The Monkey King's Used Primate Emporium and Book Reviews

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Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, �The Final Days�

Started Sept 4 � Finished September 11, 2002; 476 pages. Posted 13 September 2002

I love the fact that I finished this book on September 11th.

I thought for a long time about how I was going to approach this day. Just under a year ago, when jingoistic flag waving was reaching a high point, I ordered a Propagandhi shirt with a big honking upside-down flag on it that had the words, �Today�s Empires, Tomorrow�s Ashes� emblazoned across the bottom. (Unfortunately, they were sold out of the shirt that said, �Fuck Right Off.�)

I bought it not to piss people off, but to encourage debate. When people are in a high emotional state, they have a lesser capacity to reason critically. Since this was involving war, a manhunt for one sinister figure (who we funded with our own tax dollars, I would hasten to add), a monkey �president� bent on revenge, and a Home Security plan that threatened to assume everybody was guilty before proven innocent, I thought the hoi polloi needed a smack back into reality.

Well, I didn�t provoke much in the way of debate. I got a few dirty looks, but as a whole I think everybody had been so inundated with flags over the past two weeks that they failed to notice that mine just happened to be upside-down. Slowly the flags started to disappear. Or, more likely, they started to fall apart because they were cheap knock-offs that were made in Taiwan.

So now that the anniversary was coming up, I had to decide if I wanted to make it a point to wear the shirt again. After all, this day was most likely going to be a remembrance about the victims. There was the very real possibility that I could hurt somebody emotionally, not because of their newfound patriotism, but because they knew somebody who was killed, and that wasn�t the kind of person I wanted to shock back into reality.

But I decided that the shirt needed to be worn. I was certain that there would be a number of people who would bring out the flags once again, and since our �president� is practically begging to bomb Iraq, I welcomed the chance to debate the John Bircher�s of the new millennium.

As it turned out, there was only a small smattering of flag shirts around. My friend Alan, who is a thrift store expert, noted that the flag phenomenon was now pass�. I only counted about 35 articles of mindless jingoism or so-called tributes the entire day, and I was on campus from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.

Since nobody approached me (although I could tell most people saw which way my flag waved this time), I read about a true American tragedy.

Sure, a day with planes being hijacked and flown into buildings is a sad, dark, and momentous occasion. So was our illegal invasion of Cambodia. So was our abandonment of the peasants in Hanoi. So was COINTELPRO. So was the My Lai massacre. But the true tragedy is that we, as the people who are supposed to be the true members of the government, had a dirty president by the balls (albeit for a far lesser indiscretion � lying to the American people, good heavens!) and we let him go!

The fact that Nixon was not brought up on criminal charges just because he stepped down is a travesty. Worse is that nobody said boo when Ford gave him a presidential pardon. And most sickening of all is that we eventually forgave him. People mention his historic visits to China and Russia and his strengthening of foreign relationships as testimonies of the good in the man. And then they put him on a stamp on the same year that they issue one for Malcolm X.

�Oh,� say the press and the public, �Let�s try and get past the dirt and concentrate on his accomplishments.�

I say fuck that shit. Nixon was a dirty politician, he was strongly suspected of being an anti-Semite, he was most definitely a racist, and he lied about his involvement with Watergate all the way to the end. Forgiving and forgetting these points to concentrate on the �good� that he did is the equivalent of saying, �he may have been a child molester, but he founded this really nice orphanage.� The U.S. is the orphanage and we are all his wards. And we�ve all been fucked.

And we let him go! I�m still incredulous about that point and I was only four years old when it happened. The American people should have strung him up. This was our chance to send a message � Listen buddy, you might have the nice white house, but you still work for us. And if you forget that, we�ll send your ass to the clinker that you voted for and we built with our taxes.

Think about all that�s happened since then. Iran/Contra. Michael Milken. Our illegal invasion of Panama. Massive voter fraud in Florida. And then Clinton undergoes impeachment hearings because he gave a new meaning to the term cigar aficionado.

What the hell?

Anyway, I�ve vented enough. The book, despite having such a large cast of characters, is great � well-written and easy to follow. As good as All the President�s Men is, it lacked a certain something because it was missing the main character � Nixon himself.

Not in this outing. We get to hear about his cursing, his racist comments, his heavy drinking (despite the fact that he couldn�t handle alcohol very well), his violent mood swings, and his erratic, even suicidal behavior.

My favorite part was an aide describing how Nixon summoned him to open a bottle of aspirin. Apparently, he had been wrestling with it for a while, and the aide remarked that there were teeth marks on the ridge, the kind that said Nixon had apparently tried to gnaw the cap off.

That�s how I prefer to remember Nixon: an ape who is so ineffectual that even after resorting to brute force, he still needs to summon an aide to bail him out.

I hope Hell is hot enough for you Dick. It shouldn�t be too hard for you though � I�m sure several of your friends and colleagues are right there with you.


Rating: Worth New. God Bless America.

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