passings: james brown and gerald ford
Two celebrities die in the same week and take up tons of printers’ ink and bandwidth. I wasn’t a huge fan of either but I’ll blog about both.
Re: Gerald Ford, I couldn’t recall what position he held before being appointed vice president after Spiro Agnew resigned. I asked a couple of friends who didn’t remember either, just that he once played football. He wasn’t secretary of state…so I looked it up. Prior to his appointment as VP Ford was Republican Minority Leader of the House of Representatives. The 25th amendment to the US constitution stipulates that whenever there is a vacancy in the office of Vice President, the President nominates a successor, who is confirmed by the majority vote of both houses of Congress. So there you have it.
I never forgave him for pardoning Nixon. But enough about Ford, it’s in all the papers.
Re: James Brown, I didn’t spend a lot of time moving to his groove. The closest I came to seeing JB was during my stint with Adivan, a Tallahassee band from the late 1980s. Our bass player Bob Barker had previously played in a band which was the warmup act for a JB tour, when ‘Say It Loud’ was JB’s big hit. And when I was in highschool, my friend Chuck liked to play ‘Doing the Duke’ at his parents house when we skipped school there. Nowadays I often sing ‘Get On Up’ to recalcitrant servers while waiting for them to finish rebooting.
December 29th, 2006 at 7:42 pm
My fondest memory of James Brown doesn’t actually include him; it’s the celebrity hot tub party skit on Saturday Night Live.
January 1st, 2007 at 8:40 pm
I think that Gerald Ford also served on The Warren Commission that “settled” the issues of JFK’s assassination.
January 2nd, 2007 at 1:39 pm
I remember it well. Rep. Gerald Ford was a nonentity, go-along with the party line, republican, for years. That’s why he was picked to succeed the disgraced Spiro Agnew. At the time of his selection, there was public chatter along the lines of ‘the fix is in’; if he’s named Veep, it’s clear sailing for Nixon. When asked if he’d “pardon Nixon” if the guy resigned and Veep rose to the Office, he replied, “The American people wouldn’t stand for it.” Of course he did; and the American people, then as now,
went about caring more about superficial trivialities than the entropizing of their liberties.
But looking around at the current crop of politicians (and those departed as well), there really isn’t much difference among them regardless of gender, race/ethnicity, party, height, weight, food preferences, or what have you.
I’ll sign off by leaving a couple of quotes I’ve enjoyed for years.
“It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctively native American criminal class exccept Congress.” Mark Twain
“Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.” I.F. Stone
January 9th, 2007 at 11:34 am
Doug: after listening to KEXP’s tribute to JB I have to admit, he was damn funky. I was probably too young to appreciate his funk at the time, but too cool to admit it. (I just found the SNL skit on youtube; pretty funny!)