The empire reaches back
An American blames the Nixon regime which was never fully exorcised
by Phil Rockstroh
An unpopular war drags on, gas prices rise and rise, a cloud of scandal gathers over Washington DC: at times, it seems as though the 1970s never ended. It’s as though Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton's populism
put us to sleep through the 80s and 90s, and now we're awakening, hung over, groggy, and still in the midst of that ugly and odious era.
George W Bush and Karl Rove are as much products of the 1970s as were Naugahyde pit group sofas and outbreaks of the Herpes Simplex Retrovirus at Plato's Retreat. Historically, the world will regard The Bush Administration as the Dacron Polyester of American presidencies: its legacy will carry all the beauty, style, and enduring appeal of a powder blue Leisure Suit. George Bush himself will be remembered as the Pet Rock of the American plutocratic class.
If there is any presiding spirit possessing the current zeitgeist, it is the gray ghost of Dick Nixon. During the Watergate Era, Karl Rove apprehended a fact the rest of us pushed out of our minds due to its troubling implications: Nixon wasn't brought down because Americans were troubled by having a sick, corrupt bastard as their president, we simply found it embarrassing to have the White House curtains pulled open allowing the world to see a president pacing the floors draped in a dingy bathrobe and muttering expletives at the yellowing, West Wing wallpaper.
Moreover, Rove perceived that Nixon's paranoia, rage, envy, and resentment merely mirrored those of the American middle class. Nixon knew from the depths of his black spleen to the tips of his twitching nerve endings the dark side of the American character and how the pathologies therein could be exploited for political gain. In 1972, Rove watched and learned as Nixon was reelected in a landslide victory. Nixon showed Rove that the American middle and laboring classes feared and hated those spoiled brat, college campus radicals and uppity blacks that they saw every night on the evening news even more than they loved their own freedom.
Nixon realized the concept of freedom was too vague for many of us. Where exactly can freedom be located? By contrast, just go down to any shopping mall and you'll find envy; just visit any suburban subdivision and you'll find fear; and just set yourself down on any stool at any neighborhood bar and you'll find hatred and resentment.
Nixon's legacy looms large before us because we Americans have refused to face a few sad and creepy facts regarding why we were (and remain) possessed of the need to tell ourselves Watergate and Vietnam were mere aberrations and that Nixon's resignation from office in August of 1974 purged the demons from our nation's soul and cleansed us all. Even after Nixon was exiled to San Clemente and we took up the mantra, "That was that, let's move on, our long national nightmare is over," we Americans remained uneasy, desperately clinging to the sustaining self-deception of our being mere bystanders when the crimes were committed, and as a consequence, we made ourselves willing marks for future political flimflammers who peddle the politics of the comfort zone and all its attendant lies exalting the inviolable grace of our collective obliviousness.
Otherwise, we would be forced to face our complicity in Nixon's crimes; otherwise, a million Vietnamese corpses would have risen accusingly in our dreams—as tens of thousands of Iraqi dead would haunt our sleep tonight.
Rove, Rumsfeld, Cheney—these ruthless men are all Nixon's progeny. They all got away with it. In fact, they prospered in the cynical post-Watergate era and they continue to perpetrate their crimes right up to the present time. Moreover, it is we, the American public, who bear responsibly: we conjured up these psychopaths with our ceaseless incantations of denial.
Fascism comes to a nation when a group of fanatical outsiders forge alliances based on political and economic expediency with a corrupt ruling elite while a fearful, distracted, denial-ridden public surrenders their liberty for the illusion of security and a few material goods. I first began to take note of the acceptance of proto-fascistic tendencies in the cultural banalities evinced in the 1970s, even in those of us who were too young to have cast a vote for Nixon. I noticed my fellow peak-years-of-the-Baby-Boom teenagers were not the progeny of The Woodstock Nation, as the beleaguered authoritarian types of the era had feared. Instead we were the floating spirit-incarnate of a pop culture Weimar Republic. As a rule, we used drugs neither to expand our awareness nor as an act of social or political rebellion. Rather drugs were utilized as apolitical agents of anesthetization.
Like the sound and fury of our pinball machine distractions and our Muscle Car imperialism, and the pseudo-edginess of the so-called FM radio revolution (which was, in reality, the advent of corporate rock), our seeming rebelliousness was, below the lank-haired, faded denim-clad, reefer-reeking surface, a pervasive anomie, the metastasizing of an insidious indifference, and to a large measure a radical renunciation of anything more challenging than those things available within the immediate confines of our comfort zones. It was a revelry in adolescent, pop culture narcissism, punctuated by incessant self-medication, which was mistaken for the excesses of freedom. In short, just the sort of numbed-out, muck-headed Sturm und Drang one should expect from young minds bereft of life experience, brainwashed by an existence inundated by commercial manipulation, and incompetently educated by the state.
This is how the United States was transformed from a republic conceived to be governed by way of democratic discourse into a shabby-ass, archipelago of shopping malls devoid of a public square, dominated by a defining narrative of marketing platitudes and the collective, sound-bite psychosis of corporatist canticles. It all has gotten away from us because an internalized McMansion has supplanted the towering glory of our internal Sequoia trees; hence, our roots can no longer reach deep down into the dark loam of our evolutionary legacy and our branches no longer lift towards the sky of possibility. We are devoid of nourishment and hope because the internalized empire has clear cut it all, reducing sequoia forests to toothpicks in order to pick the bits of charred flesh of those slaughtered in its imperial wars from its teeth.
Furthermore, we shield ourselves from our complicity in the carnage by choosing to remain fixated on our small concerns and mind-numbing distractions, and rationalizing away the corruption of the corporate and political classes by claiming it in no way is a reflection of our own self-serving proclivities. We march through our commodified, daily lives consumed by thoughts as banal as Eichmann's as he calculated the weight capacity of death-camp-bound boxcars while foreign blood is spilled in our name and the natural world that sustains us dies.
We may be mortified by the actions of the US Government and the corporate overlords who own and operate it, yet we carry the empire within us as deeply as we carry the imprints of our parents' faces. It is too immense for us not to; it is too pervasive and invasive for us to avoid; it weaned us and socialized us, and even when we rebel against it, our actions are restricted within limits set by it. Otherwise, the consequences would be too crushing for most of us to endure: financial ruin, destitution, homelessness, prison. There are reasons the neoliberal oligarchs endeavor to widen the class distinctions in the United States and abroad: The harsher the economic consequences for the laboring classes to risk defiance, the more obedient we will grow, particularly when we are incessantly plied with the synergy of corporate salesmanship and state propaganda.
Through the ensuing decades, we've continued to deceive ourselves into believing the corruption and embarrassments of the 1970s, from the crimes of Watergate to the inanities of The Gong Show (the first reality TV show), had nothing to do with us. As a consequence, we didn't learn a damn thing during the 70s and therefore, we've condemned ourselves to relive it.
It is high time to strike the gong for Karl Rove and his pathetic, dancing pet monkey act that is presently stinking up the stage of The Gong Show of the American political system. But next, we should turn off the TV, walk to the closest mirror, look ourselves in the eye, and repeat the risible (as well as demonstrably false) phrase, "I am not a crook," and when we do, face the Richard Milhouse Nixon within and come to grips with the reason we Americans are, at present, as popular and respected worldwide as Richard Nixon was in the Summer of 1974.
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