Living In Nixon's Dystopia

I DID A WEE BIYT OF HISTORICAL RESEARCH, and put together a timeline. I determined that on the very day that my tenth grade English class took an exam on Aldous Huxley's "Brave New world", president Richard M. Nixon tried to convince Secretary of State henry Kissinger to get on board with the notion of dropping an atomic bomb on North Viet Nam. Serendipitous synchronicity, if ever there were. Which of the two makes for better science fiction is for you to decide. Aye doo not tink daht vood be ein velly goot ting, meester plesident. God damn it, Henry, you've got to think big. Big! Jesus Christ! Huxley died the same day that JFK did. had he lived through Nixon, he would have lived to see his dystopian nightmare essentially come true. I spent the entire summer of seventy three, right out of high school, watching the Watergate hearings on television. They turned me into a radical. I had campaigned for Nixon my senior year. Oh, the things we do when ere are seventeen. Senator Sam Irving was the main attraction, with his Tennessee drawl. I honestly thought that money laundering meant removing dirt from dollar bills. Oh, to be eighteen again. What did the president know, and when did he know it? That is the question of the ages, always appropo. Equally priceless is the recording, thanks to Nixon's private tape recording system, in which Alexander Haig informs Nixon that someone has leaked the Pentagon papers to the new York Times, which had just published them in its latest edition. soon, we the American people would know three things: 1) that the Viet Nam war was seen by all military experts as unwinnable for the United States. 2)that the field commanders had been lying to the American government concerning the war's progress, and 3) that the government had been lying to us the American people about the war, and everything else. Who leaked 'em, Al? Um, we don't know, yet, mister president. Well then, damn it al, I think we should just start at the top, and fire everybody in the whole goddamned government! At the "top", mister president? Everybody, from the top down, sir? Nixon's problem was that he never followed through. Our problem is that we keep electing to high office the people who most dearly with to occupy high office, for all the wrong reasons, and are willing to pay and get paid to do so.