my sibling Frisk was born in April 1972; I followed in December 1974. between the two of us, we bracket the entire Watergate scandal. the breakin happened not long after Frisk was born, and a few months before I came along to ruin everyone's life, Nixon was forced to resign.
both of us ended up taking a great childhood fascination in Nixon and the Watergate scandal, though Frisk took it much further, reading multiple books about Nixon (including all of Stephen Ambrose's massive biography of the man) and visiting the Nixon Library...probably more than once, come to think of it, because they were apt to drive long distances from San Diego at short notice and without telling anyone.
(I remember that used to be so upsetting; now it seems merely like my sibling was doing some self-care. if you grew up with our RL parents and experienced their tomblike home together, you'd probably think about travelling a hundred miles just to eat dinner somewhere else, too.)
it's rather weird to look back at those early decades and realize the degree to which Nixon—revulsion for Nixon, but also fascination with Nixon—shaped Frisk and myself. I suppose it's only fitting; Nixon, after all, was largely responsible for the destruction of our RL mother's native country. Generalissimo Pinochet was one of Nixon's best political buddies.
we grew up as post-Watergate children; we developed a naïve and ill-fated admiration for the purported power of the Fourth Estate to safeguard democracy and justice. we were too Americanized to pick up much of our RL mother's Marxism (though we were at least sympathetic) so our personal politics developed along "bleeding-heart liberal" lines. there might have been a time when Aaron Sorkin would have appealed to us—but by the time Sorkin got to be a thing, we'd soured on our old 1980s idealistic-liberal fantasies about changing the world with investigative journalism and "consumer activism".
I suspect that we used to have some truly ridiculous dreams about changing the world, my sibling and I. an ember of that old fire kept me going for a while, when there wasn't much else to supply a sense of higher purpose. now, though, the ember's dead and I simply feel beaten down. and Frisk, well—Frisk gave up on hope a long time ago. for one thing...it would seem that Nixon has been haunting them. they had their own headspace full of inner demons, when they were once alive under the Sun in the normal way, and they weren't into fantasy and speculative entertainments and pagan spirituality and such things. so while I came to be haunted by gods and heroic spirits, Frisk was tormented by spectres from the Real World™. and those spectres haunt them still; death has not changed that.
(it's remarkable, we've learned from experience, just how little death changes. it's proved to be no sort of escape.)
and so we feel like we still have to deal with Richard M. Nixon. he's still up here, somewhere (taps Kris's head) or wherever these things actually maintain their existence. where is a headspace anyway? it seems like it might as well be everywhere; the probability density of our headspace undoubtedly extends to the limits of the Cosmos, for the same thing can be said of the probability density of an electron round a nucleus. it asymptotically approaches zero with infinite distance from the nucleus, but it remains non-zero. in any case, somewhere in that vast and fuzzy imaginative space, Richard Nixon is to be found. apparently he once made Frisk's life utterly wretched, even though he wasn't "real".
and now we have to track him down! somehow. elicit him, deal with him, exorcise him—however you want to put it. this is a novel situation for me (which means that Kris is completely at sea) and we've been slow to act. we feel a certain impulse to revisit a certain novel that Frisk and I once read, Bob Oeste's The Last Pumpkin Paper, a bizarre historical novel about Nixon late in life, still surrounded by a little crowd of loyalists, still seeking to prove once and for all that Alger Hiss really was a Communist and stick a thumb in the eye of Nixon's detractors. https://archive.is/3CP9z
it's well to remember that Richard M. Nixon is still active on Twitter, or at least was until recently; that is to say, there was a very active fan account for Nixon, one with a substantial following of people who dutifully referred to fan!Nixon as though he were the real thing, with "Mr. President" and "sir" and all that. that feels faintly ominous somehow; one is reminded of the persistent fantasy in much popular culture that Nixon never stopped trying to rule the world. I suppose if we're all in Hell (as seems likely) then it only makes sense that Nixon would end up the eternal ruler of a good chunk of it.
~Chara of Pnictogen