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| John Mitchell |
This afternoon on
Amazon Prime I watched the movie All the President’s Men. The movie brought back memories of John
Mitchell, H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and of course Richard Nixon. All of these men struck me at the time as
being intimidating; in fact I wrote a poem about them called the “Chromium Men.” I’m sure I would have found them daunting,
most definitely in the President’s Oval Office and, more tellingly, even if I
had encountered them as locals holding forth in conversation around some potbellied
stove in a remote country store. It is
with chagrin that I admit being easily intimidated by people with an air of
authority—people who in their own bones are deeply convinced of their own
preeminence. This trait alone often
carries them far when enabled by people like me. Some people when I am in their presence seem
to convey that there is a pecking order and that I am hopeless further down in
that order than they; and I, rather than challenging it, acquiesce and become
complicit in their conviction. Perhaps
it comes from perceiving that the task of donning equality in their presence
would be futile and even somehow dangerous (the President’s men did, after all, resort to “dirty tricks” and worse).
That such acquiescence is bad for everybody and possible outcomes is undeniable. In days of analogue clocks we used to say
that even a stopped clock is right twice a day; in other words anyone can be
right now and then and anyone can be wrong despite the certitude of their ego. Perhaps in his early days, if John Mitchell
had encountered people with the guts to demur from his ingrained conviction of
natural superiority, he may have become more humble and in due time not wiped
out and dishonored himself and his associates. The recent death of Whitney Houston (she was
definitely not chromium, but certainly golden) and the circumstances
surrounding it serve to remind us that everyone is equally human despite our
own complicity in manufacturing the fiction of unassailability. The responsibility is almost a moral one to telegraph
to the self-enchanted that an air of authority, like everything else in excess,
can lead to self-destruction.
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