VauxhallVelcraux

Having been born in the earliest days of the Reagan Administration, I always had to remind myself that Gerald Ford was, indeed, still alive. What a quaint curiosity his 2 1/2 year tenure was. While Jimmy Carter has always been, pretty unfairly, something of a national joke (not to mention a rare puzzle, a pro-abortion evangelical Democrat from Georgia who did not pursue the same path as Zell Miller), one wonders what Gerald Ford thought about that: "Shit, I lost to THAT guy?"

Sandwiched between Republicans Nixon (who until around 2002 was arguably the worst president we've ever had) and Reagan (who clobbered what remained of the postwar liberal consensus), with Carter in there, Ford's presidency doesn't seem to have swung much in the glare of hindsight, whereas Carter's now a peacebroker and homebuilder and even Nixon now appears to be the last real liberal. To label Ford a mere placeholder invites anti-intellectualism and unearned forgiveness. Not only did he okay Indonesia's butchery in East Timor (where up to 200,000 people--a third of the entire country--died in a Kissingerian burst of 'stability'), but he pardoned Nixon, too. (Let's also not forget that two of the very worst public servants in recent memory--Cheney and Rumsfeld--spawned in the Ford Administration).

I know the prevailing wisdom about the pardon episode basically aligns with Ford's sentiment that "our long national nightmare is over," but I fail to see how a man unelected to either the presidency or the vice presidency who exculpates his former boss of grievous wrongdoings for 'the sake of the country' isn't very much to blame for the cynicism and apathy that have never left the body politic in the subsequent 35 years. No, there wasn't a conspiracy or a backroom deal, but the appearance of dirty maneuverings is all it takes. No one seems to remember that once upon a time you could believe your government wasn't just lying to you, all the time, in every way. Ford's lost re-election bid, and its direct traceability to the pardon, have exonerated him in the eyes of history as a decent man who prudently did the right thing even at the cost of his own political future. No--Ford was both wrong and stupid. People demand vengeance in the guise of justice when a mentally retarded citizen commits a crime, but when an imperial and pathologically secretive president breaks laws all over the place, it's best to avoid future embarrassing headlines and put the matter behind us without a criminal investigation? Nixon should have been prosecuted. Period.

As far as the man's inherent decency, well, don't expect the respectful tones of an obituary to plumb the psychoanalytic workings of good old-fashioned Midwestern conservatism and its blue-eyed work ethic. But at least the Times acknowledged the troubling contradiction between a man who would give a poor child the shirt off his back and then dash back into the Oval Office to veto a school lunch program (or whatever they said). What are we really to divine from this? That Ford was a singular example of cognitive dissonance? Or incuriousity? Or that his compassion was deep and genuine but simply myopic?

Isn't this one of the systemic problems with conservatism as a philosophy? That in spite of all the protestations from illiberals of all stripes that they actually care about the poor, the marginal or the oppressed, "caring" requires actual follow-through and more than patchwork, remedial forms of addressing poverty and disenfranchisement. Specifically, it requires marshaling the forces of a government that is, for better or for worse, inextricably tied into a vast matrix of socioeconomic forces that, if left unchecked, demonstrably ravage the lives of those who don't already possess the different forms of capital required to get ahead. It's anecdotally pleasing to remember Gerald Ford as a real swell guy who would strip himself bare in the event that shirtless moppets swarmed the South Lawn, but it's not simply Ford-the-individual acting in isolation when we stop to ponder why conservatives reflexively stop short of using government as a force for good, instead preferring to bankrupt it and staff it with cronies and then point to the resulting disaster as proof of government's inherent inefficiency and utopian pointlessness.

Gerald Ford was probably very nice. But like everyone in government who isn't doing whatever possible to equalize the results of a capitalist polity, he shouldn't get a pass. And he had 29 years to use his influence as a venerable and post-political statesman for any number of causes he might have adopted. Carter builds homes. Clinton's coordinating efforts to combat HIV and AIDS. Ford golfed.

Over a week ago, the New York Times ran a mash note to a poetry critic at Harvard named Ann Vendler. It absolutely crystallizes the pernicious anti-intellectualism that is endemic over there, particularly in one three word phrase. When heaping praise on this venerable woman of letters and her authoritative judgments on what is or is not fine verse, the piece said, "Eschewing fashionable theory, Vendler is a school of one, an impassioned aesthete who pay minute attention to the structures and words that are a poem's genetic code" before going on to quote (who else?) Harold Bloom.

Eschewing fashionable theory. What a brazenly dismissive gesture towards far smarter people than the author of this love letter. It's endlessly irksome how the Times wishes to inculcate in its readership a desire for knowledge up to and including the level of literacy that the Times' editorial manual holds itself to, and no further. As the final arbiters on what's meritorious and what's simply intellectual masturbation, they will assign themselves the task of fawning over 'aesthetes' who see past the bullshit (read: things that are hard to read and which challenge intuitive or unexamined thinking) to get to the timeless, the eternal qualities of poetry--rather than succumb to the sirensong of, say, Roland Barthes, whose work is a mere plaything for the unserious and wishy-washy. And it can all be done without even reading this "fashionable theory," which may contain playful typography, French terms or sentences that require re-reading. I wonder if people who eschew fashionable theory might also eschew "eschew."

It's not that everyone has to tear down the canon at all times. You just can't set yourself up in opposition to academia with a single condescending throwaway phrase summing it up. But the liberal media doesn't care about its credibility among lefties. They just want to please the people who don't want Toni Morrison listed among the greats.

At my new job at the New York Civil Liberties Union, we receive Christmas cards in the mail from earnest believers in the rump heartland (possibly those in the 31% of the electorate who have totally cut and run from reality). Because we're pro-separation of church and state and therefore godless heathens--shit, I wish it were so, but one of my co-workers goes to Bible study--we need to be reminded of the inherently religious nature of December.

So we get letters. Some of these people don't even have the courage to sign their names or include a return address. They must be afraid of our vast powers of surveillance and the waterboarding we've threatened our enemies with. One woman, Connie Bixler of Branson West, MO, did identify herself and wrote an elaborate Hallmark treatise about how He sent His only Son to live a life like ours and what a miracle that is. Unfortunately the card in which these pithy maxims arrived had snowmen and frolicking children on it, just the sort of inoffensively nonsectarian imagery a well-meaning but ultimately damned blue-stater might mail out to friends and loved ones.

I wish I had the card here, because my real point is the tortuous syntax one apparently must wade into when one is speaking about profundities with a Christian inflection. It's appalling. No, it's sad. Because the American educational system shits out these ill-read people whose awareness of rhetoric, cadence and poetry is so polluted by the thundering contentlessness of their pastor that they really think they're emulating the way God...actually...talks.

What a miracle--that God would send his son, who is also himself, to live and die. Really, that's a big wow. And we are complicit in his death! (Much less than our complicity in, say, exporting computer monitors to Nigeria where the mercury leaks out and pollutes all the groundwater). What a miracle is the Lord! Our God is an awesome God! Things that are not only patently not true but which should be self-evident to those who have believed them for decades and who ought to be totally past them by now and into a more intermediate stage--these are perpetually held up and glorified as amazing fonts of continual revelatory power, when really they're just sentences that appear verbatim in a lot of hymns and sermons. Christians think that God's strangely elaborate form of self-immolation a) proves his love for us, b) is sufficiently interesting to exhilerate them for all time and c) commands trump status as an all-purpose rebuttal against reason, logic, Islam, empiricism and, frankly, imagination itself.

This has dual components, in written language and the spoken word. Listen to any televangelist and you hear these reliably tidal intonations. Nietzsche broke with Wagner because he felt Wagner's music was pure ornament, an elaborate hoax to disguise the lack of substance in these marathon operas. That's what it reminds me of. Preachers have to cloak the naked reality that they're recycling poorly-executed literature which, in order to inculcate in its gullible adherents the unquestioning and childlike faith which Jesus himself encouraged, must remain unalterably fixed in 18th century crypto-English. Christian discourse never gets around to saying anything because if you believe in the inerrancy of the Bible and you question the need for priests or any learned group of spiritual intermediaries, Scripture must be totally accessible to all as well as totally closed and in no need of supplementary chatter. Since not even the primmest of scolds wants to be lectured on moral rectitude ALL the time, and we know the Christian Coalition considers helping the poor to be outside its purview, all we're left with is the circular contentlessness, with enough signifiers sprinkled in to keep up appearances. Only the signifiers aren't actually shibboleths in the sense of 'code words strung together to let believers know that a fellow believer is talking to them, so they should listen.' It's more that the pastors adopt a highly artificial tone of voice that, irrespective of the life lessons or admissions of having sex with dudes while on crystal, constructs the expectations of the faithful at the same time as it satisfies them.

Back to the Christmas cards. It's the same deal. These people aren't writing to evangelize, in the sense of genuinely hoping to strike a chord within the ACLU's wretched little heart, so that we recant and join the warmongers. They just want to perform a little exercise in striking back at one of the more visible and concrete manifestations of the vague, all-encompassing anti-Christian culture they perceive to be axing their way of life out from under them. Yeah, it's passive-aggressive. Given that most people only care what the neighbors think and imagine God to be the ultimate neighbor, one endowed with unlimited spying-from-behind-the-drapes, they're not only accruing a small spiritual chit, they're adopting the posture of the asshole neighbors who are always out there judging them. It's more fun to get to look down on someone for once, and if that someone happens to be a fleet of left-wing New York attorneys, so much the better.

So the vocabulary they help themselves to is this garbled nonsense. It's way too easy just to think that there's a lumpen mass of illiterate morons out there, and some of them have more time on their hands than you or me. But I bet a lot of them are in the upper middle class, college-educated people who read. They just feel obliged to express their irritation with "Happy Holidays" by underlining the holier terms pre-printed in the cards, and affixing a highly specific variety of claptrap that makes perfect sense to them because it replicates how speaking about God-related matters "ought to be." It's the necessary conduit of evangelical discourse, religiose without being the least bit pedagogical. And it's weirdly opaque. If there's one single thing to hate about the South, it's the attitude of "I'm going to offer you some sweet tea because you're a guest in my home and I believe in being a gracious host, but I'm going to give you every indication through tone of voice, body language and eye contact that I hate you and I'm quite confident you're going to hell." Except instead of offering us Mock Apple Pie with Cool Whip (p.s. the secret ingredient is apples), we get Christmas cards.