THE WANDERER, JANUARY 11, 2007
JOSEPH SOBRAN'S
WASHINGTON WATCH
Death Takes No Holiday
Everyone died this week. That's how it seemed to me,
anyway. No doubt my feeling was largely personal: Cancer
had just taken my oldest friend, though not before he had
become a Catholic. Despite this great consolation, I feel
his loss very deeply, and was in a morbid state of mind
when the deaths of three famous men dominated the news of
the last week of 2006.
First, on Christmas Day, came the news that soul
singer James Brown had passed away. Though I have enjoyed
a number of soul singers (who can resist Smokey Robinson,
for one?), I must say that Brown's appeal was lost on me,
and had been ever since I first heard of him 40 years
ago. I was startled at the intensity and grief of his
following.
Journalism, of course, thrives on celebrity deaths.
They afford great opportunities for eulogies, nostalgia,
and final judgment. We usually set aside the ugliness of
death, except when (as in Lady Diana's case) it comes
suddenly and violently, and indulge in warm remembrance.
And one of the nicest things about human nature is that
we really do love to praise. In that respect, at least,
death can be an occasion of happiness.
Last year also saw the deaths of two beautiful
actresses, each best known for a single haunting
performance in a classic film. Alida Valli will always be
remembered as Orson Welles's enigmatic lover in THE THIRD
MAN; Moira Shearer as the ballerina in the magical,
tragic THE RED SHOES. My heart aches a little for both of
them.
A Ford, Not a Lincoln
Overshadowing James Brown's demise were the
expiration of Gerald Ford, which called forth generous
eulogies, and the execution of Saddam Hussein, which
didn't. The tributes to Ford, focusing on the Nixon
pardon, all seemed to use the same words: "Midwestern,"
"decent," "healing," "integrity," and so forth. It got a
little cloying.
They also quoted his famously modest
self-depreciation: "I'm a Ford, not a Lincoln." That was
the best thing about him. As a loyal Republican, he took
it for granted that the first Republican president set
the standard for political greatness. Actually, this
country would be much better off with more Fords and
fewer Lincolns. Ford took a refreshingly unheroic
approach to the presidency: his role was to be an
executive, not a messiah. Everyone agreed that he was not
a "great" president, for which we can only thank Heaven.
Presidents aren't supposed to be "great." Those who earn
that epithet do so by usurping power.
To put it another way, Ford never tried to expand
the powers of the office beyond their constitutional
dimensions. It wasn't his fault that those powers had
already become bloated by the time he supplanted Richard
Nixon. He remained a congressman at heart, uneasy with
monarchical pretensions and devoid of grand ambitions. If
the presidency had been confined to its original
limitations, he would have left it that way.
At the same time, having no real grasp of the
Constitution, Ford did nothing to correct the situation
he inherited from his predecessors. He accepted the
status quo uncritically; the moral and social horror of
Roe v. Wade, for example, was lost on him. He accepted
it as a legitimate and proper exercise of judicial
authority, and seemed irritated by those who were
outraged by it.
This obtuseness put Ford out of touch with the
legions, Republican and otherwise, whom the dynamic
Ronald Reagan knew how to reach. Ford was never able to
take command of his own party; he expected the old
politics to continue as before just when everything was
changing, and in 1980 he was saying he heard "voices"
telling him that Reagan couldn't win the presidency. In
his mind, Reagan was just too "extreme." At his worst,
Ford was a piece of political driftwood, content to go
along with things as they were. As far as he was
concerned, there was nothing really wrong with what
liberalism had done to the country; he was a
"well-adjusted" Republican, the kind liberals like -- as
witness all those eulogies this week.
Ford was what might be called an unprincipled
conservative, one who seldom thought any principle worth
fighting for and was always willing to split differences
with liberals, unaware that he might be conceding
anything essential. He was too completely political to
satisfy anyone.
In a way, he was much more like Bush the Father than
Bush the Son. It came as no surprise when, shortly after
his death, it was revealed that in a 2004 interview with
Bob Woodward he had criticized the invasion of Iraq and
its doctrinaire rationale, even though he had originally
supported it. If Ford were seeking his second term today,
he'd probably be a shoo-in.
The End of Saddam
What do you do with a tyrant as horrible as Saddam
Hussein? I suppose it depends on who "you" are. Hanging
may seem a mild punishment for his crimes; but was it the
place of the United States to overthrow him and ensure
his death?
I wish I knew how to answer this. Iraqis have no
consensus at all about it. Shi'ites and Kurds are glad he
is dead; Sunnis, not only in Iraq but throughout the Arab
world, see his execution as victors' justice. So the net
result will be more discord and bitterness against the
American invaders, rather than the hoped-for "closure" of
final justice.
The invasion has created problems without solutions,
for us and for the Iraqis who were supposed to benefit
from it. Even those Iraqis who hated Saddam must agree
that life under democracy, if that's what it is, is not
altogether an improvement. It must be dizzying to find
the man who had kept them in awe and terror for a
generation so abruptly removed from the scene. No wonder
the new government has no purchase on their lives.
Even the Bush administration has abandoned -- and
all but forgotten -- its own claim that Saddam had
weapons of mass destruction that threatened the world.
Remember the mushroom cloud? Politics is like a
nightmare, with little continuity or coherence.
Meanwhile, as the American death toll tops 3,000 in
Iraq, Bob Novak reports that only a dozen of the Senate's
49 Republicans favor sending more American troops. Polls
show public support for the war sinking to abysmal
levels. Does John McCain really think his diehard
hawkishness is going to help him win the presidency next
year?
+ + +
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