Richard 37th: Nixon, Los Angeles, and World Power
Story by Fax Bahr and Phil Ethington
For what shall it profit a man,
if he shall gain the whole world,
and lose his own soul? --Mark 8:36
Holding aloft the severed head of the Duke of Somerset, Richard, Duke of Gloucester--who would later become Richard III by seizing the English crown through guile and assassination--addresses that lifeless head, taunting: "Speak thou for me and tell them what I did." (Henry IV, 1.1.16, 3) In Shakespeare's gruesome script, the speechless deed is proof. Richard Nixon left behind a mountain of deeds as he plotted, strategized, campaigned his way to occupy the highest throne on Earth. Like Richard III, Richard Milhaus Nixon, the 37th President of the United States, outraged the Constitution with the felonious abuse of power. Both were overthrown. Both were tyrants. Los Angeles produced Richard Nixon. Understanding tyranny requires understanding the region from which it emerges, the political system within which it is achieved, and the person who thirsts for power.
The essays titled Richard 37th, Acts I-IV, narrate the growth of a tyranny that sprang directly from the centuries-old political culture of Southern California, and from the center of that region, Los Angeles. Richard M. Nixon embodied and historically culminated the region's most destructive features: militarism, a military-industrial economy, racial ideologies, authoritarian populism, censorship, propaganda, espionage, criminal practices at every scale. Richard Milhaus Nixon was, along with Ronald Reagan, a crowning product of the Los Angeles region. The two led very parallel and intertwined public lives, reflected in the overlap between their narratives in Ghost Metropolis
The stories of Nixon and Reagan in this book carry us far from the Los Angeles metropolis, because they remade the world in the image of their home and political base: the region of Southern California. The story of Los Angeles told now take us to the thrones of princely power and the killing fields of Vietnam, and the American urban uprisings of the 1960s-1990s. This is a global history of Los Angeles culminating now in its Golden Age of maximum political, economic, and cultural power on Planet Earth.
That Nixon and Reagan became genuinely world-historic figures and expressed so clearly the despotic political culture of the LA region is an achievement that bears close scrutiny. Richard 37th narratives the whole career of Richard Nixon as an ultimate expression of the region's history. These essays in three acts comprise a political narrative that is also analytical. It maps where tyrannies come from, and where they go: through the halls of world power to the constitutional crisis this Angeleno Richard Nixon provoked, and laid the groundwork for Reaganism.
The story of Richard Nixon's rise to the pinnacle of world power from his humble origins as the son of a gas station and grocery proprietor in Whittier, California, can only be fully understood within a thick study of the metropolitan-institutional milieu that shaped him.
This is a four-act tragicomic historical melodrama:
Act I traces the rise of a politician who was distinctive product of the autocratic political culture of the Otis-Chandler regime of the 1920s-40s, through his double presidential-gubernatorial defeats of 1960 and 1962 respectively.
Act II tells the story of Nixon's self-resurrection as the leader of a newly militant Republican party that he organized under the banners of aggressive warfare, Law-and-Order repression, backlashing traditional morals, and a preemptive, albeit cynical, platform of liberal-Republican domestic policies.
Act III recounts the Nixon presidency of 1969-1974 as a Thermidorian reaction, an orchestration of fear to mobilize the American middle classes in support of military aggression abroad, and the iron fist at home. Nixon's tyranny was, like that of Richard III, self-destructive. Unhorsed, he also found himself alone, his actions too outrageous for his political allies, and they abandoned him. The modern Richard faced a Constitution that worked on cue and was justly and peacefully driven from power. But his legacy remained.
Act IV Briefly maps the living legacy of Nixonian politics, through his funeral in 1994.
This page has paths:
- Manna From Hell: Power and Politics from Region to World Power Phil Ethington
- Narrative Paths Phil Ethington
- Networks Phil Ethington
