scoundrel: _Nixon's Shadow_

[joeallonby]

on 9/12/04 6:57 PM, pynchonoid at pynchonoid at yahoo.com wrote:

> A Scoundrel for All Seasons
> 
>  His
> election to the Senate resulted from his victory over
> ardent New Deal Democrat and friend of Eleanor
> Roosevelt, Helen Gahagan Douglas.

"But don't you see? I had to win!"

> These cultural references are many and varied. In a
> very bizarre example, Greenberg recounts a scene from
> Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991), set in
> the distant future. The Vulcan, Mr. Spock, tries to
> convince the human Captain Kirk, commander of the
> Starship Enterprise, to make peace with the Klingon
> Empire, long-time enemies of the Earth and its allies.
> However, Kirk has spent his career fighting the
> Klingons. "There is an old Vulcan proverb," Spock
> says, "Only Nixon could go to China." [...]

Unfortunately, it's true. Only Nixon, or JFK, could have done it. Since JFK
was famously dead, that left Nixon. Anybody living other than the kitchen
debater and McCarthy's henchman would have been perceived as soft on
Communism. As a dedicated cold warrior, Nixon could go to China as a man
making a bold stroke against Stalinism. The excesses of Maoism and the
subsequent Cultural Revolution were not as well known at the time. This is
Nixon and Kissinger as master politicians. Morality and ethics be damned.

The irony is that if Nixon were a player in the Republican party today, he
would be as marginalized as John Anderson. He would be considered a liberal
who might just as well be a Democrat. Nixon accidentally accomplished many
positive things in his blind rush for power.

The conundrum of Nixon plays right back into the ongoing discussion of
emotion versus reason in today's political equation. Nixon was all about
reason and policy as long as it served his political ends. He was a Quaker
for chrissakes. Give him some dubious credit for not invoking the Prince of
Peace as justification for bombing the living shit out of people on
Christmas Day. He may have trotted out Billy Graham when it suited his last
ditch purposes, but he didn't use religion in the vile way that the
Reagonites and Dubya did and do.

I view Nixon as a tragic figure. He was a talented man brought down by his
own ambition and conviction. In that way he was the opposite of Dubya. There
is absolutely no way that Nixon could have convinced himself that his
actions were in keeping with the belief system of the Society of Friends and
his mother to whom he referred as a saint. If he had been a little less cold
and logical there would be far fewer names etched in that cold black stone
wall. What a waste. A waste of talent. A waste of intellect. A waste of
American and Vietnamese lives.

I'll take Nixon over Reagan. At least he was capable of understanding the
consequences of his actions. Nixon was capable of remorse. Listen again to
his farewell speech to the White House staff. In contrast, Reagan would end
his press conferences by saying "They tell me I have to go now." I often
wondered "Who the fuck has the power to tell the alleged leader of the Free
World that he has to fucking go now! I don't recall that those people,
whoever they are, were on the ballot!" It took the combined efforts of
Congress and the Supreme Court to tell Richard Nixon that he had to go now.

Nixon may have been an evil Machiavellian bastard who in the name of
anti-Communism bombed the fuck out of Cambodia. The resulting
destabilization made it possible for Saloth Sar and his minions to kill
literally hundreds of thousands of people. But that pales in comparison to
George Bush's overthrow of Iraq. The repercussions of that will eventually
make the Killing Fields of Kampuchea look like an exhibition game.

We should study Nixon as the American MacBeth. (I guess that makes Johnson
our Hamlet.) His story is an American tragedy. It may seem unique and
aberrant, but there is much to be learned.

That's my rant for this morning.

Peace,
Joe