The big news item over the weekend was the less than successful Fenway Park Centennial in Boston. Just kidding. That was a disaster but only for a small number of folks who are genetically programmed to expect terrible things to happen to their baseball team (whom they love despite whatever happens) mainly because they often do. To help keep everything in perspective remember you can be a success with a .300 batting average which actually means you fail seven of ten times to get on base.
But I'm not talking about Bobby Valentine-I'm referencing the passing of Charles ("Chuck") Colson, a former Richard Nixon loyalist who purportedly boasted he'd run over his own mother to get RMN re-elected. From the many accounts of his personal life and Presidential years I've read, Richard Nixon was not the happiest man on earth and it's been my experience unhappy people tend to attract like-minded ones. Look at my circle of friends. Okay bad example; I don't have any. Though I guess that does prove the point, eh? Stupid logic.
Unless you were already an adult when Chuck Colson and the crew (H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, John Dean, Don Segretti, G. Gordon Liddy, E. Howard Hunt) were all associated with the Committee for the Re-election of the President (CREEP) during the thunder and lightning phase of the Vietnam War, words cannot ever convey or capture how close this country was to Civil War.
That tendency we have now to call those right of center 'crypto-fascists' and those left of center 'communists' had its beginnings back in those days when everyone who fought in the jungles of 'Nam were 'baby-killers' and my unshaven and unwashed side tended to chant 'Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh! The NLF are Gonna Win!' Maybe that's where the Secret Service first had the idea about that staff assistance visit to Colombia (turns out Visa isn't everywhere you want to be). The power of suggestion.
The end of the world, or of our democracy, was happening 'round the next street corner and on a daily and recurring basis and forty years after The Plumbers and the attempts to humiliate and intimidate Daniel Ellsberg and hundreds of other little crimes against the Constitution and one another (yeah, the SDS didn't stand for Super Duper Students, so sue me), we have the dying out of a generation of wolves and the thinning out of the herd of sheep who made the wolves possible brings us back to where we started.
Shakespeare's Anthony in Julius Caeser offered "(T)he evil men do lives after them, the good oft is interred with their bones." I can't sit in judgement on the sum of the life of Chuck Colson and if you know someone who says s/he can, congratulations, you know a self-righteous moron (other than me). I pledged to be one of those who 'don't buy books from crooks' and I've failed at many things, but not that.
I come to bury Colson, not praise him and in so doing mark the passage of years without acknowledging the accretion of knowledge; humbled to realize that not learning to forgive my own past means failing to learn and then live from its lessons.
-bill kenny
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