One of the prices you pay for living in the Nation’s Capital is sufferring – or having unprecedented access to depending upon your perspective – the rituals of state. The inaugurations, the marches, and yes, the state funerals.
The mythologizing of Gerald Ford began with two hours of local TV news coverage of the motorcade from Andrews Air Force base through Arlington, VA and up Pennsylvania avenue to the Capitol. Let me tell you something: it gets dark here around 4:45pm and there’s very little that is less fun that watching a line of cars with their headlights blazing driving at a snails pace through the city and surrounding environs.
I personally remember Ford taking office: more, I remember Nixon getting away with it. His triumphant wave to the assembled crowd as he boarded the helicopter to leave the city for the last time. Even as a child I could see in his face that he knew he was getting away with something.
What bothers me about these state events – most particularly the funerals – has less to do with the physical changes they wreak on the city and more to do with the spinning cloud of myth that blankets us until the event is over. As Christopher Hitchens writes in Slate:
One expects a certain amount of piety and hypocrisy when retired statesmen give up the ghost, but this doesn’t excuse the astonishing number of omissions and misstatements that have characterized the sickly national farewell to Gerald Ford. One could graze for hours on the great slopes of the massive obituaries and never guess that during his mercifully brief occupation of the White House, this president had:
- Disgraced the United States in Iraq and inaugurated a long period of calamitous misjudgment of that country.
- Colluded with the Indonesian dictatorship in a gross violation of international law that led to a near-genocide in East Timor.
- Delivered a resounding snub to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at the time when the Soviet dissident movement was in the greatest need of solidarity.
How, then, do we gain any perspective on our leaders? And what, exactly, will the mythical “they” say about George W. Bush during his turn to lay in the Capitol rotunda?
Cross posted to Amphetameme