How far we have come since our toxic immersion in the ambient culture that informed the mind of Nixon and his so-called Silent Majority..

Images of pendulums swing into view.

I read this particular Hitchens on the same morning a Sotomayor decision got overturned by the Supreme Court. And now affirmative action (affirmative discrimination?) is at last knocked back a step, or two. On this particular day the outputs of our first bi-racial president track more and more like the white males who led before him. In his day Nixon instituted wage and price controls like a raging socialist, and no one seriously objected. .

Damned memories, they go all predictably wonky. And the signal continues to degrade over time. Like the present, past is never clear and simple. Perhaps not too many significant conclusions should be drawn from it.

May the future treat us kindly, or at least bring more data to the seat of judgement than we do on behalf of those who people our past..

It was Nixon who tried to make school desegregation fair and equal North and South. It was during his administration that affirmative discrimination was first implemented. Nixon always supported civil rights. It was because of Nixon that the Eisenhower administration produced the first civil rights bill since reconstruction only to see it gutted by the Democrats. He received the thanks of Martin Luther King for his efforts. Nixon was raised as a Quaker with black dinner guests at his grandmother's table. His daughters went to integrated private schools and he refused to sign a race-restrictive covenant when he sold his house.

Nice try, saloon singer. But it was during the Nixon administration that the phrase "Southern strategy" was coined.