At The Shrine Of Saint Richard

Last month's column was way serious, so I promise to lighten up. It's going to be difficult in this terribly unfunny age we live in though. I mean, it's tough for a Closet Philosopher! Just look at the subjects I have to choose from this month.

Chandra Levy's body was recently found. I guess the fact that that's newsworthy means that we are finally, officially, back to normal. But I refuse to use her death to sell any more newspapers, so to speak. Nuff said.

What else have we got here? From corporate America we hear that Phillip Morris is now renamed "Altria." What marketing genius came up with that? "I'll try ya"? Perhaps they thought the name would be good subliminal advertising to get more people smoking tobacco. Well, at least that subject's a lot lighter in tone, in fact it's pretty lightweight! And I just wrote about everything I could say on that, didn't I? I've got a whole column due here!

Maybe I should comment on how Charleton Heston hosted the NRA convention a few weeks ago. Naturally he was elected to another term. Ever the actor, he reportedly held aloft an antique rifle and repeated the NRA's mantra, "From my cold dead fingers." Actually, since a gun is 47 times more likely to kill a family member or even its owner, such prying is far more likely to take place than ever felling an intruder with it. And furthermore... nah! Been there, whined about that!

On the war front Osama Bin Laden's probably barbequed in a cave somewhere, but if we couldn't find Levy's body in a park a mile from her house, what hope do we have of finding his? I expect the Bushies to be waving about a handwritten Afghani death certificate any day now, but at present we have no body and no closure, and of course still no tally of the damage we caused in Afghanistan, so there's nothing new to talk about there either.

[Pictured: President Chavez]

What about that lovely little coup in Venezuela in April? You know, the one that the media cows hardly covered. Who cares that left-wing President Chavez was deposed for trying to nationalize petroleum revenues for the people? Our oily Bush Administration prematurely applauded the "popular" right-wingers behind the overthrow, saying that Chavez had resigned, and business as usual had returned. Only hours later a counter-coup quickly threw out the plotters and reinstalled Chavez. OOPS! I guess George's friends weren't that popular after all. Oh well, Latin America never trusted our leadership before. It'll be longer before they ever start now.

Damn, we're getting too serious again!

Hmm, Congressional Hearings are always good for a laugh. The latest is over the events that lead to the WTC bombing. Forget about barbequing Osama, let's barbeque the salaried spooks who blow billions in black budgets ands still can't get the terrorists' intentions right. Maybe 007 never meant a license to kill, it was these guys' IQ!

If you haven't heard, it's come out that there was an FBI warning about possible terrorists in flight school last summer. Supposedly Dubya and his team got this information in August, but didn't act on it. Again OOPS! I bet they felt pretty foolish on September 11th. Maybe that was why Air Force One flew all over the place that day, he was looking for the memo. It was more high comedy to see George's spokespeople get all frenzied amid the questions, rushing out rationalizations in his defense like a bunch of ants defending their home from a sprinkler's flood. Meanwhile the Democrats are gloating over the revelation, openly wondering what did the Resident know and when did he know it.

Now there's a phrase that brings back memories! It was used for Reagan during the Iran-Contra Scandal a lot, but it was invented for Nixon and Watergate. Nasty old Tricky Dick, his demise as President started thirty years ago this month. We've had good presidents, bad presidents and then there's Dick. Nixon was bad, ugly, complex and as Machiavellian as hell. He's the only President to resign in disgrace, but many conservatives still revere his name. I don't understand why, however I did try to figure it out.

The Richard Nixon Library is close to where I live in Los Angeles; last month I finally made time to visit. It's 30 miles east of downtown in Yorba Linda. (This time, You're Belinda, not me, okay?) It was all rural and full of orange groves when Nixon grew up, but it's just another suburb in the sprawl called LA now. The little house where Nixon was born and raised by his Quaker parents is still there, amid lovely gardens full of roses and lilies. The library itself is a large affair with a big meeting hall and extensive exhibits.

The museum area covers Nixon's whole political career. All in a very positive light of course. There was an exhibit detailing his first run for Congress, right after World War II. It included a real Mercury station wagon rigged with speakers, just like the one he used to shout down Helen Douglas as "the Pink Lady," a reference to her supposed Communist leanings that earned him the "Tricky" nickname. Once in Washington Nixon built on the anti-communist theme, developing a reputation for red-baiting that rivaled Joe McCarthy himself. In the new nuclear politics of the cold war, it propelled him quickly to become Eisenhower's Vice President in '52, in spite of allegations about mishandling campaign funds. He put down the questions with a novel ploy, a TV address about his dog Checkers. After two terms, Nixon made a strong bid to become President in 1960.

The Kennedy-Nixon race was the first election that I paid attention to as a kid. The area where I lived was staunchly Republican and I remember wearing Nixon-Lodge buttons like the ones on display in the museum. It was an extremely close election and I remember being terribly disappointed Nixon lost. Back then I was too young to pay attention to the finer points of the process but it's well known that there were quite a few voting irregularities that year in Illinois, enough to swing the electoral votes to Kennedy. Sound familiar? Chicago Mayor Richard Daley had much the same role in that election as did Florida Governor Jeb Bush in 2000. Kennedy's margin of victory was less than 115,000 votes nationwide. In the pre-cybernetic era of 1960 however, the irregularities were not apparent on election eve and Nixon conceded without asking for a recount.

I'm sure the close tally and the later stories of fraud in Illinois must have made Nixon terribly bitter. In '62 he virtually resigned from politics after a losing bid to become Governor of California. Perhaps these defeats are why he made sure he had black bag squads like the Plumbers after he returned to politics. Or maybe he had them all along; he wasn't the kind of guy to leave anything to chance.

Nixon finally won the Presidency in the tumultuous year of 1968. It was another close race but he promised to end LBJ's War in Vietnam and it was enough to take both the popular and electoral college vote. Once in office, the old red-baiter turned around and fought North Vietnam even harder, even bombing areas of neighboring Cambodia or wherever else he thought the communists were. A rather strange approach for a Quaker kid from Yorba Linda.

Meanwhile I had grown up and become a long-haired hippie. My view of Nixon had reversed polarity mostly because he refused to stop the war, and lots of other young people felt the same way. Protests and demonstrations were the order of the day. The museum showed only a little of this strife from Nixon's first term, concentrating instead on his foreign policy achievements. Four years later when he came up for re-election, Dick was solidly in control. But still he wanted to stack the deck in his favor, so enter the Plumbers into the Watergate building. June 17, 1972, was the day seven of them were caught red-handed bugging the Democratic Party's headquarters. To this day no one knows exactly what they were looking for.

The Watergate section of the Nixon Library was fascinating. It's a dark hallway where backlit exhibits of quotes, pictures and news reports provide the only illumination. In fact, the items on the Plumbers' arrest, the unraveling of the coverup, the Ervin Hearings and more seem to float in the air like wraiths. The effect is achieved with mirrors. There's a long black counter running the length of the hallway with some exhibits on top, but behind the counter there's a space of a couple feet and darkened mirrors are mounted all along the actual wall. Exhibits, laid out in reverse and backlit, shine onto the mirrors from the back side of the counter, so just the words appear in a deep black background. Clever design and appropriate enough. Like Nixon, they just couldn't tell it to you straight.

There also was a station where you could listen to the famous "Smoking Gun" tape. That's the one that finally made Nixon resign when he was forced to release it in 1974. Of course it wasn't just the raw unedited tape. There was an announcer telling you exactly what to think about the few snippets you heard, so all you got of it was maybe about 3 minutes total. In it Nixon is clearly heard telling his boys to interfere with the FBI's investigation of the break-in, at a time when he told the nation that he had no knowledge of and no interest in Watergate. The museum's spin was that a couple weeks later in a call to Pat Gray, then director of the FBI, Nixon ordered the investigation to go forward, rescinding the cover up. Yeah right. Only the faithful, who already believe without question, believe that.

An interesting thing the museum left in the Smoking Gun tape was Nixon making reference to the Bay Of Pigs affair. Nixon wasn't even in office during the Bay Of Pigs, that happened under Kennedy, but the Plumbers were mostly CIA and Cuban veterans of this failed coup. Dick was obviously concerned that his burglars might spill their guts about it. Something the Plumbers knew must have been very important, but there's nothing more about it in the museum's exhibits.

If you believe the Library's version, Watergate wasn't much of a crime. One exhibit even labels the investigations as "efforts to overturn the results of the election," as if it's all a Democratic plot instead. Right, what's a little subversion of the election process between parties? That's not something you should impeach a President over! Admittedly it's not as bad as trading in arms and running a secret war like Reagan did in Iran-Contra, but it is incomparably worse than the blowjobs that Clinton got impeached over. If anything could be called an effort to overturn an election, the Republican attack on Clinton is it. They can spin and call Watergate a "third-rate burglary" all they want but the fact remains that Nixon was caught. The Smoking Gun tape proves that he knew about the dirty tricks and was very involved with covering them up. He was a crook, and only President Ford's pardon saved him from being prosecuted for it. We'd probably know much more about what he did except the pardon also halted all further investigation of Nixon's many subterfuges.

So what did the President know and when did he know it? It seems like every President since Watergate has had to deal with that question. In Dubya's case of whiffing on the terrorist warning maybe the question's more like, "What was the Resident told and when did he understand it?"

What, you think that's too cheap a laugh? Could anyone have been prepared for 9-11? Maybe that is an unfair question after all. Okay, but traditional question still needs to be asked about Bush and his administration's role in the Chavez coup. That bears all the hallmarks of a covert operation and so far no one seems to be asking who those Popular Venezuelans actually were and exactly who was backing them.

Cynical me. My deep distrust of governmental power all derives from Nixon. Decades after Watergate I can't bear to vote for a Republican. The abuses of the Reagan and Bush years only made that impulse stronger. Perhaps the rich and powerful have been calling the shots for both parties all along, but with Nixon the mendacity and abuse of power became painfully obvious. He's thoroughly Un-American, no matter how many eagles and flags grace his shrine. In fact, I use reverence for Nixon as a litmus test to find which politicians to be wary of. The greater their love of Tricky Dick, the more willing they will be to use covert means, lies and violence, to achieve their ends.

Suddenly for some reason I have this old song lyric running in my head, "...but the point of a gun was the only law that Liberty understood." Interesting when it stands by itself, yanked out of the context of that old western. Certainly the NRA would subscribe to that, but is the threat of death really the only way to govern? I wonder when we'll grow up enough to simply cooperate without political power growing out of the barrel of a gun.

I wish I could find a leader to believe in. For a time Clinton seemed a good answer, but as Michael Moore points out, he was "one of the best Republican presidents we've ever had." Peccadilloes aside, Clinton allowed business nearly as much free rein as Reagan did in the Go-Go Eighties. No progress was made on health coverage and there was hardly any progress on environmental issues either. Oh yes, and a huge portion of our population now sits in prison for simple drug possession, far more than in 1992 when he came in. Real progressive, Bill.

Speaking of drug crimes, the Nixon Library Gift Shop is where you finally encounter the famous picture of Elvis and Dick together, when The King Of Prescription Drugs, sorry, The King Of Rock And Roll was made an honorary narc by the Pres. It's available on T-shirts, coffee mugs and mousepads. There were also books available by Pat Buchanan (a Nixon speechwriter) and other darlings of the right; no surprise there, it's tantamount to holy scripture in that crowd. Only'd make a good mousepad on my desk.

Strangely, among the racks of patriotic ties, full of eagles, stars and stripes, there were ties emblazoned with the donkey. Democratic ties! I guess the elephant ones were all sold out. Looking at the different donkey designs I couldn't help but think, when are they going to update that damn thing? It's a pretty, er, asinine symbol. Maybe they're really just honest about being asses. Perhaps they should just change their party slogan to We Kick Ass. Or drop the donkey and say We Kicked The Ass. Just don't replace it with the buffalo; that's way too appropriate for a political party. Maybe another American animal like the turkey would do. I can see the promo now. Cue some well muscled turkey farmer in plaid flannel and Levis saying, "I'll try ya Democrats!" Fade out on patriotic stinger.

I knew I could finally lighten up this column!

I wonder what mascot the Greens should adopt? Maybe that's why they can't get anything going, they've no good animal to identify with, only trees, hardly an inspiring symbol of decisive action. I guess it's time to go back into the Closet to find them a better logo. And then I'm going out shopping for a leader that I can trust. Thanks for reading and until next month the Closet is closed.

(C) 2002 - Rusty Pipes

Official Disclaimer: Mr. Pipes should be very, very careful before he writes lies such as these. I was a very powerful man and I still have very powerful friends, even though I'm a little dead right now. How would he like it if I were to send my little goon squad after his whiney liberal ass? I don't think he'd like it so much. No. So he'd just better shut the [expletives deleted] up before I break my [expletives deleted] rotting leg off in his [expletives deleted] [expletives deleted] or tear off his [expletives deleted] [expletives deleted] and [expletives deleted] [expletives deleted] [expletives deleted] his [expletives deleted], because he's making me out to be a [expletives deleted] rotten [expletives deleted] sucker, and I was a nice feller, once you got to know me. Oo, time for coal walking and torment. Gotta go. Bye.