Nixon an the system

Leitura: 2 min

At the dawn of May 9th, 1970, more precisely at 4 am, President Nixon’s official car stopped right in front of Lincoln Memorial, that statue with that dude sitting down.

Nixon was a tormented person. 

He was a protestant, a quaker, the guy from the oatmeal box? 

There. A Bible-thumper. Conservative. Republican. Quakers are Bible-thumpers. 

Bible-thumpers make oatmeal. Monk Coen is the one who makes beverages.

In fact, Bible-thumpers should make beverages. 

Jesus did. 

He would get down to the parties in bohemian Jerusalem, and he would transform the drinking fountain water into Moet Chandon. 

Nixon climbed up the stairs of the Memorial that dawn. 

Vietnam-war protesters were lying on the ground, young people, undergrads, and some of them from social movements. 

They saw Nixon and decided to talk to him. Picture this. You’re sleeping during a protest, and when you wake up, the president is there.

A young woman asked Nixon why he couldn’t stop a war that the Vietnamese didn’t want, the States didn’t want, and even Nixon himself had said he didn’t want it since he had already reduced the budget for the war.

And Nixon said it was too complicated. Then the young woman said:

– You’re the president, but you don’t have power. The system wants the war. As a matter of fact, you don’t have the power to stop the war. The system is a wild beast.

Nixon climbed down the steps saying it had taken him 25 years in politics to figure out what the 19-year-old woman told him. 

The system.

The United States is a beast.

They can’t stop the war, only remain in it.

That’s the scene, the one recreated by Oliver Stone, I have in mind when talking about Afghanistan.