During fall break, which I didn’t know was Monday and Tuesday until the Thursday before, I decided to watch a film that I have been putting off for a long time: Robert Altman’s Secret Honor. Robert Altman was a film director, probably one of the best out there, who directed one of my favorite films of all time, Brewster McCloud (1970), and also, more famously, MAS*H (1970), Nashville (1975), and The Player (1992). So, I ordered the movie from the Criterion Collection (who we are para-mutuals with on Instagram) (Criterion, please send the van to Pittsburgh, I promise I won’t steal it (it will be a group effort)), and then I had to order a DVD/Blu-ray player off of Best Buy because I didn’t have one since it’s 2024 and no one buys physical media anymore, which is leading to what I’m calling, and if this article becomes big enough, what academics will call, “The Interesting Media Drought/Bland Media Flood.”
Anyways, the DVD comes with the movie, which is 90 or so minutes of some guy as Nixon monologuing and also with 81 minutes of bonus footage from Nixon’s presidential career. And after watching the 81 minutes of Nixon footage, all I can say is that Nixon was the best president ever. It is a constitutional right that a president is allowed to spy on the opposing party’s headquarters. Only Nixon, whose administration bombed the ever-loving shit out of Cambodia, could go to China. Through his paranoia, he got NASA the funding and know-how to get to the moon because he thought the Soviets had already beaten us and put a spy/mind control device there that would influence Americans into communism. Nixon fought in the war on drugs, not because he thought drugs were bad, but because he hated Jane Fonda having better weed than him and stealing his buyers.
Furthermore, Nixon’s paranoia is relatable to the people of today because everyone is paranoid nowadays. Everyone is trying to kill you. Your friends, your family, your neighbors, your pets. All of them are secretly trying to poison you in your sleep (except for the mayor’s cats, who have hired a hitman). The world is a giant reverse panopticon where you’re the only prisoner, and everyone is in the watchtower trying to escape. Nixon’s failure to remove a cap off a Tylenol bottle is also relatable as we all struggle with those until we get it open with our weapon of choice (napalm). Nixon showed off the unbreakable American spirit by getting off scot-free and writing a memoir after committing political suicide. I think that if we adopted the Nixon mindset, America would be a better place — paranoid, ill at ease, and relentless.