I recently watched the infamous Nixon interview (Is it redundant to call something Nixon infamous?). Not the movie of the play based on the interview, but the original.
There’s no way Nixon could be a politician now. His speech, mannerisms, and sweaty odd-looking face would be enough to make people not vote for him—besides the crap that comes out of his mouth, not limited to the stuff Hitchens writes below.
I’ve heard it plenty before that even in his first loss to Kennedy in ‘60 was due to the discrepancy in their TV images, that Jack knew how to work it and Dick didn’t. But supposedly that must have been countered by the time he won two in a row. Whatever coaching they did, wouldn’t be enough today. The sweating thing especially: in old movies I’ve seen, there are these incredibly sweaty guys, sometimes the main character—think Carl Malden or Gene Hackman. Unless they’re in the jungle or playing sports (or having sex) stars don’t sweat, not naturally and thus uncontrolled. But just that face, too. That shit is old school.
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Hitchens on Richard Nixon from his column at Slate.com:
The impressive thing is that even in the smallest details, the obsessive nastiness and criminality of the bigger picture is further delineated. The foulness of Nixon's mind was not "compartmentalized" between one issue and another. For example, like most "family values" Republicans, he was distressed by the Supreme Court's finding in Roe v. Wade. But, like almost anybody, he could imagine an exception where abortion might be excusable or even desirable. "There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white. Or a rape." The association of ideas between the first mental picture and the second one is so clear as to be—if it were not so hideous—pathetically laughable in an individual, and really quite alarming in a president of the United States.
As so often, his remarks about black Americans are crude and often sexual, while his innuendoes about his Jewish fellow citizens are more sinister. And, as ever, the worst interludes of anti-Semitism occur when Nixon is chatting to his friend Billy Graham. This time—February 1973—the two cronies are discussing Jewish opposition to the evangelical Campus Crusade movement. What the Jews don't seem to get, observes Nixon, is that they bring dislike on themselves. Why, just look at the record—disliked in Spain, disliked even in Germany. It could be America next. "What I really think is deep down in this country, there is a lot of anti-Semitism, and all this is going to do is stir it up." To this aperçu (incidentally suggesting that anti-Semitism "in this country" is not located all that "deep down," since it's being vented in the Oval Office), he adds, "It may be they have a death wish. You know that's been the problem with our Jewish friends for centuries."
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Here's my impression and paraphrasing of Hitchens at a talk/interview he gave recently. I found the video at this pretty cool site: FORA.tv (thanks Allan).
(I know this poster is Chinese, but as close as I can get. Relax.)Attempting, what he thinks an impossible task, to describe what life is like inside contemporary North Korea, Christopher Hitchens, after already likening the nation to that of George Orwell’s 1984, draws one contrast. While there is no mention of religion in the book, the state having taken the place of all things, the purported irreligious communistic country, North Korea, is, rather, similar to a particular western faith: Christianity. The president, the country’s founder, and his son, the current leader of the commi-esque party and the military, not president, are fused into one identity. Only, the president has been dead fifteen years. Hitchens quips, “It’s only one short of a trinity.”
Apparently, he's almost here. Won't that be a lot of fun. Actually, though, I feel better now that I know, like most heirs apparent of even anti-western countries, he was educated in liberal European schools. Sure, know your enemy. But now matter how careful and restrictive, they will encounter more people and things that counter the homegrown isolationist tendency.
Just look at what Europe did to Bogey.
