Nixon Kicks Bucket

Ding Dong The Wicked Witch Is Dead!

by Mr. Venom

The day after Richard Milhouse Nixon died, I noticed while driving to work that the flag at the McDonald’s on Woodward Avenue was hanging limply at half-mast.

Richard Satanic Millhouse Nixon, Richard Slaughterhouse Nixon, Richard Whorehouse Nixon, Richard Deathhouse Nixon. Tricky Dick Nixon, arguably the most despised U.S. politician in the 20th century. At long last, we wouldn’t “have Nixon to kick around” anymore. I was getting sick of hating him, anyway. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Then came all the repulsive eulogies and flim-flam about a Nixon of Shakespearean proportions, a man of “enormous vision” brought down by “tragic blindness.” This “tragic Nixon” legend is an insult to the intelligence. Nixon should have been remembered as “the man in the glass booth,” after being hung for his administration’s gruesome war crimes in Indochina, Chile and elsewhere, Instead, he died in his bed, forgiven by the official media for what were only his petty offenses at Watergate. Patriots, apparently having taken a wrong turn on their way to Graceland, placed flowers at the doors of Millstone’s presidential library.

Also that nauseating funeral, with Henry Kissinger sermonizing to a roomful of bigwigs and politicians—where are those Islamic Jihad militants with their truckloads of dynamite when we really need them? As for politicians, they never change. According to one of the members of the current camarilla (a career liar who once worked for Nixon), today’s resident of the White House “loved the lucidity of Nixon’s mind.” That’s some kind of weird, bad joke—like the ludicrous babbling of one fairly typical pundit who noted the “remarkable persistence and towering size” of that slouched, paranoid, vicious, self-serving, conniving and mass-murdering wretch. “For an American who came of age with him in the second half of the twentieth century,” blathered Frank Rich in The New York Times, “making peace with Richard Nixon proved in the end an essential part of growing up.”

Sorry if we disagree. Some people—particularly those paid by the rulers to manufacture the consent of the governed—might think “growing up” means surrendering one’s principles to make peace with one of the most contemptible villains of the century. We’d rather stand with his myriad victims. It just isn’t possible to make peace with the architects of genocide and maintain one’s integrity and honor. Coming of age with Richard Nixon (whose “statesmanship” the Cuban newspaper Granma once appropriately elucidated by turning the x in his name into a swastika) meant witnessing the obliteration of whole countries to appease the craven ego and save the job of a vile warped fraud. It was a daily pageant of mendacity, corruption, and bureaucratic brutality. True, it may not have been fundamentally different from political power at any time, but it had a particularly sordid character to it all that is difficult to describe to those too young, or too accommodated to power, to remember

The evil inanity that foreign policy was “Nixon’s forte” is especially repellent. If Nixon was shrewd enough to “open China” (allegedly his greatest achievement), it was only because the maoist dictatorship had been begging for western business for years. Coming of age with Nixon meant seeing the images of him and Mao toasting one another at the very moment U.S. B-52 bombers were punishing the Vietnamese people with some of the heaviest bombing runs of the war.

To be sure, Nixon was a tragic example of what Wilhelm Reich called the mass psychology of authoritarian society—resentful of his “betters,” contemptuous of his “lessers”, distorted even physically by his suspicion, rancor, venality, and hypocritical machinations; and perfectly willing to defame or destroy anyone who might impede his rise to power. But contrary to the fairy tales, there was no other side to him, no idealism, no grand vision, none of it. Nixon rode the pervasive baseness, foolishness and fear of American society to its summit. until his corruption sent him into an early (and comfortable) retirement. But he never paid for his real crimes, and their tragic consequences were not borne by him but by his victims.

The squalid meanness, ignorance and inhumanity he exemplified are still with us, which explains in part the nostalgic outpourings and flowers. It will probably take world-shaking transformations to bury once and for all whatever it is that causes a Richard Nixon to occur. Let us lay flowers at the threshold of that possibility.