Welcome to 2007!
The naughties are a strange decade for me. Somehow I still have this sensation that anything past the year two thousand is “the future”, and it’s a touch surreal to somehow be living seven years beyond that nebulous borderline. What’s more, living in a “future” world that’s quite remarkably prosaic and much like it was all along, with the exception of cell phones and the Internet. Other than those two things, we just don’t seem to be living in the future; no explosion of space travel, no new forms of transportation, and a general level of political selfishness, provincialism and stunted vision (i.e. “conservatism”) that hearkens back to the nineteenth century rather than the twenty-first.
Now, I suspect a lot of this is just the fact that I am, regrettably, getting old. Without realizing it at the time, the late nineties were sort of a high point, a halcyon era, in my life, and I somehow unconsciously believe that but for present circumstances I ought to be able to go right back to them. It’s been a decade since 1997, and yet the life I lived then seems as though it were just yesterday, and that the years between then and now have been just sort of treading water in an off-budget area of time until I get back to that life.
Which is an odd sentiment for a period of time encompassing getting an MBA, writing a novel, and having a child. But there it is. Between 1987 and 1997 I was a very different person; between 1997 and now, it just doesn’t feel that way. More disillusioned, perhaps. But I guess I feel that I haven’t changed, and so the world really shouldn’t have changed around me. Whereas until that point, both the world and I were evolving together.
But enough about me. 2006 closed out the year with a trifecta of high-profile deaths: James Brown, Gerald Ford, and Saddam Hussein. Two of whom will be missed.
I don’t have much to say about James Brown, other than it was nice to see him going strong up to the end. I like his music, he lived hard and probably shaved some years off his lifespan thereby, and like most people was a mixture of good and bad qualities. In his case, the bad qualities garnered him some really wacky mugshots.
Gerald Ford was, apparently, a very nice man. Although president during my lifetime, I don’t remember anything about him other than the general sense that he tended to stumble and was a relatively ineffective president. Upon current reflection, though, he strikes me as belonging to at least two distinct presidential categories. First, he was one of the presidents unfortunate enough to govern during the 1970s, a period when it would have required a truly great man to rise above circumstance; none of the three occupants of the office during the time were particularly great. Secondly, he was a Republican prior to the moral collapse of that party.
Which is not to say that he was a good president. Of course, compared to the guy we’ve got now, he was Abraham freaking Lincoln. But then, a cantaloupe would be a distinct improvement to what we have now.
You know, one really has to reach back for a good Republican president. Eisenhower was pretty good, certainly, and I have a soft spot for George Bush the Original despite his elitism. But Reagan was a hustler and a demagogue, and the first to ring up the nation’s credit card for no good reason, and aside from that who do you have? Nixon. Hoover. Harding, who at least had the good manners to die when his massive corruption was exposed. Hell, you have to go back to TR to find a truly great Republican president, and he was great precisely because he embraced everything the Republicans hated.
I guess the democrats aren’t that much better. You don’t have to go back as far to reach our great Roosevelt president, and Truman and Kennedy both were pretty good. Johnson, of course, crashed and burned, and Carter was more moral than all the presidents of the twentieth century put together, but not a good president for all that. Clinton was pretty good – sharp as a whip and did a decent amount of good things despite the constant character assassination.
Anyway, Ford slips pretty unremarkably into that panoply. A decent man, raised to the presidency almost accidentally (although not accidentally to power, power he achieved on his own), and largely overwhelmed by the events he found himself in. I say ‘unremarkable’, yet he was one of only forty-three men to hold that office. It’s quite interesting the variety in quality you can see in a sample size of just over two score.
And he’s given my wife a day off work, during which I insisted she spend at least a few minutes thinking about President Ford. I mean, some gratitude is appropriate, no?
As for Saddam, good riddance to bad rubbish. Was it worth the price? No. Does it look a whole lot like the result of a kangaroo court? Yep. But George W. needs at least one person he can look down on while burning in Hell, and his inexplicable bete noir fills that role admirably.
Meanwhile, Ford will probably be stumbling over a cloud somewhere.
Sun Ra