Gerald Ford

While I understand the importance of mourning, dignity, and paying respect to the dead, I believe that if you died on Decemeber 26th, then your-not- wishing-to-be-President-but-Speaker-of-the-House- soul has already risen up to that great rotunda in the sky. And as such, your body should already be buried or cremated.

The money wasted on these burials slays me. The United States contains so many people that are hungry, homeless, and uninsured that the money spent seems like a slap in the face to the living who suffer these indignities. Our governemnt tells us they can't afford to feed everybody, but they sure can afford to bury the hell outta someone.

Even James Brown's solid gold casket offends me. Who the fuck needs a solid gold casket?
He's the Godfather of Soul! He should be keepin' it real, even in the afterlife. (I am also not one for mythologizing the dead so I just have to mention the fact that James Baby shot up an insurance seminar because he thought someone used his office bathroom. Also, he endorsed Richard Nixon for President. I guess Nixon's resignation was "Payback! Hey hey hey!")

Of course, you are not suppose to point out that the money could be better spent or that the dead might have done some awful things because it is "disrespectful".

And I agree. The truth almost always disrespects those who benefit from the waste and the lies.

Whitehouse.gov photo of Ford's casket at the White House Rotunda

I wish I could get a screen-cap of what I just saw now on CNN --and I have been switching channels to see if I can get a better look at the seating arrangement on the left-hand side of the aisle.

Almost all of the Bush family is sitting in the front of the left-hand side aisle. Jimmy Carter and his wife are in the front row along with Nancy Reagan and Laura Bush. Condoleezza Rice is on the third row behind Bush I, his wife and one of their daughters.

Oh! I saw the Clintons.

As Bush is walking down the aisle with Ford's widow, I caught a glimpse of the Clintons. They are sitting to the left of one of the Bush daughters. Off-center and almost off-camera.

Also interesting ... they put Betty Ford with her immediate family on the right, away from the politically charged seating that was arranged on the left side.

The seating on those 3 front rows on the left side say way too much of the effed-up politics of United States. Talk about nepotism and The South controlling politics in the post-Civil Rights Movement Unites States.

ps : Did I just saw Dick Cheney express an emotion? He actually looked sad!

In refreshing my memory about Gerald Ford's legacy, I reckoned what he in common with James Brown : They're both godfathers of two American cultural movements.

James Brown, the godfather of soul, funk and the African American pop culture revolution.

Gerald Ford, the godfather of soulless compassionate conservatism.

It's so clear to me now. Ford, called healer of the nation was the poster child for compassionate conservatism.

Yet, as Timothy Noah explains in Why Pardoning Nixon Was Wrong, Ford's blanket pardon of Nixon opened the doors for not only a "teflon president" with Ronald Reagan; but it created the unaccountable monster that is George W. Bush.

Gerald Ford should go down in history as the godfather of the GOP's soulless compassionate conservatism and neo-con corruption.

    

There has got to be meaning to this juxtaposition :

James Brown, the hardest working man in show business who took shit from nobody and represented the emerging black powered pop culture revolution. He dies on Christmas day.

Gerald Ford, the man who had to clean Richard Nixon's shit while nurturing the emerging white supremacist neo-con movement introduced by his presidency. He dies the day after Christmas.

James Brown, no matter how fucked up his situation, he always seemed to be able to overcome through hard work and determination. His foibles? Pardonnable because even though he was superhumanly talented, his shortcomings and humble beginning just made him more like us.

Gerald Ford, on the other hand, never seemed to break a sweat. His photographs in the White House make it look like he is more like a vacationer than a president; just passing time before his time to go. And his biggest foible? Pardoning Nixon, and letting him skip free from the consequences of his corrupt actions.

Seriously. There has got to be some meaning to these seemingly asynchronous deaths. The universe is never that clueless or random.

There was a time, barely remembered today, when the idea of bipartisanship really seemed reasonable. There was once a kind of Republican, now driven to the verge of extinction, called the "Eisenhower Republican." Today, the equivalent beast would be called a "Moderate Democrat." The Republican Party itself has largely purged itself of Eisenhower Republicans in its radical shift to the right.

I have always been a Democrat. But even the earliest President I remember, Richard Nixon, though a crazy, paranoid, power hungry SOB, could be ideologically reasonable, as evidenced by his establishment of the EPA. But Nixon, probably unintentionally, began the decline of the Eisenhower Republican. Some of those he brought into government are the very same "barking crazy rightwingers" who have systematically been destroying our nation under Bush. That, combined with Nixon's spectacular and televised downfall, discredited the reasonable, moderate Republican. The Democrats, then more liberal than now, were ready to take advantage of Nixon's downfall, and the far right wing Republicans, then marginalized but poised to strike, were ready to begin their plans to take over the nation through lying, stealing and cheating.

One man had a small chance of saving the Eisenhower Republican: President Gerald Ford.

Gerald Ford, the last of the Eisenhower Republicans who had any chance of saving the Republican Party from the barking crazy rightwingers, has died.