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| Barry Goldwater |
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| Review this obit carefully..... |
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This is Dark Cloud on Tuesday, June 02, 1998. Even the Colorado Daily dabs its eyes for Senator Goldwater. Really, I want to say something nice about Barry Goldwater, but as genuine a curmudgeon as he was, his existence illustrates the problems with the Republican Party and the gooey sentiment that passes as American history. He was a man with the courage that inherited wealth brings coupled with the blinkered vision that it often inflicts. He was also intellectually lazy, and those supposedly monstrous libertarian and liberal opinions that have endeared him to the ignorant and the left in his dotage really emerged when he made time to observe and think a little. Nixon, we were thrilled to hear him say, was the biggest liar he’d ever met in his life. Well, Duh, Sherlock. What gave you the first clue? You said that in 1972, twenty years after the man had first libeled opponents as traitors and communists. And by the way, Barry, where were you when Joseph McCarthy was calling General Marshall a traitor? Defending the fat suppository, that’s where. He was for a woman’s choice about abortion, which removed him from debate and also played well in affluent Arizona, home to many widows with the time and money to rethink the night that produced Junior. He was against the Religious Right, also a no brainer in the land of retired New England Episcopalians and California Unitarians whose concept of lower class worship services is always a frontrunner for their disdain. He was for gun ownership, lots of it, and this was hardly a gutsy call in Arizona, where even one hundred years ago a noted officer in the cavalry observed that Arizonians did not view people who drew guns with Christian charity, not because they disapproved of gunfights, but because it called unpleasant comparisons to the majority of Arizonians who would nearly always fire from the coat pocket without ever drawing the gun at all. Those were the antecedents of Barry Goldwater. Goldwater made his name trying to regain the Republican Party for the conservatives, and in 1964 wrested it from the withered and wandering hands of Nelson Rockefeller. Rockefeller, it is now necessary to state, was an Eastern liberal who certainly could afford to be, and once, breaking bread with the great unwashed, suggested that his audience consider “your average American earning $100,000 a year.” This was at a time when he missed the mark by a factor of, oh, twenty. But as removed from reality as Rockefeller was, Goldwater earned considerably more than that each year even before politics, and he had far more in common with the Rockefellers than with the common people he supposedly rose from. He did not emerge from the cornfields. And although Goldwater served in the Air Force – I believe he became a General in the Reserves – he remained rather aloof from the techno-weinies that offered us Vietnam. He apparently just liked to fly planes, and his genuine interest started and ended with that. He did, however, late in life support gays in the military, to the delight of the Democrats, but to all but the loony right, this is an obvious position to take: gays are in the military at all ranks and always have been and it is stupid to pretend they are not. His position was: this is reality, deal with it. You would search in vain, however, for some mention of Goldwater facing into that wind when it might burn – say when there was an election coming up. He could have made a better case by using buddies Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn as poster boys for the cause, but somehow that opportunity passed. Also absent is any heroic opinion on fellow freedom fighter J. Edgar Hoover. Goldwater’s family had integrated their store long before the Civil Right’s Movement, but Barry himself came out against it and fought it tooth and nail, saying it stepped on individual freedoms. It is hard to claim that Goldwater was an actual bigot – even among his enemies, nobody has apparently suggested it – but this is probably due to the fact that people like the Goldwaters didn’t shop much at a place like Goldwater’s Department Store, and in lily white Arizona for most of his life, it wasn’t an issue. Of course, the old geezers who voted were rabid bigots, as later state governments proved, but Goldwater could sail above them while conveniently using them. Too conveniently. Goldwater’s supposed convictions were, during his electable years, safely and exactly those of his bluehaired, bigoted, and Bismoled electorate. Only later did he blather some leavening thoughts. In fact, Goldwater – far from being a sentient statesman of gentle wisdom – probably ended a senile little boy just trying to fry the pants of those who succeeded him, and succeeded him far more successfully than could have ever been imagined after his disastrous and idiotic campaign of 1964. It was Ronald Reagan’s soothing conservatism, offered in a televised speech on Goldwater’s behalf during the campaign, that won Goldwater any states whatsoever. Goldwater – supposedly anti Big Government – is notoriously recalled for his punch line: “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” It is a phrase that could best be placed in the mouth of traitor Jefferson Davis, who discovered that the defense of his freedom required the enslavement of millions and high quality social organization that can only emerge from a strong central government. When your freedom and wealth are unfairly based upon the shackling and impoverishment of others, such clarion calls sound flat, flatulent, and evil, even in 1964. Goldwater was, like Reagan and at best, an ignorant man of wealth and power. A case can be made that such a person is the embodiment of evil, but no one can deny he is certainly a threat. |
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