We Are All Richard Nixon
February 10, 2010
While not a Catholic commentary on politics and culture, I thought this short video was rather interesting. There is something in it which rings true. But I also think we are even more like Nixon than the video suggests; we are recording ourselves on youtube; we are spying on each other through the internet; we are looking for conspiracies and scandals which we believe are there. If we don’t expose them now, they will hurt us in the near future. Or so it seems.
Isn’t it time for a change? Do we really have to follow President Nixon’s paranoia?
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4 Comments
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I don’t know. I’m kinda with Nixon on this one, rather than Roy Jenkins.
So Roy Jenkins improved everything by getting rid of laws against homosexuality, abortion and divorce and that solved all the worlds problems – and he was right and Richard Nixon was wrong – and this is a Catholic blog – I see!!
It’s very interesting to see the comments to the video — people are getting other things out of it than I did. It was an analysis of ourselves in the light of Nixon. Indeed, it shows that the same people who begun with criticism of Nixon also became like him. The media itself helped create such in us.
I once again remind people what Nixon was like: he was out to control and manipulate through any means necessary — very much like Big Brother in 1984. And this included support for population control and the use of abortion for it. The paranoia involved in Nixon goes to his attempt to control everything and to find everything to be a scandal.
This, alas, seems to be a general problem with people on the internet. That is the point. We are becoming a paranoid bunch but more than that, we react by trying to control by any means necessary. The way blogs often act and react show this (of course I am not saying everyone is for population control like Nixon was). But again, the video has some interesting observations of what has happened since Nixon. And it is not a positive turn.
Nonetheless, by putting this up, I do not say I agree with Roy Jenkins. How does one get that I did, or the blog did?
But I agree with a premise of the video — that is a paranoid-control-freak mentality in our society; it is one which I see all around the blogosphere, and it is indeed causing grave harm to society. We see the gridlock in the political system when politicians look more for their next election than for the good of the people. And instead of helping to move us forward, the commentary is indeed very much geared to keep us in a standstill and to see all kinds of conspiracies behind any attempt to change things. The fact that time keeps moving on and much work needs to be done to fix things means without such changes, greater disasters are coming.
I’m sorry if you cannot see the problem being addressed and want to look at the placement of the video for discussion as some sort of agreement with Jenkins.
Do you want to know who makes me paranoid?: Ayn Rand.