Because You Never Asked

MILHOUSE

     (This essay was written in the mid 90’s. With the death of Gerald Ford just having taken place in 2007, it seems the appropriate moment to put this essay up on my website. I mentioned Gerald Ford at the end of this essay and have just completed a piece about his death entitled “Gerald Ford: He‘s Dead“. It is now obvious they both show a similar bloodline and could be read in tandem.)

     Richard Nixon has died. They laid him to rest two days ago. May he rest in peace and my deepest sympathies to his family. Even Richard Nixon deserves that.

     It might be remembered that I spoke of my job in a previous essay (see essay, “The Polls and the Gulf War”). I explained how the total, cross sectional gamut of human life passed through my “lens on life”. From the ten days or so it took for the ex-president to fall sick and be buried, this all inclusive sweep of American culture spent a good deal of time with me in my work place. What was their reaction?

     As I scan my memory for an answer to that question, like a radar screen without any blips, I must eventually come to the conclusion that there was no reaction at all; no sadness, happiness, pain, regret, relief, or any other manifestation of human feeling. In all that time I only heard one comment pertaining to President Nixon’s death --- a young lady was annoyed because his funeral preempted her favorite soap opera. Down here in the real world, where people work, shop, take their kids to school, root for the Cubs and try to have a little fun, the passing of Richard Nixon was about as noteworthy as the arrival of the next high tide. We don’t have Richard Nixon to “kick around anymore”, and frankly, nobody gives a damn.

     But that is in the real world. In the la la world of news coverage in pursuit of advertising dollars, this was very important, whether the rest of us thought so or not. This is because the politicians and the press; the striped tied pundits and the governing lords; the broadcast moguls and the cell phone Caesars of our day, are all players in the same movie. They feed off each other to create their own images, their own version of the “truth”, that we all, like water dripping from an old faucet, eventually find almost impossible to ignore. A former president, a man with a leading role in the movie, has died. If this isn’t important, then who are they --- the pundits and politicos --- making these images? It is essential that it be important, that people remember, that Joe Blow accepts it as such. So they shoot it at him for a whole week, with color guards, eulogies, “objective” critique of his life, big bucks evangelists, bygone interviews and haunting trumpet solos wafting across a lovely garden.

     The media mourned Nixon about a week longer than the rest of us, but by the end of it, even the angered soap opera masses began to treat it as “news”.

     I was never a fan of Richard Nixon, but after a week long media blitz rehashing his life, I’ve begun to realize he was very misunderstood. That’s right, misunderstood in that many people still think he was pretty cool. For those of us who understand the true Richard Nixon, the sewage treatment smell we now associate with politics is his main legacy to American life. Politics has never been a pristine pool of sincerity, but “Tricky Dicky” took dirty politics to a whole new level. He cheapened the way we choose our leaders and we still haven’t recovered. I even heard one of his ex-advisers say that Watergate was a “trivial” thing. I wonder if this guy has ever had his house burglarized? (Author’s note: As I put this essay up on my website more than ten years after its birth, it is not unreasonable to decide that Richard Nixon was the original seed that has grown into the Karl Rove tree of political operations.)

     If the Republican Party is currently busting their humps trying to discredit a Democratic president for some failed business deal having virtually nothing to do with his presidency, Richard Nixon is the inspiration for such strategy. If the Democrats defeated John Tower’s nomination as Secretary of Defense based upon some bygone history of drunken debauchery, Nixon pioneered the way. If every politician with a blond secretary is now suspiciously considered an over-sexed adulterer (he probably is, but nobody used to care), we can thank Richard Nixon for that.

     Thanks and adios.

If the media had a hard time making the death of Richard Nixon a big deal, the true test is yet to come. Do you remember a guy named Gerald Ford? (See essay, “Gerald Ford: He’s Dead”).   

back to the Table of Contents

Email: JerryG@postcman.info