Fourth Reich Archaeology - Jerryworld 5: Love / Machine, Pt. 1

Episode Date: September 27, 2024

Jerryworld is back, baby! This week, we introduce the female lead in our saga, Betty Bloomer Ford, and we explore the parallels and rhymes between Betty’s and Jerry’s lives.For example, like Jerry, Betty was raised by a mother who was acutely aware of ancestry, social status, and etiquette. In fact, Betty’s mother, Hortense, and Jerry’s mother, Dorothy, ran in the same social circles.  Also, like Jerry, Betty had an alcoholic biological father who spent much of his life tormented by his demons. And, like Jerry, Betty always had a good attitude about life and a cheery disposition.  So the story goes. Betty’s life was not without its excitements, nor was she far removed from the Cold War deep state. Betty spent some of her most formative years studying modern dance with Martha Graham - one of the State Department’s (and the CIA’s) favorite cultural exports to expound the virtues of the American way of life. We’ll pick up some of the threads we opened up in our interview with Matt Farwell around Frank Wisner’s “Mighty Wurlitzer” and the dynamic between propaganda on a mass scale and mind control at a more micro level. Wherever we dig in Fourth Reich Archaeology, we always find something that ties back into that continuity of interests and tactics between the Third Reich and the (American) Fourth.We’ll also catch up with the man himself, as he returns to Grand Rapids as Lieutenant Commander Ford, ready to take on the McKay political machine.  In fact, one of the first things Jerry does when he gets back from the war is take over his stepfather’s duties as president of the Republican Home Front Organization. Jerry also takes a job in private practice for the prestigious law firm Butterfield, Kenney, & Amberg. With looks to kill and a job in Grand Rapids’ preeminent law firm, it’s no surprise that the people of Grand Rapids think Jerry is the town’s most eligible bachelor. In part 1 of this two-parter, we focus on Betty’s background and her and Jerry’s courtship. In part 2, we’ll pick up with Jerry’s law firm gig in Grand Rapids and his final face-off with the weakened McKay machine, from which he’ll emerge a victorious Congressman.

Colonialism or imperialism as the slave system of the West is called is not something that's just confined to England or France or the United States. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. So it's one huge complex or combine. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. And this international power structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources. We found no evidence of a conspiracy, foreign or domestic, the Warren Commission of science.

I'll never apologize for the United States of America. Ever, I don't care what the facts are. In 1945, we began to require information, which showed that there were two wars going. His job, he said, was to protect the Western way of life. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders the more easy victims of a big lie than a small law. For example, we're the CIA.

He has a mile. It usually takes a national crisis. Freedom can never be secure. Pearl Harbor. A lot of killers. You get a lot of killers. Why you think our country's so innocent? Not more than the CIA.

This is a global. I'm Dick. And I'm Don't know. Welcome back to our returning listeners. And if this is your first time tuning in, please do go back to our first episode and start there. We'd like to also thank everybody for all the feedback. We love hearing from you. We welcome you to email us at forthrightepod at gmail.com

and to give us a follow on our social media at fourth Reichpod on Twitter and Instagram. We also would like to very briefly direct you to our Patreon, right now this podcast is operating on a shoe string budget. Well, a shoe string budget of a shoe with no strings, really, because Dick and I are taking all of this time out of our lives to conduct the research, make sure that it is interesting and that it is well-sourced, and editing these. episodes with love and with great affection, both for the subject matter, and listener for you. We aspire to be fully listeners supported and ad-free, and if you like what you're hearing,

we politely and kindly request that you get behind this here horse. We have every reason to believe and to hope that Fourth Reich archaeology is bound for glory. And just think, five years from now, wouldn't you like to look back and say, I remember listening to Dick and Don and being one of their original sponsors? And we're thinking up some nice treats to offer those of you out there, who do go out on a limb and get in on the ground floor, before there's even the promise of exclusive content. But fret not for such content is indeed forthcoming sooner than you may think.

That's right. So soon. So soon. And in fact, I would say a sampling of that content is in some ways already here. Of course, we had our election special a few weeks back, but I got to say, our most special, special episode to date has to be last week's episode, where Don had the chance to sit down and interview the legendary Matt Farwell. Boy, am I sorry to have missed out on that conversation. I particularly enjoyed the discussion about this global combine, right? what started out as the mass infotainment machine that's now developed into this hyper-effective individualized culture machine. The point of the discussion being that after World War II and into the Cold War era,

the intelligence community curated entertainment, culture, information, dogma to drive this super effective propaganda machine. It's this idea of using popular entertainment. And the point of entry for the boys in last week's episode was the publishing industry, but it also translates to film, music, design, art, and relevant to today's episode, Dance, to sort of weave a collective memory or references

for a population to develop tangible views on abstract ideas. like freedom and justice and morality, and then to rely on that base to control the population. The boys talked about how that played out in the post-war era, and with Matt's research interests including Frank Windsor and Tom Clancy. But the guys also talked about how that is all accelerated in the 21st century at the introduction of the internet and mobile devices and social media to create this hyper-effective individualized messaging that can be scaled out at breakneck speeds. Of course, all of this will come up again and again as we proceed with our excavation into

the Fourth Reich, starting with today's episode, which picks right back up where we left off in the life and times of Jerry Ford. You'll recall that our last episode was a two-parter, and we traced Jerry's involvement in a number of different wars and battles. Ford sought to deepen his involvement in America's wars, sort of throwing off his earlier isolationist tendencies that he had expressed through his involvement in America first, when he applied to join the FBI as a special agent in 1941. He also applied to join the Office of Naval Intelligence, and that application would end up bearing fruit when Jerry was enlisted into the Navy after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

He spent a good deal of World War II aboard the USS Monterey, in the Pacific Theater, and ascended the ranks drawing on that old Jerry Ford charm. Once he got back, he broke up with Phyllis and set his sights on another prize, taking on the political machine of Grand Rapids' boss, Frank McKay, and looking towards a future in politics. This week we'll catch up with Jerry as he returns to Grand Rapids' boss, Grand Rapids as Lieutenant Commander Ford, back from the Navy, and for one of the first things he does is he makes good on his promise to his stepdad, and he steps in as president of the

Republican Home Front Organization. He also takes on a job in private practice for the law firm Butterfield, Kenny, and Amberg. And this is where he meets his new mentor, the named partner, Julius Amberg. While Jerry was working at the Butterfield firm, he became quite active in the Grand Rapids community outside of the Sporting Goods Store basement meeting place of the Republican Homefront organization. He sometimes directed his involvement for picking up moral brownie points, like when he chaired disaster preparedness for the Red Cross. Other of his civic engagement activities were geared towards political credit,

especially drawing on his status as a veteran with other organized veterans' communities around town. But let's get to the good stuff. It's 1947. Jerry is the town's most. eligible bachelor. Averaging by his own account one day to week. The ladies love him. One wrinkle to this, of course, is that Jerry, age 34, is still living at home.

And he's constantly getting harassed by his mom about when he would find a bride and settle down. And so he's thinking to himself, he's getting old, and he realizes that perhaps it is time he wed. Enter Betty Blumer Warren, a former dancer with cultural cold warrior Martha Graham's avant-garde New York City troop, who was soon to be divorced. And while we've discussed how many of the stops along Jerry Ford's life trajectory, pointed him towards the White House? In 1948, it's really the definitive inflection point where he will be sent to Washington after taking on a longtime incumbent congressman

for Michigan's fifth district congressional seat. Jerry's opponent in the first election that he ever ran was a guy by the name of Bartel J. Barney, Jankman. And you may guess from the name that, yes, Junkman was Dutch. He was a real establishment figure of the Grand Rapids Dutch Calvinist community, which recall Jerry Ford was not. Jerry set his sights on the establishment and nobody thought he could do it.

But, well, I think the listener already knows what happened. He won. Yeah, and I want to go back to the mythos of Jerry and this character that we've been examining, right? And we'll see that this week in his campaign for Congress, the themes of Jerry being on that grind. mindset and a hard worker, his innate ability to connect with people, his deep connection with the people of Grand Rapids, and his ability to walk amongst both commoners and kings effortlessly.

We look and ask ourselves once again whether Jerry was a political chess master or just the greatest pawn of all time. And another mythological event in Jerry's life that we'll be covering today is his 1949 induction, so just shortly after taking office in the U.S. Congress, to Freemasonry. On September 30th of 49, Jerry and his three stepbrothers are inducted into the Maltolize. Grand Rapids Masonic Temple. He would be an active Mason throughout his political career, ascending to the very top of that fraternal

order. And while we're not going to exhaust the content of Gerald Ford's Masonic Association today, we'll at least introduce it and situate the free Masonic influence in the Grand Rapids community. We are so glad to have you back with us for another installment of Jerry World. And we're so excited for this next episode, which, Fair Warning, is going to be another two-parter. And the reason for that is that there's just so much ground to cover. What do you think, Dick? I'd say, let's start the digging.

Sounds like a great idea. Man in me will do nearly any task And ask for compensation That's a little he would ask Take a woman like you To get through to the man in bed Born Elizabeth Ann Bloomer in Chicago On April 8, 1918

Betty Ford grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan in the upper middle class. Her father, William Bill Bloomer, was a factory parts salesman who worked for the Royal Rubber Company as a traveling salesman. Yeah, I think he sold conveyor belts, which I just like to think about what that pitch must have sounded like. Yes, exactly. At a time where there was a steady conveyor belt market. In America, people were buying those things. Bill was also a drunk. He was never home, your classic rambling man.

So that left Betty's mother, Horton's, to take care of the kids. My mother was a very kid. My mother was a very independent. woman because she had to be. She had been very much a role model in my life because my father was gone a lot. Now Betty was the third child and the only daughter of Bill and Hortense. She had two older brothers, William Jr. and Robert. So you can imagine she grew up as sort of a tomboy. She had a Dutch boy blonde bull haircut and would tag along with her brothers as they went out into the world as kids. And this sort of tomboy demeanor carries on into her young

adulthood. And we see her in pictures and in firsthand accounts. Betty is often wearing pants in an outfit with a skipper hat, a yachting cap, and would take on the nickname Skipper. Now, in the very early years of Betty's life, the family moved around a bunch. They were in Chicago suburbs for a bit and then moved over to Denver for a bit, but finally settled in Grand Rapids when Betty was around two years old. And as we said, Bill was largely absent. He was on the road. He had substance abuse issues and by all accounts was psychologically, at least abusive. Does that sound familiar to you at all? Yeah, it does a realm like Leslie Lynch King a little bit, right?

Gerald Ford's biological father that chased him and his mother out of the house with a butcher knife when Gerald was an infant. So there's already that shared bond. And remember, too, that it was another similar story with Harry Conover, whose father was an alcoholic that abandoned the family after being abusive to his mother. And in all three of those cases, additionally, the mother comes to take. take on a extreme role, right, as kind of serving as both parents. And in all three cases, it does result in some overbearing tendencies among these matriarchs

as well. And Hortense Bloomer was no exception. She was really rough on Betty. Right. And she had some ideas about what a girl should be like. in her life she traveled to and lived in the big city the big apple new york new york city and went out as far as seattle washington and so at the time these were considered the sophisticated sort of cosmopolitan cities of the future and hortense very much viewed herself as a cosmopolitan woman and so she expected her daughter

Betty to follow suit. And she was irked. I think from a very young age, she realized that Betty was not going to be your typical girly girl. Yeah, one of my favorite anecdotes that is recounted in the Smith book is that Betty in the summertime would go socialize among all of the kids and the families by their summer cottage and they would all give her candy and give her sweets and hortense took the humiliating step of hanging a sign around little betty's neck that said please do not feed this child so i'm sure that those expectations and that demanding attitude took a psychological toll on Betty and we'll kind of see how that plays out. Right. I think it's also good at this point to point out Bill and Hortense were in the upper

middle class of Grand Rapids Society. And so Hortense very much had this, as many in the upper middle class do, had this eye towards what it would be like to truly, to be one of the true elites. And so they very much carried themselves in a manner where they would think they were displaying those elitist characteristics. And one of the things I think Hortense, maybe she never admitted it, but certainly didn't like that she was doing was that she was staying at home to take care of the kids. And she felt sort of bogged down by that. Yeah, she wanted to to be a socialite. And in that respect, she was very similar to Dorothy Ford with whom she became social friends in Grand Rapids. Exactly. Exactly. And they were kind of planning cultural activities,

right? After visiting the coastal cities, Hortense participated in arranging for performances and for touring plays and stuff like that to come through Grand Rapids. which otherwise might not, you know, without that sort of initiative from some civic-minded people like Hortense, Grand Rapids would not necessarily have been on the map for touring performances and exhibitions, art shows. 100%. And so exactly what we're saying is she was eager to display this character of elitism. Keeps a more way to Shandor in a pretty cabinet, let them be cake, she says, just like Marie Antoinette. Yeah, bringing that Emily Post lifestyle to Grand Rapids, right?

That was the book of etiquette. My own mom used to quote back at the dinner table from time to time, which is perhaps why I have developed such poor manners. She's a kidder, queen gunpowdy Dynamite with a laser beam And another way that Hortense's elitism

expressed itself Or maybe not so much Hortense's elitism As the class position And the self-regard Of the Bloomer family Was their High School choice choice for Betty, right? Remember, we talked about the distinction between South High and Central

High in Jerry World episode two, and Jerry had made the decision to attend the more working class South High. But where did Betty go, Dick? She went to Central High with the rich kids, and we're talking about the 1930s era, I think, at this point. And, the idea of sort of a preppy girl comes to mind. Preppy but not stuck up, right? I mean, I think Betty did not espouse the same elitist attitude. I think that more than anything that that kind of gave her a chip on her shoulder because she never stopped being a tomboy.

When Betty was in high school, she used to actually accompany her brothers to Ann Arbor on road trips where they would watch none other than Gerald R. Ford as a Wolverine in uniform snapping that ball. So the story goes, this is true, though. You're absolutely right. So Betty was more of a down-to-earth girl, and also, you know, the word gets thrown around a lot, but iconoclast, I think, in a lot of ways, willing to cut against what was expected of women of the time. But I wanted to go back to what I suppose was surely something Betty, or at least in retrospect, Betty, would say it was her decision,

but something that no doubt to me at this point sort of stinks of Hortense is doing. But Betty's enrolled in the Cala Travis School of Dance at the young age of eight. I was dancing when I was eight because it's straight to dance so late, and she early on is recognized as a capable and comfortable dancer. She's comfortable sort of being silly at eight, which is interpreted as being very capable, I guess,

and then sort of grows as a dancer in the school. She learns tap, she learns acrobatics, she learns Spanish dance, she learns ballet. And by age 14, by the time she's sort of going into high school, she's teaching classes at the Cala Travis School. Yeah, her dance would become such a focus that it would take her out of Grand Rapids, but not right away, right?

I think before we talk about Betty's departure for the East Coast for college, we'd be remiss to leave out the fact that in 1934, Betty's dad, Bill Blumer, was found dead under his car in the family garage. It came as a shock because he died quite suddenly. I was 16 years old, which is a very impressionable, very important age. do you have a take on whether or not he killed himself or if it was an accident

I know that the exhaust was running and the cause of death was carbon monoxide poisoning right but it wasn't clear like why was he underneath the car if he just like passed out too close to the exhaust pipe or if if he actually closed the door and offed himself in that way Yeah, I know the story is that he, it was like a hot day in 1934, and I think his wife, Hortense, her account is that he sort of said, I'm going to go work on the car. And then she finds him under the car. Got to think he was drunk. Yeah. I mean, the fact of the matter is that it's not ruled a suicide.

No. Because, and Hortense collects an insurance payment. Right. which would have been precluded in the event of suicide. Right. But the rumors abound that it was a suicide and that in any event it was attributable to Bill's alcoholism. Right. And I was going to say the rumor is the important part is that this is sort of what the reputation he had in the Grand Rapids community.

In his community at the time was like he shows up dead and people start talking about whether he killed himself. or not. So that I think more than anything speaks on like what his reputation was at the time of his death. What was more important than how he died was what happened at the funeral when Betty was told for the first time by her mother that her father was indeed an alcoholic. Do you know who didn't have any bad rumors about them circulating in Grand Rapids? Gerald Ford Sr. He was an upstanding citizen by all accounts. So that's also just another interesting juxtaposition comparison to keep in mind

that the family circumstances have both similarities between Betty and Jerry and some important differences as well. That there was no sort of stabilizing father figure for Betty in the same way that there was for Jerry, and the way that they sort of react to their trauma as adults differs, I think, in part due to that disparity in their family lives. Yes. Bill Blumer, may you rest in peace or pieces. I don't much care. Let's get back to

Betty, who now age 16, has lost her father. She's in Central High. She is active in the dance community. She's a good student, but not a great student. She hates all of your traditional sex gender roles. She doesn't like, you know, your home heck. She doesn't like the sewing and those sort of classes, which were mandatory at the time. She spoke right out. You always knew how you stood and what she wanted. She wasn't a Mamby-Bamby, pretty little dancing doll. She was very much a solid character. It's a girl who needs a little room to breathe, right?

Hell yeah. Hell yeah. And a vanguard for this eventually, remember. But this is, we're talking origin story. And so she wants to join. One of the things she loves doing is debating. I can see her with her brothers arguing all day. so I can't be surprised that she wanted to join the debate club,

but was denied the opportunity because she was a girl, and girls didn't do that. Another thing I'd want to point out here is this idea of Betty as a dancer. At the time, dance was also rejected as a norm in Central High in Grand Rapids. There was a saying, flowers don't dance. And I, you know, that must have gotten under Betty's skin. It surely got under her skin. I became very interested in my dancing school.

And I spent a lot of time with that because I enjoyed it so much. I kind of fell in love with dance. And just the point here about dances we're going to get into it in modern dance. It's really important to note that at the. time, you know, although there certainly were dances and dancing styles that depicted, you know, but more effeminate, historically what's viewed as effeminate characteristics, dance was largely seen as a masculine endeavor. And so it's, it's interesting to see it, I think, under that, in that lens. In any event, Betty continued to dance. All her life,

she was a dancer. In high school, she was a dancer. And what, What that means is she was a hard body and a looker. And everyone remembered her as the girl that all the boys wanted to be with. The story goes that throughout the week, the girls would wait and see who Betty was going to be taking out that weekend so that they knew who was available. She got the first dibs. Right, exactly.

much like Jerry Ford, another hard body. She was very popular with the boys. There'd be several of us who would sort of wait and see who is asking her for the Friday and Saturday night dates and then see who is going to be left over for us. She dated a great deal. She smoked early. She says she had her first drink at age 14.

This was a young rebel. And what they both have in common, And although they don't figure it out until they hit it off, is throughout their lives, and especially you see in their early life and in their adolescence, despite all of the troubles, despite all of the trauma, they are remembered to have a very cheery, positive outlook on life. Which, who knows how much of this is just storytelling, but Hortense would describe her daughter's bubbly attitude.

Yeah, didn't she say something like she wasn't so much born as popped out of a bottle of champagne or something like that? Yes, that's exactly right. And, you know, Betty loved dance. That was really the spark in her life was dance. And no surprise that upon graduation in 1936, she enrolled in, Bennington College in Vermont. While studying there, she met and began her long association with the dancer, choreographer, living legend of dance, Martha Graham.

So she gravitated to modern dance, which was an outgrowth of the artistic scene of the 1920s, was much more expressive, was much more free form. It was perfectly suited for Betty's adventurous personality. Oh yeah, there's a lot to say about Martha Graham. Sweet dreams are made of this. Who am I to disagree? I travel the world and the seven seas. Everybody's looking for something.

So first, the sort of surface level, what everybody knows about Martha Graham. She is known as the sort of first lady inventor of modern dance. And there's a lot of really sexy elements built into modern dance in the Martha Graham school. No tutus, nothing to obscure the body, just sort of skin tight leotards, often flesh-colored, sometimes. you know with transparent type of fabric there's a lot of pelvic thrusting Martha Graham apparently would tell her dancers that if you've not yet had an orgasm to leave the studio and to not come back to practice until you have gotten off. Martha was very strict she expected you to give it full attention 24 hours a day

we're talking about the 30s here right the like very very very extreme thing to be saying talking about female orgasms in the 1930s but that's who martha graham was she was not cowed by the social norms of the day and had a much more sort of metropolitan outlook on the world you can kind of think about that generation of Americans in Europe, right? Your Hemingways, Fitzgeralds, the modernists who emerge from the European artistic milieu with much more open minds about sexual relationships, about class relationships, about race relationships as well, that leave the sort of provincial American approach to all this stuff in the dust.

And Martha Graham is unapologetic about espousing the idea of freedom in her artwork, right? But she's also a real patriot at the same time. and she has a vision of American exceptionalism, right? Dick, I think there was a quote of hers that about American dance that you had found to be an interesting one. It's very short. And she goes, an American dance, it's not a series of steps. It's infinitely more. It is a characteristic time beat, a different speed, an accent, sharp and staccato. You know, I went back and I looked at some of Graham.

You can find Graham's dances online. And like you said, it's the 1930s. But if just for the listener who really wants to go further on this, you could hold Martha Graham's videos next to a video. The one that came to mind would be the rap video for Fade with Tiana Taylor. And you can see that even when you can see that even in 2018 or whatever, when Fade came out, and you have Tanna Taylor dancing, it doesn't look all that different from what you had in the 1930s. So, like, it's pretty crazy how it pops up and just sticks with sort of American culture as a way to get a message.

Your love is fading. I feel. What a real. I feel it. Can you feel? But the freedom and libertinism that you might perceive by looking at Graham's sexually charged dances, on film was in sharp contrast to the atmosphere of extreme discipline that she fostered in her studio, in her school, and with her students and her dancers, right?

She was a hard, hard task mistress who would have her dancers up at the dawn and rehearsing all day and studying, you know, dance theory and movement theory and working their asses off until dusk. I had a lot of talkings to by Martha. You know, if you're really serious about this, you better settle down. There's one anecdote, like, if that I think Betty Ford used to say, if you weren't sitting up straight enough around Martha Graham, that she'd put her knee into your back.

and you wouldn't soon forget it. So you could imagine the degree to which she is able to really not only impress the skills upon her pupils, but to really indoctrinate them into her worldview, both aesthetically and, although she would certainly deny it, politically as well. Absolutely. This requires discipline, not real, not something imposed from without, but discipline imposed by you, yourself, upon yourself. Your goal is freedom, but freedom may only be achieved through discipline. In the studio you learn to conform, to submit yourself to the demands of your craft, so that

you may finally be free. And just to get back, you know, the point on her view on American exceptionalism was that she took all of these different sources, right? You have African dance and dances of Europe and these different styles and made a distinctly American dance and sort of showed the world that this is what dance looks like now. Right. And it's funny, too, because, you know, as you were talking about this, and, you know, having looked into Martha Graham's life and work,

there's a real rhyme also between what she was doing and what sort of a generation before the opera conductors were doing, right? You think about Verdi and Puccini putting on these shows that incorporate sort of the orientalized culture, pieces from Asian, African, and Middle Eastern colonies or vassals of the European empires and incorporating them into a very Western musical tradition. And I think that that's funny how Martha Graham would kind of do the same thing. In 1955, for example, she went on a state department sponsored trip to Japan.

and started to incorporate all of this Japanese aesthetic culture and present it in this American time stamp that appropriates and sort of repackages in a universal cultural language. And there is something. Controlling that cultural landscape. Yes. You know, taking control of culture, right? totally going around the world to what essentially become lesser cultures right taking in the best parts of each and then producing something that is the very best

yes I can yes I can anything you can be I can be greater sooner or later I'm greater than you no you're not yes I am yes I am right exactly kind of like like in the voice of America to say to these other countries, we can do the things that are familiar to you and we are better and we are trustworthy and therefore in this Cold War, you should side with us because we are the culturally superior. We are the universal. We do not speak for parochial interests, but for universal human desires and interests. And I wanted to just take a little detour here and talk about Martha Graham as cultural Cold Warrior. There is a lot out there.

There's a book. It's Martha Graham's Cold War, The Dance of American Diplomacy by Victoria Phillips, published in 2020. And it just ties so well into my conversation with Matt from last week because this is really Frank Wisner's Mighty Wurlitzer in full form, right? So we talked a little bit about Martha Graham's cult-like approach to dance instruction. And so you can kind of see how that parallels some of the micro-targeting, M.K. Ultra style mind control techniques, right? Perhaps on much more witting subjects, i.e. professional dancers who want to be formed

into these sort of super soldiers of the dance, right? But the techniques are similar. And one of her dancers described this as, you know, the dancers were just bodies, right? and their bodies were like colors on a palette. And Martha was painting with them. And so, you know, she forced her dancers to dress alike. She enforced rigorous, rigorous behavioral norms on her dancers and would punish any nonconformity with those norms. And she really had her dancers acting like.

diplomats. Her troop went on world tours on six out of seven continents. Well, maybe five out of seven. I don't think they hit up Antarctica. And they also, tellingly, did not go to Africa. But they traveled extensively through Europe, through Asia and the Middle East, and through South America as well. And her dancers became like diplomats for the United States. And I wonder if they weren't a little bit more than just diplomats in the same way we talked about models making good espionage assets, right? So these tours continued all the way from the Roosevelt administration through the administration of George H.W. Bush. So just the expanse of her work for the U.S. government is epic.

I mean, it's almost unthinkable. Like we're talking about 50 plus years of running shows on behalf of the U.S. all over the world. And it wasn't just the State Department. I would imagine that many of our listeners have already kind of pricked up their antennae, because, of course, the CIA was behind the scenes. So maybe listeners are familiar with the CIA's sponsorship in the art world, like abstract expressionism, or CIA sponsorship in literary criticism, like what Matt and I talked about,

week in the publishing industry through all these channels the CIA was exerting influence in order to push the party line for capitalism and against collectivism against Soviet communism and not surprisingly Martha Graham and her philosophy fit right into this agenda and to bring back a another of our cast of characters, a lot of these programs were set up by none other than Dickie Bissell. Remember, he had been Gerald Ford's mentor in the America First Committee, and after that, he went on to head the Ford Foundation in the early 50s. He spent time in the Ford Foundation. This was in between his time with the OSS, and before he went to the C.I.

So you could imagine that he was not far from the intelligence community during that time and indeed worked directly with Alan Dulles, who was then head of the CIA, to funnel covert funding from the CIA to its favored cultural and artistic projects. Right. namely the Institute for Contemporary Arts founded in 1947, which in turn made Martha Graham a fellow of its Congress of Cultural Leaders, affiliated with the better known Congress for Cultural Freedom, which was another CIA Ford Foundation Front. But here's the best part. Guess who was on the ICA's Board of Directors? Oh, that's our boy, our boy William Bundy. that's right the son of Grand Rapids native Harvey Bundy brother of McGeorge Bundy

those two bros that overlapped at Yale with Jerry Ford before they each went on to join the CIA call that a small world it's a small world for a Nazi you know what I was just when I see this on the paper the CIA and the ICA. Yeah. The ANGRA. It's not funny. Yeah.

Not very, a little on the nose. I think they call that hiding in plain sight. Right. And these types of foundations and cutouts that were funneling CIA money to the arts to bring it back to the micro-dynamic were the same foundations, right? the same foundations, right? Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, and the million other foundations that proliferated as further conduits to spread it all around, right? We're also funding M.K. Ultra research. So, you know, you've got the mass and the micro-appeal. The left

hand the right hand working together for total social control and domination right that and and that's where like the rubber really hits the road right like the goal here is in the minds of many of the participants right like i don't know that martha graham uh was thinking that she was participating in a effort towards total social control, she was legitimately espousing her deeply held artistic beliefs about freedom and expression and, you know, believing that the people giving her shit tons of money to travel all around the world were similarly inclined towards a goodwill toward man and artistic expression all around the world. But I don't think that Dickie Bissell gave much of a shit about freedom of expression around the world. I don't think Alan Dulles gave much of a shit about freedom of expression

around the world. Those guys wanted power. Right. And stability. And they wanted to keep the majority of people distracted. Right. And they wanted to keep the majority of people distracted. Right. And they wanted to be able, wherever they went in the world, to recruit more people into that distraction. This culture that was being developed made it so that an individual can essentially be lulled, lulled into a reality where their expression, everything they're doing is essentially consumer choice, a consumer choice, and not coming from any sort of political substance. And so then the way they do that is you have this illusion of individual freedom. Well, really, there's three factors, right? You have an emphasis. You start developing a culture

where the emphasis is on the individual and the individual freedoms. And one of the way is the major way to get this is through expression, expression through abstraction and an appeal to elite sophistication. And at the same time, what you're doing is you're sort of removing any ideological content from that. So I think the idea here is that you take any ordinary person and you give him something to aspire to. and this would be the wealthy, the sexy, the young. Yeah, and actually Martha said that she could make anybody a dancer. Now this is not competition. There is no competition.

You're in competition with one person only, and that is the individual you know you can become. And that is the thing that makes a dancer's life, the life of a realist, and gives it some of a realist. its hazard and some of its wonder. It is a creative process. It is out of that handling of the material of the self

that you are able to hold the stage in the full maturity and power which that magical place demands. That it wasn't limited to a certain body type. And she did have at least in sort of the formative years she did have a range of there weren't any fatties obviously but she had a range of of tall and short and blonde and brunette she did also integrate the troop i think in 1951 or so with one or two black dancers uh there was asian dancers uh jewish dancers So all of that goes to this idea of emphasizing, you know, expression through individuality,

you know, the freedom of anybody to join in that collective expression, but not to submit oneself to the collective, right? The focus is always on the subjective. Totally. And the way you mainland that into American culture, into U.S. culture, into the global culture, is by first having it be accepted by the elite. And so you have in New York and in the high society and the major cities in America, this adoption of this avant-garde dance. And so, Just as you were saying, right in the era before it, with the opera, the who's who of society are going to see these dances and participating in the art world. Yeah, even though numerically it's not a huge number of people participating at this elite level of artistic consumption, But what matters is who the participants are, and among themselves, they represent such a massive concentration of power that it does give an insight into their ideology and especially how they view themselves and their values. like Walter Benjamin wrote about it at the time of all of the operatic stuff, right?

Like he's got some great analysis on how it worked back in those days of the old empires. And then I am a huge fan of Guy Debord, right? The Society of the Spectacle as to how that develops along with technological innovation in the media. And on this elite point, I wanted to read, if I may, this quote from George Kennan, who, you know, career diplomat, massive Cold Warrior, you know, hugely, hugely influential in the U.S. Cold War containment policy after World War II, right? and he lectured at the Museum of Modern Art on one of these CIA-sponsored exhibits of abstract art from Yugoslavia. And he said, quote, a considerable part of modern art does not reveal its meaning. I am well aware that this meaning is visible to people whose acquaintance with art is far deeper than my own. and for this reason, I am wholly prepared to believe that it exists.

And I just thought that quote was so telling about this entire approach, right? And it actually will dovetail with our forthcoming discussion on Freemasonry, where you also have secret meaning embedded into representations, right? whether architectural or on a geographic scale in Freemasonry. And with art, it's the same. I mean, the way that Kenan describes it, it just puts a perfectly fine point on the fact that what you're really doing is you are deputizing a cultural elite to interpret cultural production.

And that is such a fundamental mechanism of capitalist reproduction, I think, that, you know, puts the power of propaganda into certain hands and denies that power from other hands, right? Whereas by contrast, take something like Soviet realism, the meaning is right there in the end. image, you know, whether it's a meaning, whether it's an image of the exploitation of the worker by the landowner, or whether it's an image of the revolt of the revolutionaries in glorious victory against the oppressor, right? Whatever the intended meaning is, there's not an intermediary between the viewer and the artist. And look, Fourth Reich Archaeology podcast is not endorsing Stalinist aesthetics here, okay? Please, listener, do not confuse our message here. For my part, I have a lot of admiration

for abstract art. I make abstract art. Don't get millions of dollars for it, or even any money for that matter. But we're talking about the instrumentalization of aesthetics in service of the cause of capitalism, which is totally distinct. And this applies to Martha Graham as well from the artistic merits of the underlying works of art. So we just wanted to clear that up less there be any sort of takeaway that we are shitting on any artistic expression other than socialist realism. We're not. Instead, we're trying to explain how in the minds of these cultural cold warriors, for Martha Graham, just as much as for, you know, the abstract expressionist in some respect, The full appreciation of the work of art requires that mediation by some elite authority.

And now it's even the same with politics, kind of like we talked about in our election coverage, that it's the media who's serving in that elite role and certainly vulgarized and reduced in sophistication, but it's the same process, right? Right. And the substance is an art, but information. And they're telling you, you know, what to give credence to and whatnot. And just before we move on, I love this idea of kind of putting it into the words of the Cold Warriors themselves. And so I found another couple of quotes. And these are taken from a great book that I'd recommend to understand these issues. And I think we'll talk more about this stuff in future episodes. But these are from the book, The Cultural Cold War by Francis Stoner Saunders. And she quotes Alan Dulles himself, saying that the success of the CIA's

Cold War efforts depended on, quote, its ability to appear independent from government, to seem to represent the spontaneous convictions of freedom-loving individuals, end quote. And that's Martha. She famously and repeatedly self-identified as apolitical. You know, notwithstanding the fact that she was getting CIA money to go on these goodwill tours for the U.S. world, right? She said in no uncertain terms, I am not a propagandist. Right. But as we all know, not everybody says what they are and does what they say. Well, that's my sign that you are dead

My list, oh, you can't so fat to know I'm the hardest of ice I'm the eye man of TV With my oculeule of TV I need all the people I was just going to say that all of that is just a kind of package up and better understand this facet of Betty Blumer Ford's identity and to also understand the role of to which Gerald Ford makes his grand entrance in 1948.

Because this does form a part of the Betty Ford myth, as well as the Jerry Ford myth. Just ask Hillary Rodham Clinton. Seeing her with the Martha Graham Dance Company, it's thrilling. Seeing her then back home and eventually marrying this handsome, young ex-GI who went to Yale Law School where I went. So there's a lot of remembrance of Jerry Ford at the Yale Law School and then starting their life. And then him getting elected to Congress and they're off to the races, never knowing or

expecting that history would put him and her in the White House. But boy, am I glad it did. Maybe, Dick, you can get us, as you always do, back on track and pick back up with our heroine here with Betty. Yeah, well, I guess before we get there, let's dive back into, let's say, the late 1930s era. Betty graduates from Bennington. She goes back to Grand Rapids for a bit, but she decides to make dance her lifelong love a full-time career for herself.

So it was, I think, Martha Graham was on one of her tours, and she was in Grand Rapids. and of course Betty went to go see her. The set was over, and after the show, she goes and talks to Martha and essentially ask her for a job in her dancing troupe in New York City. And Martha agrees. So Betty heads to New York City.

It is now the late 1930s, 1937, 1938. She's dancing for Martha Graham's concert group. she's also a fashion model for the John Robert Powers firm. Don, who else was affiliated with that firm? Well, I can think of at least three people who hold a dear place in my heart, who were associated with that firm. One, a fellow by the name of Harry Conover. two, a real looker by the name of Phyllis Brown, and three, a strapping and a square-jawed real piece of man by the name of Jerry Ford.

I love that. And so you see Betty is in the orbit is no doubt in the same. social circles as Jerry and Phyllis at the same time in New York City. So it's, you know, it's fun to imagine where these people, where their lives crossed. But they never overlapped, right? As far as I could tell, there's not any suggestion that Betty and Jerry ever met in New York, right? That's right. There's no, I don't think any of the historians that I covered, had any acknowledgement from either

party that they had sort of seen each other at the time. Of course there would be later interactions with Phyllis but getting back to it at this point Betty is sort of living her life in New York City

as sort of like an original Carrie Bradshaw I'm thinking right? Like she is just a city girl. At some point I think was considering joining Graham's premier troop that would travel across the country and she rejected that idea. She didn't want a life on the road and maybe I think she thought back to how her dad's life was quite sad living on the road. So Betty's in New York City and it's now in the

1940s right on the cusp and her mom visits her uh and true to form she gives betty an all-time sick burn and she's like you know classic fucking hortense i wanted my daughter to go dance with martha graham to be a great dancer not to just become some some some new yorker that had a job and so what a burn this was right and so essentially hortense is like you know betty what do you doing here. You're just living in New York City. And this, I think, in terms of like an overbearing mother that is impossible to please, this is a good one. Because remember, Hortense revered New York City. Like, she held New York City on such a pedestal, but she's basically ragging on her daughter for living there. I feel like I could picture Hortense in her afternoon tea or whatever with

the other Grand Rapids ladies and they're talking about their young adult children and oh Betty what's she up to over there in New York City and the big apple huh she must be really painting the town and and Hortense probably with some embarrassment didn't have the bragging fodder that she would have liked to have had right oh she's a dancer and then the friend would say, oh, so she's on Broadway? No, she's with this company and, oh, so what is that a dancer? Like, is she a stripper? You know, you could kind of think about, like, is she a showgirl? Because this is like the cusp of the jazz age, too, right? So there's also this kind of racial, potential, potentially threatening racial undercurrents to being a quote unquote dancer in New York

city at the time. So all of that, yeah, it just didn't sit right. She kept talking about all my friends at home who were getting married and having these lovely weddings and trying to tempt me to come back. 100%. And in the Grand Rapids community, in the Grand Rapids community, which was on the conservative end of things, to say the least, right? So even if some parts of America were becoming more accepting of this very suggestive form of dance. Certainly in Grand Rapids, there was still a ways to go. So anyways, she, Hortense is basically to Betty, like, why don't you come back to Grand Rapids?

Spend six months out there. If you don't like it, you can always come back. New York City will be here. That's like a classic page in the mom playbook, right? knowing full well, like wherever you go, that's where you'll be. And as soon as Betty comes back to Grand Rapids, essentially in Hortense's views, she just needs to get Betty back to Grand Rapids, and that's where she will stay. And she's right, I mean, to some extent, right?

So Betty comes back to Grand Rapids, and she is now a teacher at the Travis School. She does choreographs and dances and hold some performances. and then she takes a crack at working at a local department store. Purple Shymers. It's such a good name. And she's sort of engaging in sort of social activities and community activities. She's helping with the disabled children. And she is gaining a reputation.

I think at this point there's some folks in Grand Rapids that would call her even the Martha Graham of Grand Rapids. Absolutely. I mean, come on, she was right there at the very top of the avant-garde of dance in the country, if not the world, and then comes back to Grand Rapids where up until like the late 1930s, they didn't even deliver newspapers on Sunday out of respect for the Sabbath. Right, exactly. It was basically just work and God.

And so that makes her a real powerful woman, too, right? Like the gender roles in that extremely conservative environment were something that, you know, Betty had already come to the conclusion that they were stifling and she had made it a sort of mission of hers to challenge those hard and fast gender roles. and I think that her dance work and her teaching sort of promoted that and it made her extremely popular among other women, right? She was kind of a Moses of the women of Grand Rapids in that sense.

Hell yeah. A pioneer. I mean, you'll hear this over and over again about her, but you can't say it enough. She was a pioneer. here. She broke the mold. Okay, but back to the early 1940s. So it's 1942.

The war is ongoing. Most of the eligible bachelors are either on some tin can in the Pacific or in the trenches somewhere in Europe. And Betty is sort of stuck. with whoever's left. And one of those people, one of those men who stayed back in the war was a man by the name of William Warren, who has a diabetic. He had an exemption, and so they get together and they get married. William Warren, Bill Warren, was a salesman, and he was also an alcoholic.

I wonder, Don, does that sound like anybody? Oops Yeah, somebody married their daddy Right, there's no doubt Some trauma that has permeated into this decision Or maybe it's just some sick cosmic joke But But here you have Betty basically married

To a guy who is not very different from her father But the difference is that They don't have kids and Betty this time joins Bill on the road so they go to places and sort of set up shop in Toledo and in upstate New York and they live sort of a nomadic life for a few years living on the road my friend

was going to keep you free and clean now you wear your skin like iron your breaths as hard as kerosene You weren't your mama's only boy But her favorite one, it seems She began to cry when you said goodbye You sank into your dreams But after some time

A couple years, Betty's ready to start a family And settle down And guess what? Bill isn't up for it. He likes the rambling life, and he isn't ready for children. And this sort of gets to Betty. The story goes that one day while Bill is out in Boston, she's in Grand Rapids. She sits down to write a letter to Bill and essentially divorce him.

And as she's writing this letter, she gets a phone call. And it's from some hospital in Boston where they say Bill was in a diabetic shock and is in a coma and close to death. And so, you know, distraught, obviously, Betty goes out to Boston and sees to her husband and stands by his side for something like two years while he gets better. Yeah, imagine that. That must suck. Yeah. And, you know, I think, like, for a while, she's just waiting for him to die, right? All the metal you can buy and all the doctors you can hide. eventually brings him back, you know, brings him back to Grand Rapids

and then has him on one floor of the house while she lives on the other. And, you know, it's essentially a non-existent relationship at that point because I'm sure, in her view, this is someone who was going to die any day. But he doesn't. He gets better. Two fucking years.

yeah yeah um but he does recover remarkably and as soon as he's back on his feet betty's like all right i've had enough enough of this uh it's time for it's time for for me to pack my things up this isn't the life i want yeah it it reminds me of something out of uh days of our lives or something i don't know if you ever watch those soap operas oh hell yeah as a kid the hourglass, so are the days of our lives. There would always be like somebody's in a coma and their spouses. Yeah, Victor Chariacus. Victor Chariacus was in a coma in days of our lives.

Dude, I'm a huge Days of Our Lives fan. Bill Brady. Oh, and Hope. I had such a crush on Hope. Oh, hope. Yeah. Yeah, I'm glad you said Days of Our Lives and not one of the other ones because that's, you know, the OG. Well, that's why, that's why, you know, that's why we work so well together, Dick,

because, you know, even though we didn't grow up together, we just, just like Betty and Jerry, you know, our paths were star crossed unbeknownst to us. And here we are now talking about to talk about one of, you know, the great meetcutes of history. Oh, yeah. It's impact. Definitely. Right. So you have Betty, who is now like 29 years old. She is in the process of divorcing her husband. And she feels like a complete failure. Knowing what you know about Hortense, knowing what you know about Betty, you can imagine what that relationship was at this time. And, you know, having your mom sort of breathing down your neck about this kind of stuff. So Betty sort of safe to say at a low point. But also, you know what they say, when you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose. And so for Betty, she put herself out there on the market. Oh, yeah. And again, Betty, total hardbody.

Knowing Betty, her list of suitors was long. And before long, our hero, Jerry Ford, seeks to be on the top of that list. So remember, Jerry's back from the war. He's a lieutenant commander. I, again, got to emphasize how good he must have looked walking into a room wearing his formal military garb. I was thinking, like, maybe this was the best suit he had was his military suit. Yeah.

And I wonder, was it like the Navy whites? Was that they wear the white suits, right? The white uniform? I think so. I don't know when they did Maybe he had a blue one I hope so for his sake Because that would have wrecked up

I'm sure an epic dry cleaning bill I'm sure that Jerry was squirt and mustard Yeah if he's got the whites Yeah Like crazy I think by the time he left As lieutenant commander he did have a blue jacket But maybe the formal gear

You know Having not served in the military I don't know But we could look into it So he's at Amber's firm he is moving his way up the ranks whining and dining the local lawyers and he is on the prowl as we mentioned at the top of the hour he's going on like one date a week and um you know one night when he's at his friend frank newman's house and working on this fundraising drive he asks

frank's wife peg if there are any women that she could set him up with because he's he's looking to settle down. And Pegg does have someone in mind. Her name is Betty Blumer Warren. Yeah. And Jerry is primed having been raised in a second marriage household, right? It's a good fit because many men more conservative or more sort of close-minded men might not be interested in Betty because she's her divorce isn't complete yet, right? She's still married but is separated

and that might turn a lot of guys off. Exactly. And actually probably for Jerry it may have endeared her to him, right? Like, you know, he's thinking about his mom. Mm-hmm. And just as Betty, first time around,

dad, maybe Jerry was sort of looking at Betty thinking about, here's a woman who's in a bad spot, just like my mom was. I helped her out of a jam, I guess, but I used a little too much force. So they set up a call, and this is sort of an old-timey thing, but also something that, like, I don't know about you, I totally did. not at age 34 but in middle school and maybe even earlier than that where you have these sort of three way phone calls where two people are one side and you're sort of egging one of your friends on to call a guy or girl and um oh yeah yeah yeah there's also that SNL skit

with Will Farrell as Saddam Hussein and Daryl Hammond as Bill Clinton and Molly Shannon as Monica Lewinsky doing that. Have you seen that one? Oh, amazing. Hello, you got Saddam. Saddam, it's me, Bill Clinton. Buddy, I need you to help me out here.

This Monica Lewinsky thing is getting pretty hot again. I could use a distraction. Couldn't you spray a few curds with anthrax? Come on, Bill. Hey, Saddam. Monica, you never call me anymore. So it's like your classic three-way style phone call, very adolescent. But I guess this is the way that you're sort of meeting people at the time when you don't have Bumble and Tinder and all that jazz.

So you have Pegg call up Betty, and then Betty, you know, Pegg gives the phone to Jerry, and then Jerry and Betty talk for a bit. And Jerry asked her out for a drink that night. And Betty reminds Jerry that she's still married. And as a lawyer, he should know better than that. And Jerry essentially is like disregards that completely and it's like, how about we go somewhere quiet? And they do. They meet up for a drink and they hit it off. And as you mentioned at the top of the hour, it turns out that Betty had her eyes on Jerry all the way back to when he was a ball player.

at U of M. Before this meetup had happened and before Jerry, you know, asked Peg for a hookup, Jerry had almost gotten back together with Phyllis Brown. I don't think we've mentioned that. No, we haven't. This is a good one. Yeah, she alerted Jerry that she was getting a divorce, right? She had married somebody else and she was getting a divorce also and hit

Jerry up and he like packed a suitcase to go out and see her and you know try and sweep her off her feet and reclaim that prize that he left behind in New York and before he makes his way out the door she phones him up and says you know actually on second thought we better not meet up uh I think it's not a good idea like you go your way and I'll go mine and they never well actually they did see each other again and we'll talk about that too but Jerry is kind of like

he's kind of digging in on the post Phyllis lifestyle right he is breaking off with the old and looking for something permanent and even more motivated to find that match

after it becomes clear to him that that this supermodel, like the love of his life up until that point, the person who's always kind of been a presence preventing any of his casual flings from developing into anything serious, that's off the table. Right, exactly. And so, you know, she's the standard, right? Phyllis Brown's the standard for Jerry. And he's got no shortage of candidates. He's going on dates. every week. So there are ladies, but when your standard is a literal supermodel, um, it's kind of hard to let, let that go. So he was picky, right? And so I guess with Betty,

he finally found someone that, uh, sort of met those standards. You know, the two hit it off. There are these series of sort of half secret dates, double dates that they go on with the Bukens. remember Phil Bukin being Jerry's long-time friend, former law partner, and current associate at Amber's firm. You know, everything was sort of kept quiet on account of the pending divorce until September 1947 when the divorce is finalized. And then Betty and Jerry's courtship becomes more public. And there's this famous vignette that Smith does at a get-together. at Betty's house after the divorce. There is, you know, several potential suitors, you know, guys coming after newly single Betty,

hanging out at the apartment, Ford being one of them. And my dude literally posts up on the couch with a fucking newspaper, just letting all the other guys flirt with Betty, like one after the other, have their little chats as though it's like The Bachelor or whatever. Yeah, exactly. And Jerry posted up there, nonchalant. Not threatened at all. If anything, like, can you imagine, like, you're sized up against Jerry Ford at that point,

Lieutenant Commander Ford? Yeah. I would pack it up. I would say this is not going to work out for me. And that's what happens, right? Yeah, and that's what happened. So he, like, sort of sweats them out. Waits all night until Betty finally is like, all right, guys, I'm going to bed.

all the men leave and outside the apartment Jerry sort of corners them and it's like all right guys like you know if you have serious desires to go steady with with Betty let me know right now because I you know I want I want to be with this girl and then they all back off and then it's you know Jerry and Betty become official and again these are two peas in a pod they're very athletic They're very active. You know, they're both, as I said before, hard bodies, sporty and competitive and very social. And they become very close. By Christmas, 1947, Betty gifts Jerry a cigarette lighter that's inscribed, The Light of My Life.

Aw. But right on the heels of that comes the final closure to the... the Phyllis Brown saga, right? So Jerry and Betty go together to New York City, and they're meeting with an artist friend of Jerry's called Brad Crandall, and Crandall pranks Jerry by inviting Phyllis to ambush them at his apartment, and Phyllis is like stunting on Betty, and talking about all of her knowledge of Grand Rapids and the Fords, and Betty gets pissed. Like she feels like a real inferior sort of country bumpkin here, but Jerry just plays it cool as though nothing happened, and then...

And so then, by February 1948, Jerry proposes, but there's something odd about the proposal. Yeah, guys, don't do... Don't do this kind of proposal. Betty knew that Jerry loved her. She knew he adored her and that she was his entire world. And she was confident that he was going to marry her. But it was weird. When he proposed, he said, you know,

let's hold off the wedding until some time in the fall of 1948. And I can't tell you why. Yeah, I think when she recounted it, He's like, I don't really remember him giving me a reason. And I didn't, it was kind of odd that he said we're going to have to wait until this very specific time. Yeah. And we are going to get in to the reason why they had to wait in part two of this episode, which will release next week. For now, I'm Dick.

And I'm Don saying farewell. and keep digging You say you love me and you're thinking of me but you know you could be wrong I just say you told me that you want to hold me but you know you're not that strong

I just can't do that before I just can't beg you any more I'm going to let you pass and I go last and time we'll tell just who has

and who's left behind when you go yo and I don't mind Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.