Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles from Clovis to Nixon Main Menu Regimes: Ruling the Los Angeles Region from the Late Pleistocene to the 21st Century Places and Paths of Los Angeles Manna From Hell: Power and Politics from Region to World Power Shadows: Visual Cultures and Mass Media of a Regional and Global Power Segregated Diversity: The Geosocial Formation of Social Justice in the Late Twentieth Century The American 1989: Los Angeles at the Climax of the 20th Century Narrative Essay Bibliographies, Filmographies, Gazeteers, Indexes Mapping the Past: Theory, Methods, Historiography Path Credits Root

Richard 37th: A Study of Tyranny

677
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 is, in many ways, the crowning product of the Los Angeles region.  The stories told about Nixon in these essays, and the judgements rendered, do wander considerably far from Southern California, to the thrones of princely power and the killing fields of Vietnam.  But that is precisely the point of this global history of Los Angeles.  

That Nixon became a genuinely world-historic figure and expressed so clearly the despotic political culture of the LA region is a sinister achievement that bears close scrutiny.  Ghost Metropolis examines the whole career of Richard Nixon as an ultimate expression of the region's history, and does that on its own terms: as a political analytic-narrative.  I hope to show that we can learn a great deal about where tyrannies come from--literally. Those who do not want to follow this path in my history of Los Angeles, through the halls of world power to the constitutional crisis this Angeleno provoked, and beyond to his legacy in the Reagan era, need not tread further.  But, beware to all those who do continue.  This is a tale of grisly horror inflicted on a planetary scale.
 

This page has paths:

  1. Narrative Paths Phil Ethington
  2. Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles from Clovis to Nixon Phil Ethington
  3. Manna From Hell: Power and Politics from Region to World Power Phil Ethington
  4. Networks Phil Ethington

Contents of this path:

  1. Introduction: in exponendis nixon
  2. Richard 37th, Act I: Rise and Crash of the Angeleno, 1913-1962
  3. Richard 37th, Act II: Resurrection, Race and Reaction, 1963-1967
  4. Richard 37th, Act III: Thermidor, 1968-1974
  5. Funeral for a Tyrant, 1994
  6. Bibliography for Richard 37th

This page is referenced by: