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By Root 448 0

happy to see them. You know when you go to a play or a movie and you can see the acting, see the actor performing his lines, going through the motions, and at that moment the performance has lost you and it is over and it can’t be recovered? That was Nixon in Bad Axe. The man who had been a congressman, senator, vice president, and now president, the man who had met with world leaders and at one time considered dropping The Bomb on North Vietnam, the man who clawed and climbed his way to the top more than once—now here he was in a place he’d never seen, reduced to sitting on the pop-top of a Pontiac in a staged parade of hopeful photo ops, a nice piece for the evening news, but there was no fooling anyone: This was not Nixon in China. This was Nixon in Bad Axe. Crushing, and irrevocably humiliating. It was all that he had left.

As his eyes glanced down at my NIXON’S A CROOK sign he did his best to look away and pretend to be happy, but there was just the next sign after me and the one after that and the 297 after that. When I saw his sad reaction to my sign, I instinctively lowered it, ashamed that I was now kicking a man when he was down—a pretty ruthless, despicable man, but nonetheless, a man shamed and alone. A man on his way back to Orange County or to prison. He may have been surrounded by thousands there in Bad Axe, but the only axe that mattered now was the one that was just weeks away from being lowered on his head. The Republican governor of Michigan, William Milliken, declined to join him in the parade. Milhous was a pariah, he knew it, and, really, what was the point at this juncture?

I’ll tell you what it was. He said he would end the war—he told us he would end the war!—and instead he sent another twenty thousand American boys to their deaths. He rained so many bombs down on the civilians of Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia that to this day no one can give an exact body count. (Is it 2 million? 3 million? 4 million? At this level, you’re talking Holocaust numbers, and if you paid your taxes, then you supported this and you are culpable and you know it and you just want to puke.) He had committed war crimes so heinous that we still live with the legacy of his actions to this day. We lost our moral compass with him and we’ve never gotten it back. We no longer know when we’re the good guys and when we’re the terrorists. History has already written our demise, and History will say it began with Vietnam and Nixon. Before Vietnam there was so much hope. Since Nixon we have known only the Permanent War.

For some reason, not knowing then what would come of our country, I lifted my sign back up. I wanted none of it and none of him.

We walked down to where he was going to give his speech, but the police made sure we got nowhere near him. He got on the loudspeaker and bragged about his subsidies to the local farmers. He asked the crowd if their doctor “should work for his patients or for the government?” And then he addressed the young people who were there.

“I have brought you a lasting peace,” he told them. “Yours will be the first generation in this century who will not know war. And to you young boys here, you will be the first group of eighteen-year-olds not drafted in over twenty-five years!”

The crowd cheered. Nixon, the peace president. We booed as loud as we could. It was more like a howl. Nixon would not make another campaign appearance before resigning from the presidency a few months later. We were there for his last one.

If only we could have said the same about that being America’s last war.

Crisis Intervention

HE WALKED STRAIGHT in through the front doors, wielding a shotgun.

I had been told by the teachers at my crisis intervention training that this day would eventually come. They called it the “audience suicide.”

“This is it, motherfuckers!” he yelled out after entering the Hotline Center where I worked. “This is good-bye and fuck every last one of you!”

“Hold on,” I said quietly as I emerged from the room that contained the crisis phone lines. “Hold on. Talk to me.”

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