These days a hefty slab of the teenagers alive in America will supposedly live to be 100 (presumably working till they drop to pay for the rest, jobless and dying from diabetes). Given the reproductive shadow hanging over America--poor semen quality, cryptorchidism, impaired fecundity--they won't have that many children, although the sparse litters will contain people likely to live to be 125, handing down horrible recipes for turkey giblet gravy to the next generation. In short, there'll be a lot of centenarians about, and the name Gerald Ford will mean absolutely nothing to any of them. You had to have been born in 1960 to have been 14 in 1974, hence even vaguely conscious of the genial interregnum between Nixon and Carter, over which Ford presided.

Ah, the 1970s! More precisely, the mid-1970s, an interval--from Nixon's resignation on August 9, 1974, to January 23, 1977, when Jimmy Carter installed Zbigniew Brzezinski as his National Security Adviser--when people thought America might head down a different path.

A Maryland-based former weapons designer with a nose for conspiracy suggested to me the day after New Year's that Karl Rove masterminded the hoopla over Ford's passing--the postal holiday, the solemn elegies--all as a way of associating the beleaguered presidency of G.W. Bush with the supposedly popular Ford. If so, chalk it up as another clunker from Karl, whose magic touch has brought his employer's popularity ratings close to the lowest in the history of the Republic.

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