To life (patent pending)!
Getlein, Frank
Of several minds: Frank Getlein TO LIFE (PATENT PENDING)! RICHARD NIXON ON THE SISTINE CEILING IT certainly came as no surprise to me that the Nixon Supreme Court would and did find that new...
...The rest of the gang, including Nixon himself, have mostly gone into authorship, exhibiting themselves as freaks for pay...
...As you might expect, there is a personal consideration as well and, as is usual with the Unindicted Coconspirator, that consideration goes straight to the cash nexus...
...American military history has been a curious affair often enough, never more so than in the last thirty years, but the kind of long leap upward accomplished by Haig with no command at all between battalion level and global level has never been accomplished by anyone...
...If Nixon invented Kissinger and Kissinger invented Haig, then Nixon invented Haig, a classical syllogism in the hypothetical mood...
...Haig, however, having parlayed his way from lieutenant-colonel, his penultimate command position, direct to captain-general of the free world, his last, by the way of being factotum, dogrobber and all-around body-servant to Nixon's factotum, dog-robber and allaround body-servant, Kissinger, has more recently parlayed the captaingeneralcy into top corporate bucks of the kind respected by the Supreme Court...
...Hiss did not invent Nixon in the way that Nixon did invent Kissinger and Haig...
...It was only a question of time...
...He owns the ball game...
...Hiss made the man...
...in the long run, of course, the corporation is a new life-form itself, having by law from birth the gift of eternal life so many humans have dedicated their whole lives to achieving and having it in this world...
...in that span GE will certainly come out ahead of RMN, but in the foreseeables, it's Nixon two to one, or more...
...It's the most portentous question of its kind since, What immortal hand or eye/ Could frame thy fearful symmetry...
...The decision was also tipped—if tipping were needed—by the fact that the appellant was an employee of General Electric, had been when he did the Godnumber, and hence had signed away the proceeds to the corporation...
...It's a sound claim and it should take about fifteen minutes to establish the fact that there has never been anything like Richard Nixon in American politics, hence he is an authentic new life-form...
...Hiss was merely the occasion...
...The Renaissance called them bravos and I suppose Cesare Borgia was the highest placed of the breed before the Katzenjammer Kids and their apprentice tough, Colson...
...The meat just isn't there, not even ham...
...A claim can be put forward by Kissinger, but is instantly disposed of on the principle that, the agent of my agent is my agent...
...Can you really see Welles doing Erlichman...
...Good old Al will be bringing in the corporate buckerinos, with stock options, perks and other under the table baksheesh and it will all belong to Nixon...
...That Court has written itself a coherent and consistent record of support for property rights over life rights...
...Can Nixon legitimately claim to be the only begetter of Al Haig...
...The logical, inevitable, apex of that structure is a decision turning life itself into private property...
...If he could bring a successful suit to establish the claim that he had invented Nixon and that therefore all the Nixonian perks and pelf belonged to him, a lot of people, including myself, would feel a lot better about life...
...He is thus a new form of life and the credit can only go to Nixon...
...Take Henry Kissinger alone—not the best way to take him, but still...
...Had it not been Hiss, it would have been another...
...Even Spiro Agnew, who was really the only old pro in the crowd, except Nixon, had been into being a crook for years in the traditional small-time pol sense, wrote, most recently, a kind of reverse of the Liddy book, reciting his own fears of being rubbed out by Nixon agents, presumably Liddy...
...When last heard from, Hiss, destroyed by Nixon in his Haig-like climb to the top, was selling stationery and office supplies on a very small scale...
...There is certainly no doubt that Nixon did indeed invent Kissinger in his manifestation as born-again Mettemich, eavesdropping on the offices of his associates / August 1980: 425 and bombing the lesser breeds without the law...
...If so, that life form could be extremely lucrative...
...The claim is clear...
...So there was a new form of life in the trio, certainly in the history of American governments...
...But Cesare had a certain style...
...This assuredly was a form of life that didn't exist before it was created by Richard Nixon and, like the oil-eating microbe, it has demonstrated an enormous power to earn money, all of which belongs by property right to Nixon, its inventor...
...The considerations above are all more or less ideological, if that's not too grand a word for the Poor Richard's Almanac philosophy that seems to inform the Court on so much...
...To complicate mat ters further, the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci can stake out a unique claim to having invented Kissinger as the lonesome cowboy...
...It is true the cloud of copyright infringement hangs over the potential Kissinger gold mine...
...Actually, Agnew needn't have worried: the record suggests that being marked for destruction by Gordon Liddy was one of the safest things that could happen to anyone...
...That's their capital and once they've blown it, it's gone...
...RICHARD NIXON ON THE SISTINE CEILING IT certainly came as no surprise to me that the Nixon Supreme Court would and did find that new forms of life are patentable...
...There is, of course, a deeper shadow over all these golden prospects than the one with Barbara Walters and James Reston disputing Nixon's claim to all rights in Henry Kissinger's money-making as a result of his strenuous understrapping for Nixon...
...If Nixon can lay claim to them bucks, his troubles will be over, there'll be no more worries about what will be the outcome if the income don't come in as the crooks run dry with their books...
...The latest crook book, the one by Gordon Liddy, is reduced to retailing the author's imaginary crimes, preparing himself to murder Hunt, for instance, on orders that never got through, planning to erect Babylon in Miami—talk about redundancy—on similar orders that never made it...
...This is good while it lasts, but they were all involved, really, in only one big swindle, the Watergate complex of burglary, conspiracy, perjury and assorted other crimes and misdemeanors...
...Haig was the understrapper's understrapper and Nixon was the man in need of understrapping...
...Richard Nixon stands to make more money out of the Supreme Court's allowing patents for new forms of life than even General Electric, at least in the short run...
...This can be seen as if in a lightning flash when you ask the question, Who invented Nixon...
...Peter's Square to the fact that he inspired Machiavelli and was played in the movies by Orson Welles...
...Well, it's a case for the lawyers and that alone enhances the money-making potential of the new form of life...
...Still, only a rancher singularly insouciant about his stock would sign up Kissinger as a lonesome cowboy, while NBC already has him on the payroll as font of wisdom and Chase Manhattan has him on its own as secret swinger—at least that's what one must assume, Kissinger himself having no record of any kind at all as a famous economist or financial advisor and secret swinging being a well-established Rockefeller propensity...
...Alas, no...
...There are too many other things on the midway...
...Without Hiss, Nixon would have been a kind of third-rate Robert Dole, who is already a third-rate Nixon...
...Conceivably it might have rejected his plea, lectured him sternly on the sacredness of life and closed up shop for the summer...
...Old Jaws was hanging there, waiting, he seen his chances and he took 'em, including Hiss...
...frank getlein Comrrionweal: 426...
...And Hiss owns him...
...It's evident in everything we know about the man, from the personal bull-fighting in St...
...If Supreme Courts in general may be said to follow the election returns, the Nixon Court may be said to follow the dividend returns and on that standard GE has been exemplary...
...and, Did He Who made the Lamb make Thee...
...There is only one reasonable answer and that has to be Alger Hiss...
...But there seem to be valid claims by both James Reston of the Times and Barbara Walters of various television networks, that one or both of them invented Kissinger not as bomber and eavesdropper, but as font of wisdom on the one hand and glamoroso secret swinger on the other...
...Nixon is clearly the creator of it and entitled to all the royalties the Kids have collected and to whatever may be left of the sums born-again Colson has been getting from the gullible for the salvation of souls in prison...
...Or consider the musclemen, Haldeman, Erlichman, and Colson...
...The claim is that, simply, had there not been a Hiss, there could not have been a Nixon—in the sense at which we marvel...
...If some wild-eyed professor working in basement solitude had turned the trick, there's no telling how the Court might have come down...
...But the point here is that you can't keep yelling, Look at me, I'm a freak, and draw the rubes forever...
...Happily, this was no wild-eyed loner, but the Giant Corporation itself...
...Yes, there had been thugs in government before...
Vol. 107 • August 1980 • No. 14
