A day that lives in infamy

[Ian Livingston]

That is a very good point, Laura. But, I wonder, could the Reagans have
achieved their autocratic inoculation from legal recourse had Ford allowed
the impeachment proceedings to continue without executive interference?


On Fri, Aug 9, 2013 at 12:28 PM, <kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:

> But one thing we still had back then was a relatively independent press,
> with genuine investigative journalists who helped expose the Watergate
> affair. Ford's pardon was a disgrace, of course, but I'm not convinced that
> it was the first step in the road to the current level of NSA surveillance
> and the trampling of the civil rights of voters, poor people and
> whistleblowers. The consolidation of the major news outlets and the
> systematic buying out of government (not just US) by corporate interests,
> via lobbying and manipulations of existing laws, had already begun. It
> wasn't caused by Ford's pardon, or by Nixon's famous megalomania. If Nixon
> had served time, along with various of his minions, would we be living in a
> flourishing democracy now? Even if Nixon had been a passionate democrat and
> pacifist, the powers-that-be would have replaced him, inevitably, with a
> Reagan. The really overt, opening battle cry, the real day of infamy, that
> got us where we are today, was Reagan's 1981 declaration of war against the
> PATCO workers, which opened up the floodgates of union busting. It was a
> corporate test case on what the American people would swallow. And boy did
> they swallow!
>
> Laura
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ian Livingston **
> Sent: Aug 9, 2013 12:31 PM
> To: alice wellintown **
> Cc: pynchon -l **
> Subject: Re: A day that lives in infamy
>
> I was quite young at the time, it was just prior to my 18th birthday, and
> I recall the glee and relief around Minneapolis, where I was living at the
> time. People among my group of counter-culture drop-out types were mighty
> happy, we began to dream that the politicians had been served notice, that
> they would now recognize that they were the servants of the people. Nobody
> really knew what it was all about, only that "we" had taken down the
> President of the United States. While it's true that had it not been for
> the popular groundswell the investigation might have turned out quite
> differently, the delusion remained until September 8, 1974, which I count
> as the day the government officially announced its status as an agency
> independent of the will of the people, and the beginning of all that
> happened after. But for this one month we had our little dream, the people
> had the power, as Patti Smith later said, to redeem the work of fools.
>
>
> On Fri, Aug 9, 2013 at 6:27 AM, alice wellintown <
> alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> You can't be serious. Nixon obstructed justice after the Burglary. The
>> burglary was a far more serious crime than anything Obama has been accused
>> of, and the cover up, which some place higher than the burglary, though
>> doing so  is questionable, caused the president to resign because he, as
>> president, tried to subvert the constitution, to undermine the essence of
>> our democratic system. He did not only engage in crimes of political
>> espionage, spy on the competition, he engaged in crimes of sabotage.
>> Remember too, that many o the people, groups of people he, through abuse of
>> power, damaged, were "competition" only in his paranoid mind. Nixon's
>> competition, those who suffered from his crimes, include, anyone who
>> opposed his filthy wars, the free press, our system of election, our system
>> of justice. Not to mention our History. Your quip here seems to side with
>> Nixon on the last of these.
>>
>> The paranoid man in the theatre / theater can't here the rocket. What?
>> It's important to keep things in perspective: Obama is not the new Nixon.
>> The world is changed, for he better, despite the sufferings from h excesses
>> of global capital. We ain't livin in no Nixon Land no mo.
>>
>>
>> On Friday, August 9, 2013, wrote:
>>
>>> In light of the present-day levels of surveillance, his actions seem
>>> almost lovably benign and even comical. Ooh, he spied on the competition -
>>> horrors!
>>>
>>> Laura
>>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Ian Livingston **
>>> Sent: Aug 8, 2013 11:31 PM
>>> To: pynchon -l **
>>> Subject: A day that lives in infamy
>>>
>>>
>>> http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/picture/2013/aug/08/photography-president-nixon
>>>  ****
>>>
>>>
> ******
>
>
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