During the days, I’m pretty good at regulating my reaction to my strong feeling that the nation I was born in and partly define my soul by is migrating from roughly Rebel Alliance to Evil Empire.
How?
I’ve got a lot of good work do. I’ve got a family to feed. Starting with my wife and daughter, I have family and friends to support and to be supported by. I exercise a lot. I love my dog Eddie (who just turned one on Sunday!). And, as my mother always said when asked about her ability to keep on keeping on despite everything, I’ve got a rich fantasy life.
But the nights.
You know how I’ve been getting through the nights between the days of overwhelming bad news?
In what appears to be the back room of a State Farm Insurance branch office, a guy named Frank Gannon interviewed Richard Nixon, in 1983, about his whole life and career, over about 30 hours. Childhood. College. War years. Congress. Alger Hiss. McCarthy. Vice President. Presidential bid and loss. California gubernatorial bid and loss. Wilderness years. Victory in 1968. Kent State. Victory in 1972. China. Vietnam. Watergate. Resignation. (There’s like a whole hour of conversation, just on how the Nixon family spent their last 24 hours in the White House.)
I hear it sleeping, waking, twilight—conscious, subconscious, gloaming—over and over. I know much of it almost by heart. Even the bits in between while waiting for sound adjustments or hair and makeup. I now know Nixon better than I know some of my family members.
Sad. Angry. Proud. Arrogant. Misogynistic. Horribly cynical. Racist. (Dorky.) (Funny, usually unintentionally.) (Tender, at times?) (Loving, even?) (Ummm—occasionally adorable, Jesus help me?) (Smart, in any case.) Morally wanting, but morally engaged, at least. Paranoid, yes, but not nihilistic.
A friend to whom I have divulged my Nixon “hobby,” as she calls it, sent me a cartoon in which Nixon says, “I’m not a crook.” And Trump says, “I’m a crook, so what.”
That’s just it.
I wrote back, “I would knock on doors in Alabama to get Nixon elected right now.”
Do I really mean that? Yes, I really do.
Based on what we know about Trump by now: Don’t you?
