Dear Ike: Urgent Memo, Please Respond

When Dwight D. Eisenhower was a high school freshman he suffered a minor cut to his knee. He thought nothing of it at the time and went about his schoolboy business. But infection set in, and soon he was slipping into periodic comas. The family physician counseled amputation of the leg, to prevent the infection's spread. Young Dwight, when conscious, counseled the physician to shove it. He recovered.

Years later, after Eisenhower had saved the world and thus become ensnared in the political scene, his Hallelujah supporters, in revivals and distributed print, credited his youthful recovery to his Mennonite family's task-specific, emergency and marathon prayer sessions (occurrences that Dwight's brother, who was fully conscious throughout, also later denied: "We always prayed," he commented).

God had listened, said the thumpers, and thus spared young Dwight so he could fulfill his destiny. It was all part of the celestial Big Plan, they said; hence if you wished to be a Big-Plan participant, you would like and support Ike, too.

And just how did Eisenhower react to this religio-political hoopla?

He said it was "ridiculous."

How times have changed. Today's Republican pols would pay millions for a story like that. They'd lend their slickest media consultants to the Christian Coalition's propaganda machine and plaster 60-second mini-dramas of young Ike's miraculous recovery on every Iowan's TV screen.

And such small-minded, petty demagoguery of today only serves to highlight and enlarge by comparison some of the true greatness that lived yesterday.

I was reminded of the Eisenhower story's nobility the other night as I sat and watched Mike Huckabee answer a question tossed from the enthusiastic bowels of an auditorium full of his own Hallelujah supporters. "Gee, Governor," an eager young Huckabee-acolyte asked, "how do you explain your sudden rise in popularity and the polls?"

Take it away, Mike. And he did.

It seems Mr. Huckabee's surge -- according to Mr. Huckabee -- is far less the result of ground organization and free media and the Republican base's withering disappointment in available alternatives than it is the result, simply, of divine intervention -- a miracle equal in miraculous significance to what Jesus did with a few fish and loaves of bread. I kid you not. He said that, and in dead earnestness.

He further explained that any doubters of this would soon get a godly education -- one that those in the audience were already clued into, and hardly needed from him, but boy wouldn't they gloat when it came to others and the Light dispersed across the land. Upon that the crowd, needless to say, thundered itself into an orgiastic reverie of self-celebration and its own, cleverly exclusive insight. Their eyes, they knew, were falling on God's directly appointed agent, and Huckabee stood back and thrilled to the swelling adulation like a dog in heat.

Poor Ike. I imagine in reaction to all this he would have landed on a characterization somewhat stronger than "ridiculous." And he would have bowed his head not in prayer, but absolute disgust.

What either in hell or on God's green earth, he would have asked, had become of his party? How did a political organization that once canonized the likes of the doubting Abraham Lincoln -- who prayed only that his actions might be in alignment with God's wishes, and reminded himself regularly that he had no guarantee of such -- ever come to this?

Poor Ike also would have watched Mitt Romney's profoundly disturbing Constitutional exegesis this week -- "Freedom requires religion," clarified Mitt on behalf of the Founders -- and been thankful that he departed this world just prior to his party's demagogic fall from grace. Joe McCarthy's exceptional right-wing Christianity was bad enough. But in today's party, his demented thrashings and bizarre reworkings of history are the rule.

I'm with you, Ike, in spirit at least. You knew what real threats looked like when you were alive -- global fascism, the deceptive lure of Stalinist communism, the internal wrongheadedness of a national-resources-consuming military-industrialism -- and you faced them with the secular power of reason. But today's would-be great and near-great Republican pols couldn't touch you, Ike, in either their comprehension of what constitutes real threats, or how they sell their executive ability to handle them.

Ike, would you mind asking Jesus or Mohammad or whoever's handy when the madness will stop? Then let me know? A few of us down here are a little worried about your America.

Comments

[quousque]

Perhaps it is now time for true Americans to remain seated and silent during the ritual recitals of our divisive and untrue Pledge of Allegiance. If enough of us did so, then maybe it would register ......... before it is too late.

[Realist]

While quousque's comment shows s/he's got the strategy, the tactic is doomed to failure. Attempting to appeal to the masses through such acts isn't going to work, as the other side has control of the media. It would only be spun as further evidence of "un-Godly" disdain for "patriotism".

As for the idea that Ike's America still exists, I feel that is a forlorn hope. That America died 11/22/63 at 12:30PM CST.

The clue as to the nature of the current national structure called by the name "America" lies within the reasoning behind the release of the Iran Nuke NIE. My personal favorite puts the responsibility at the foot of the throne in Riyadh. In order to protect the power of that throne, it has become sadly necessary to throw a couple of Republican running dogs to the wolves in order to buy time to slip choker chains around the necks of their Democratic "opposition". One can't allow improved mileage standards from suffocating the SUV cash cows, can one?

American can once again become a brave land of free people, but only when the control of transportation energy sources is completely domestic. That time is coming, as the current regime is in the process of pulling down the shining temple on the hill to feed their own greed.

When the Gekkos have destroyed it all, then America can rebuild itself in the spirit of the Marshall Plan - creating a new modernity on the wreckage of the old.

Then we can say Ike's America lives.