TUESDAY TIPS: April 22, 2014: Nixon’s the one!

TUESDAY TIPS: April 22, 2014: Nixon’s the one!

April 22, 2014 Uncategorized 0

“I brought myself down. I gave them a sword. And they stuck it in. And, I guess, if I’d been in their position, I would have done the same thing.”-Richard Nixon

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Years ago, having a conversation with my then-boyfriend, he said, weightily, in response to some flippant remark I made, “You think it’s easy to be good?” At the time, I didn’t understand the depth of his question…but now I do. Choosing to be good, i.e., choosing to be the best you can be, choosing to believe you can achieve your dreams and that you deserve to do so, instead of wallowing in your (taught) fears and self-loathing….is a very hard choice indeed.

In my opinion, probably no single figure best represents the worst case scenario of choosing badly than our 37th president, Richard M. Nixon. Yes, in my own (emotional) manner, I am a Nixonite. (If my father is reading this particular blog entry, he’s a good man, and he probably had to go take a walk. My parents hate Nixon slightly less than cancer. When our people were busy hating Bush, my parents stayed true to their tradition of hating Nixon.)  But since I’ve been a teenager, I’ve had an emotional empathy with Tricky. Probably, originally, due to a perverse desire to piss of my parents, but over time, the more I studied him, the more fascinating I found him. And, the more I recognized myself–and all of us–in him. Nixon,  like many of us, found it easy to be bad, to be America’s henchman, to wipe out the “Red Menace,” to be derided and used by Eisenhower–Ike, notoriously, loathed and slighted Nixon. Nixon, raised in a, poverty-stricken, self-mutilating Quaker home, in which two siblings died young, called himself a “dog” as a boy, and learned early on that happiness is a myth, and the world respects fear. He became the cruel man he both feared and needed.

“What starts the process, really are laughs, slights and snubs when you are a kid. If your anger is deep enough and strong enough, you learn that you can change those attitude by excellence…” –Nixon

Listen to the transcripts, and you’ll hear him berate Jews, women, his family, minorities, foreigners and other Americans. Yet at the same time, he made other, even more secret tapes for himself, discussing his own feelings, expressing sympathy and compassion for the draft-dodgers, for example. Who really was the real Nixon, I wonder? I doubt even Nixon himself knew.

Let’s all admit that Nixon wanted us to hear his “secret” tapes, he wanted us to know the worst parts of him–his racism, profanity and arrogance, sitting around with his heads of staff and sounding like third-rate consigliere. Nixon destroyed himself and everything he had worked for because it’s always easier, unfortunately, to embrace hatred rather than love. Love is hard, hate is easy. Love takes courage; hating others takes no courage at all.

“People react to fear not love; they don’t teach that in Sunday school, but it’s true.”-Nixon

Nixon created the “Dirty Tricks” department to ensure his second, and final, White House election…and he didn’t need it. He won by the biggest landslide at that time in American history. If Nixon had had the courage to believe in himself and his ability, he could, and should, have left the White House as the statesman he was setting himself up to be. Watergate need never of happened.

But maybe Nixon needed Watergate, maybe Nixon was ready to unmask himself and see the truth come out. Maybe Nixon was more like us than we want to admit: how many of us are afraid to be all that we dream of being? How many potential clients do I have who come to me with, in my opinion, totally realistic aspirations…and then the clients stop everything because they don’t believe they deserve to be happy? Ugh, so many. How many potential clients can’t even tell me their aspirations because they themselves don’t know because they’ve been raised to never ask since it’d be impossible. Oy.

Nixon, fueled by self-hatred and jealousy,aimed for the top and he achieved those heights. And then he created his own destruction. Makes you wonder…what could he have done if he liked himself? What could he have done for America, if he could have loved his country?

“I let the American people down.” -Nixon

There’s countless lessons to learn here, but I think the most important one is: forgive yourself and be the best person you can be. Oh, and commit to making your peace with yourself. Commit to forgiving yourself and befriending yourself, because otherwise, nothing will ever be good enough. Woodward and Bernstein didn’t destroy Nixon, Nixon destroyed Nixon. When you hate yourself, nothing can ever be good enough. Not even the White House. What a shame. For all of us.

Nixon’s Farewell to the White House

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