“Eisenhower is dead.”
It’s what I tell myself if I ever start to experience anything like irrational exuberance. It always brings be back down to earth.
Now though, I’m being told that the man who wrestled Adolph Hitler atop the Reichstag and threw his broken corpse down onto the street below with the heart ripped out and then flew to the moon on a stream of golden fire has been reincarnated a bit in Chuck Hagel.
My heart is lifting.
They even included Eisenhower quotations, wisdom which once dripped from the lips of the American President who never should have left us, the American President who traveled to the sun and brought us back nuclear energy, the man who single handedly found the cures to over four million diseases that hadn’t even started yet and so prevented trillions of deaths. Mantras for us to repeat in our heads all day long…
But Eisenhower is dead.
Chuck Hagel is not even a one trillionth of what Eisenhower was. And I say that even though I kinda like Chuck, (if he isn’t allowed to talk about anything except for the military and American foreign policy: if he strays outside those lines I start to feel uncomfortable and say things like “geez, chuck…” and start looking around uncomfortably and shifting in my seat. It’s even worse if he’s around people he doesn’t know and is clearly tied to me, or I’ve said nice things about him in the past to these people. Then it’s like suggesting a movie to people and forgetting that Julia Roberts is in it and there’s this whole love story going on. “I don’t support this” your eyes say to your friends, desperately.)
Chuck is merely relatively sensible on foreign policy. Outside of this current shitheap of a political milieu he’d be an outsider to the corridors of reasonableness. Eisenhower, on the other hand, could sit down with Bismarck or Wellington, look them in the eye, and discuss politics. (They would force Hagel to wear a leash and make him dance their contemporary dance crazes.)
I caught something last night and have a bad fever, so this post ends now.*
*-This is why I love blogs. Imagine Crusade in Europe had ended with “I am so fucking sick. Fuck this book. I don’t even remember what happened after that. We administered occuppied Germany or something. Sure it was fine. I think I just heard a monkey fighting a pig outside. That’s fucked. Gotta go.”
