More of the Ramble project. In 2007 I started writing longer pieces, so I’m going to post the rest one at a time.
Gerald Ford recently died, reminding the world that he was still alive. Saddam Hussein also recently died, in what appears to be a counterprogramming ploy by Fox News against what otherwise would have been wall-to-wall coverage of the funeral of a President that literally nobody remembers fondly, if at all, as other than as a genial grandfatherly figure who took a break from slipping Werther’s candies to his grandkids to casually pardon Nixon.
Nixon, if you will recall, is the grandfatherly figure who took a break from stealing secrets from his business rival to sexually molest his grandchild, America, in such an obvious way that the parents - both houses of Congress - had to forbid him from seeing the grandkids again. (Yes, this was a tortured metaphor.)
He was the scariest grandfather figure our nation had seen in high office until Dick Cheney became VP, a grandfatherly figure sort of like the old man at the head of the Leatherface family in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.