by Ambrose Bierce (channeled)
There are two kinds of immortality available to the American statesman, and the current occupant of that office appears determined to purchase both in the same season, on credit, with other people’s currency.
The first is stone. This week the board of trustees of the Kennedy Center — a body he appointed, staffed, and made chairman of himself, which is rather like a man appointing himself executor of his own will — voted to inscribe his name upon the building’s facade, in defiance of a federal judge who had, in May, ordered that name removed on the plain ground that Congress, not the tenant, owns the naming rights. The trustees’ solution was not to obey the order, nor to appeal it, but to wait out two months of public attention behind a curtain of tarpaulins, as a family drapes a disgraced relative’s portrait before company arrives, and then to hang the same name again in different lettering, sanctified this time by a $48 million renovation that includes, among its improvements to the Republic, finer restrooms for the donor class.
MONUMENT, n. A structure raised to commemorate a man who did not build it, with money he did not earn, to virtues he does not possess, over the objection of a court he does not obey.
The second kind of immortality is more perishable, and considerably more urgent, and it was purchased two days before the first, in Ankara, at rather greater cost to persons other than himself. Israeli intelligence having informed the White House that Iran intended to put a missile through Air Force One as it left Turkish airspace, the President did not cancel the flight, nor face it, nor even announce it. He waved from the top of the boarding stairs for the cameras. Then he slipped down the aircraft’s blind side and was lowered to the tarmac inside the elevated box of an airport catering truck — a conveyance ordinarily entrusted with stale rolls. From there he was carried to a second, unmarked jet, flown by a considerably safer route to Britain, and in due course returned to the plane he had never actually left — so far, at least, as the men and women still aboard it knew. Those men and women were the White House press corps, ordered to draw their window shades for reasons no one troubled to explain, flying on, unarmed with the one fact that would have told them why: that the target described by Israeli intelligence was no longer aboard, and that they now constituted, without having volunteered for the honor, its entire remaining likeness.
COURAGE, n. A virtue much celebrated by men who have never been required to practice it, and, in the present instance, much delegated.
I have stood in places where men who wanted no monument at all received one anyway — a stick, a number, six feet of Tennessee clay — while other men, better connected, discovered urgent business at headquarters. It is an old story and I did not expect to be surprised by a new telling of it. What is worth remarking is not that a President arranged to survive; self-preservation is the one virtue no instruction is required to practice, and I begrudge no man the exercise of it. What is worth remarking is the arithmetic by which he chose to practice it: the danger real, quietly kept to himself; the escape real, quietly kept to himself; and the only people left holding the visible, camera-ready, flag-painted shape of the target were reporters who had been told nothing and asked for nothing, doing a job that consists, on its better days, of standing exactly where officials would prefer they did not.
It will be said, and rightly, that no missile was in fact fired, and that the arrangement therefore cost nothing. This is the standard defense of every gamble made with another man’s stake. The press corps did not know, as they sat with their shades drawn over Turkish airspace, that the wager had already been settled in their absence. They found that out afterward, from the newspapers, the way the public generally finds out what has been risked in its name.
RENOVATION, n. The art of making an old theft look like a new gift.
PATRIOT, n. One who loves his country enough to arrange that others shall be endangered for it, and loves himself enough to arrange that he shall not.
Between the marble and the catering truck there is less distance than it appears. Both are monuments to the same appetite — the wish to be permanent, in the one case carved for the ages over a judge’s objection, in the other secured for a few more years by quietly reassigning the risk of extinction to persons who had not been consulted. A man may be forgiven for wanting to live forever. He is harder to forgive for wanting two kinds of forever, the safe kind and the eternal kind, and insisting that other men supply the collateral for both.
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