This piece of political
commentary was written before Watergate, obviously, so the characterization of
Nixon as “alert & gutsy” seems odd to say the least, but perhaps he was alert & gutsy. He was also a
treasonous thug when he secretly sent an emissary to the North Vietnamese in
1968, asking them to hold off on the Paris Peace Talks until he was elected,
sabotaging the cease-fire being brokered which would have gone to the
Democrats’ credit. This cost countless lives, and likely tipped the balance on
the election. This was also flat-out a crime, and Nixon was subsequently
paranoid about leaks and established what he called a “plumbers unit” to keep
them in check. These were the same people behind the Watergate break-in that
eventually brought Nixon down. Good riddance, but along the way he did
tremendous damage to the country. B. may have thought Eisenhower was a dope,
but Eisenhower seems to have had some old-fashioned integrity. Here is Hunter
S. Thompson writing in Rolling Stone
on Nixon in 1994, the year he died: “If the right people had been in charge of
Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those
open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was
a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that
he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his
funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been
burned in a trash bin.” Yikes! Thompson’s eulogy is hilarious and so filled
with contempt and spit it’s really worth a read: http://www.theatlantic.com/past/unbound/graffiti/crook.htm
“Universal contempt” indeed! How on Earth did such a figure get elected
president of the United States? It’s a rhetorical question. Since then we’ve
seen an empty-headed Reagan and a differently styled empty-headed George W.
Bush achieve the same station for no less mysterious or crooked reasons. You
can say this much: Whatever devious claptrap debris Nixon had clattering around
in the dumpster of his head, at least his head wasn’t empty.
Eisenhower doesn’t seem so bad in
retrospect. But probably most politically aware, progressive, intelligent,
artistic academics would align against any Republican, period, even Eisenhower.
In an earlier Dream Song, B. laments Adlai Stevenson’s loss. It would be nice
to have him back. Politics these days seems to have some relatively bright,
competent centrists on one side (Obama, the Clintons), and the lunatic fringe
yanking things way to the right on the other—pretty much name any prominent
Republican. Their inventive variations on the theme of whackadoodle would be hilarious if they weren’t perpetrating such societal
vandalism. What’s inexcusable is that they’re doing this in service to an
unimaginably rich and powerful cabal of billionaires who are really the ones
calling the shots these days. They’ve forged a way around the democratic
safeguards and are ripping things to shreds and selling off the pieces. Times
like this, it’s tempting to think maybe a king would restore some semblance of
order.
In a “Film as Art” class, once, I
took a poll among the students, all guys, for a film they suggested we should
watch. The Matrix won, and unlike B.
who reports nixing Gone with the Wind
in favor of War and Peace, we went
with it, in the spirit of educational democracy. Bad idea. After studying and seriously
discussing The Matrix, I now
officially despise that phony-baloney movie. So much for democracy. Gattaca was much better. It’s not an
overrated idea, exactly, but democracy doesn’t work in every conceivable
instance. I’m with B. on that.
No comments:
Post a Comment