scoundrel: _Nixon's Shadow_

[Otto]

Hi Joe,

got a free Monday morning (the dentist's waiting for me in the afternoon)
and I really liked to read your post.

>
> > 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." [...]
>

I remember that particular scene quite well because I agreed to Mr. Spock
back then, although I don't remember which episode it's been. He may have
been a scoundrel, but Nixon ended the Vietnam war. As you say:

> 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.
>

This may excuse our inappropriate admiration of Mao from back then a little
bit. And we were young:

"The world is yours, as well as ours, but in the last analysis, it is yours.
You young people, full of vigor and vitality, are in the bloom of life, like
the sun at eight or nine in the morning. Our hope is placed on you. The
world belongs to you. China's future belongs to you."
Talk at a meeting with Chinese students and trainees in Moscow (November 17,
1957).
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/works/red-book/ch30.htm

> (...)
>
> 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!"

Well, every actor has a director . . . but his calling to reason of the
soviet leader and the Reykjavik-meeting with Gorbatchev, the beginning of
the end of the Cold War was his big moment. And ours.

>(...)
> 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.
>

I still have the hope that an elected Iraqui government next year simply
will tell the US & British troops and their auxiliaries to leave. What
better way for such a government to prove its power and sovereignty to its
people.

Don't forget in your righteous anger about the killed innocents those at
least one thousand American troops who've died in the belief of serving
their country but instead were just employees of Halliburton IG; but not
knowing this. Not knowing that they would be regarded simply as infidel
mercenaries -- who came to take revenge on the Muslim world for 9/11 -- by
those they came to free from a terror regime.

>
> 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.
>

Are you proposing a group-reading of Coover's "The Public Burning"? I've rea
d it once and would still have many questions.

> That's my rant for this morning.
>
> Peace,
> Joe
>

Well done!

Otto