the deaths Ford enabled, but the dead of East Timor weren’t assassinated, merely slaughtered, and being peons scarcely worthy of notice.
Listen to the stories of how much he wanted “only” to be Speaker of the House, of how the deceased “sacrificed” what he wanted by agreeing to put a bland, patrician face over the increasingly mad and hateful sneer of the Nixon administration. Take comfort in the tales of how he returned “main street values” to the White House sullied by the resigned and disgraced Nixon. Oh, the cooing and warm chuckles over his love of golf, a game presented as something “just folks” do for fun, as though it wasn’t primarily the province of the wealthy and connected, as though Ford didn’t make a good living playing with those in the upper crust.
It’s considered rude and disrespectful to bring any of this up, of course. That’s funny, considering how Ford was supposedly a “common man”, where every wake, funeral or post-service get together I’ve ever been to for most common men and women is full of stories of both their accomplishments AND their foibles. That’s how most “common” people go out. With laughter and tears, with drunken whispers of “he could be a bastard, but boy I’m going to miss him,” shared quietly by the bar while the ground is still moist atop the recently planted box. As I wrote more than a year ago:
The plain fact is that civility is a one-way street in this country. If you are poor, powerless, gay, a woman … if perhaps you believe that religion is dangerous or that business SHOULDN’T be the “business” of America, then you are expected to remain quiet, respectful, temperate, quiet-mannered … to get with the program. The ugly fact of life in the feudal twenty-first century is that manners are a requirement for the peons. The deeper you are mired in peony, the more “civil” society demands you to be.
It may be rude to point out how the orchestrated pomp and circumstances of Ford’s sendoff is based on deceptions, that it has no basis in history, but it is necessary. The best function of a good wake is to help us all form a grounded, well-rounded picture of the deceased in mind, so that we might remember them better, continue to learn from the lessons of their lives. This should hold true for the high and mighty “common” men as it does for those actually of more modest stock. The gaudy and dishonest display across three cities for this mediocre politician and friend of authoritarians demonstrates how far down the road to complete feudalism we’ve gone.
It is telling that one of the voices heard at the service in DC was that of one of the most visable members of the corporate media. Tom Brokaw said:
As a journalist, I was especially grateful for his appreciation of our role, even when we challenged his policies and taxed his patience with our constant presence and persistence. We could be adversaries, but we were never his enemy, and that was a welcome change in status from his predecessor’s time.
To be a member of the Gerald Ford White House press corps brought other benefits well, as we documented a nation and a world in transition, in turmoil.
We accompanied him to audiences with the notorious and the merely powerful. We saw Tito; Franco; Saddat; Marcos; Suharto; the shah of Iran; the emperor of Japan; China with Mao Zedong, Chou En-lai and Deng Xiaoping all at once; what was then the Soviet Union, and Vladivostok with Leonid Brezhnev; and Helsinki, one of the most remarkable gatherings of leaders in the 20th century.
There were other advantages of being a member of his press corps that we didn’t advertise quite as widely. We want to Vail at Christmas and Palm Springs at Eastertime with our families.
It’s good to be at Court, to walk amongst Lords and Ladies, amongst Princes and Princesses, amongst Emperors and their Consorts. How perfectly this sums up how badly broken and removed from the rest of our lives institutional Washington D.C. has become, where the media help eagerly with the prevarications and the restatements of history.
If it’s rude to point all of that out, then I wear the label with pride. Only honest appraisals can save us from ourselves, and over the last week we’ve only bathed in the warm spit of vipers and the fabrications of killers and thieves.