Can it really be 41 years since the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee voted the first article of impeachment against Richard Nixon over Watergate? Yes. And I suppose to some people, as our historical perspective flattens and vanishes, it might as well be 410 years ago. Nixon? Nixon who?

To me it is obviously not so distant. Not only because I’m still steaming about Richard III and that was over five centuries ago. But also because I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Nixon and am acutely aware of his extraordinary virtues and his outsized flaws.

Because of that, and my second-hand involvement in controversies over Vietnam and the 1960s Counterculture (I wasn’t aware of them at the time, but was in the arguments in the next couple of decades), I’m also acutely aware of just how turbulent that period was.

I remember waaaaay back when George W. Bush was president and people said America was more divided than at any time in its history. Bosh, I responded. What about the 1960s? Or the 1850s? Even the years immediately before and after 1800 were at least as bitterly partisan. (And frankly I don’t see that the nation is any less divided under Obama than it was under Bush; it’s just that as liberals are now winning they’re smiling smugly instead of grimacing and fulminating.) And the way the 1960s culminated in the Nixon presidency and the divisions it engendered, on issues from Vietnam to college riots to welfare, was genuinely frightening in ways people forget today.

In 1970 Norman Mailer and Orson Welles claimed on TV that Nixon might cancel the 1972 elections. And as he prepared for his first Inaugural Address, Daniel Patrick Moynihan seriously suggested the new president reassure blacks that he did not in fact plan to establish concentration camps for them.

It may be that such talk always sounded absurd to what was then “Middle America”. But there was no doubt that as the Watergate scandal was gradually uncovered, concerns about the deliberate conspiratorial subversion of American constitutional processes by the White House were shown to have some legitimate substance.

What is remarkable, and remarkably healing, is that the increasingly discredited mechanisms of conventional “bourgeois” politics dealt effectively and decisively with the crisis. Congressional hearings, plodding, thorough and conventionally adversarial, led to a growing cross-partisan conviction that Nixon had indeed committed high crimes and misdemeanors and had to go.

He was never formally impeached. But that’s because senior members of his own party told him his position was untenable, forcing him to resign on August 8 1974. Which might seem a more significant date than July 27. It’s certainly a date on which the nation breathed a sigh of collective relief, as the widely mocked but spectacularly decent Gerald Ford took over the presidency. But I think historically speaking, the proof that “the system” could deal with the system was the beginning of a vital calming, restorative process that among other things made the election of Reagan possible in 1980 because traditional American values were vindicated when Nixon was driven from office. The fact that liberal journalists and politicians took the lead in driving him from office actually helped undermine the radical critique.

Now compare this process to how it’s done elsewhere. Not only with the way tyrants last forever or are assassinated in undemocratic countries, or the way Robespierre was driven from office on July 27 180 years before Nixon lost that key Congressional committee vote, and executed a day later with 21 of his followers. Compare it with the way other democratic nations have removed heads of state or government who obstructed justice and tampered with constitutional norms.

Oh wait. You can’t. The political process may bring down the odd leader like, say, Silvio Berlusconi once they descend from tragedy to farce. But the way the rule of law prevailed over Richard Nixon is almost unparalleled.

It continues to dismay me that Bill Clinton could perjure himself and commit flagrant sexual harassment and beat impeachment on a purely partisan basis. If standards slide far enough they cease to exist. But still I take comfort in Watergate.

The fall of Richard Nixon isn’t an emblem of the corruption and deceit of American politics. It’s an emblem of just how strong the commitment to the rule of law was even in those desperately turbulent days at the tail end of “the Sixties”.

Thanks for beating Hitler. Now don’t let the doorknob hit you in the backside.

That was the disgraceful message British voters delivered to one W. Churchill on July 26, 1945 when the votes were counted and the Labour Party under Clement Atlee won an unexpected landslide on a promise to undermine British liberty.

Oh, they didn’t put it like that, of course. It was about the security “from cradle to grave” the brave British people had earned by their heroic resistance to Hitler. And I don’t doubt either that the populace had generally behaved heroically or that they were tired. But if freedom is what made Great Britain great, it was a seductive promise they should not have heeded.

Churchill himself tried to warn Britons of the path down which they were headed. Indeed some of his statements from the 1945 election, dismissed as shrill and hysterical at the time, have since proved all too accurate. And I cannot quite fathom the public reluctance, having ignored his warnings about Hitler in the 1930s until it was almost too late, to heed his warnings a decade later about socialism grinding down Britain and making life there dismal. It smacks of ingratitude as well as obtuseness. (It’s true that Churchill was returned to 10 Downing St. from 1951-55, but by then he was himself too tired to make a difference and the times were against him.)

He had lost none of his eloquence. It was the audience that failed him when in a Commons speech in October 1945 Churchill uttered his classic “The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” And when in Scotland in May 1948 he said “Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy.”

The election result of 1945 had the additional ill effect of yanking Churchill from the Potsdam Conference with Stalin, leaving the unprepared Truman to face the evil Bolshevik dictator alone. Churchill himself, of course, was as clear on Soviet Communism as he had been on Naziism, giving a warning Americans did heed in 1947 about the Iron Curtain, whose prose still resonates today:

“A shadow has fallen upon the scenes so lately lighted by the Allied victory. Nobody knows what Soviet Russia and its Communist international organisation intends to do in the immediate future, or what are the limits, if any, to their expansive and proselytising tendencies…. We understand the Russian need to be secure on her western frontiers by the removal of all possibility of German aggression. We welcome Russia to her rightful place among the leading nations of the world. We welcome her flag upon the seas. Above all, we welcome constant, frequent and growing contacts between the Russian people and our own people on both sides of the Atlantic. It is my duty however, for I am sure you would wish me to state the facts as I see them to you, to place before you certain facts about the present position in Europe. From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow…. The Communist parties, which were very small in all these Eastern States of Europe, have been raised to pre-eminence and power far beyond their numbers and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control. Police governments are prevailing in nearly every case, and so far, except in Czechoslovakia, there is no true democracy.”

Churchill also commented tersely in 1949 that “the strangling of Bolshevism at its birth would have been an untold blessing to the human race.” (Evidently with more than Reaganesque foresight he also, in 1953, told a young aide named John Colville that if Colville lived a normal lifespan he would see Eastern Europe free from Communism.) And he was an early alarmist about radical Islam as well.

Given his record it is tragic that his warnings about socialism went unheeded and, unconquerable from without, Britain was hollowed out from within.

I cannot say how different things would have been if Churchill had won the 1945 election. But I hope I would have voted for him if I’d been there at the time. How could you not?

On July 25, 1832, the first recorded railroad accident in U.S. history, and the first railroad fatality, happened near Quincy, Massachusetts. Four people riding on a vacant car on the Granite Railway to see how effectively a train could carry loads of stone were hurled off a cliff when a cable snapped. It sure didn’t take long. And I wonder what environmentalist defenders of the “Precautionary Principle” would say.

It’s always odd to see familiar technology in its infancy. For instance, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad started in 1828 powering its cars with, of course, horses. I mean what else would you use? But after a steam engine, of all things, nearly outran a horse in 1930, they started using this new-fangled stuff.

Some people found it troublesome. New York governor Martin Van Buren wrote to President Andrew Jackson in 1829 that “The canal system of this country is being threatened by the spread of a new form of transportation known as ‘railroads.’... As you may well know, railroad carriages are pulled at the enormous speed of 15 miles an hour by engines, which, in addition to endangering life and limb of passengers, roar and snort their way through the countryside. The Almighty certainly never intended that people should travel at such breakneck speed.” And as the 1832 accident indicated, “breakneck” is not just a colourful adjective.

Of course, it existed before there were trains. I very much doubt the horse would have passed a Precautionary Principle test thousands of years ago. I mean those things can buck, they can kick, and where will we put the dung?

No really. The last was a very serious ecological problem by the turn of the 20^th century especially in big cities, mercifully solved by private industry through the now-despised car. Oh, and by the way, the first automobile fatality in the Americas occurred quickly as well, when 69-year-old Henry Hale Bliss was crushed by an electric taxi. I doubt electric cars would be allowed today under the sort of rules applied to oil pipelines.

I don’t even think the bicycle would make it. When cheap steel made bicycles widely available in the 1890s, Carl Honoré notes in his splendid book In Praise of Slow, there was concern that riding them at high speed on a windy day might produce the permanent disfiguring condition “bicycle face”. I mean hey, you never know. (The first recorded bicycle accident came in 1842 when someone ran over a kid; I haven’t been able to determine when the first bicycle fatality came but evidently the inventor of the menacing-sounding steam-powered bicycle, Sylvester H. Roper, died riding one, though possibly because a heart attack caused him to crash.)

As it turns out, we did get trains, and now they’re the subject of some nostalgia as well as futuristic dreams of high speed rail. We don’t pull them with horses any more and we’re not very afraid of them. But nuclear reactors and oil pipelines, weeellll….

On this day in 1901 (I’m apparently on an alcoholic writers binge this week) I read that O. Henry was released from prison.

That’s weird, I thought. He was such a popular and beloved author. What was he doing in jail?

Turns out he went to jail for embezzling from a bank in Austin before he became famous. He actually fled justice, going to Honduras (where he invented the term “banana republic”), came back because his wife was dying of “consumption” a.k.a. tuberculosis, went to jail in 1898 where he had a fairly comfy gig as the night pharmacist, published a variety of stories under pseudonyms while incarcerated, was released on good behaviour after three years, reunited with a daughter who didn’t know he’d been in prison, began writing full time and married a childhood sweetheart.

So far it reads much like one of his stories, as notable for their heartwarming uplift as their surprise endings. Including the improbably comic fact that he only wound up working in the bank he apparently stole from because he lost a government job in Texas in 1891 when his patron was defeated for governor by the legendary “Big Jim” Hogg who really did name his daughter “Ima” (but did not, urban legend notwithstanding, have another daughter named “Ura”).

Unfortunately the O. Henry story does not end happily. Despite his popularity as a writer, he drank away his second marriage and his life, dying of cirrhosis of the liver and related complications in 1910 at age 47.

It seems so odd that writers gifted not merely with technical ability, witty turns of phrase or compelling characters, but with genuine moral insight, able to write stories that improve the lives of millions of readers, should not infrequently be themselves miserable and a burden to others.

Here I am tempted to quote critic Cyril Connolly’s cynical and depressing aphorism that “There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.” But it is not true that great art and a decent personal life are at odds, in parenting or anywhere else.

Good artists can be good parents, or bad ones, just as bad artists can be either. Likewise good artists can be good friends, brave soldiers, honest businessmen and everything else admirable as well as being sodden skunks. Indeed, Connolly’s maxim isn’t just better suited to wild Romantic visions of transvaluing all values than to O. Henry’s heartwarming message. It’s a feeble excuse for being a jerk just because you have creative ability.

No one, artistic or otherwise, has any right to say that to explore their talent properly in fiction, business, politics or any other field they have to be an irresponsible wretch.

Henry would have made short work of such a character in his fiction. And he should have in his life as well.

I hope you can still read his work with genuine pleasure knowing he did not. As I hope I can.

It might not be appropriate to say Happy Birthday Raymond Chandler given his life. But on this day back in 1888 the creator of hard-boiled detective Philip Marlowe was born in Chicago.

I like Chandler for several reasons. First and foremost, I love his writing. I’m a big fan of the noir genre done right. As Chandler himself put it in a 1944 essay (“The Simple Art of Murder”) “But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.”

In that sense there is a vital model here for all of us in Chandler’s heroes even if we do not personally spend much time plucking bullets from our jacket with an air of nonchalance. (And in that sense a writer like the infamous Jim Thompson is working in a wholly different genre; for all his talent Thompson seems to me to justify the jibe aimed at a different author, that he needed to be cured not edited.)

The other thing I like about Chandler is that after resigning a civil service job as stifling, and serving in World War I (he joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force and fought with the Gordon Highlanders in the trenches of France), and responded to the termination of his oil company executive career in 1931 by turning to writing.

The thing I don’t like about Chandler is that he was an irresponsible alcoholic whose drinking and philandering got him fired from that executive job and shadowed him all his days. But as Benjamin Franklin says, the man who’s aground often knows where the shoal lies, and there is redeeming wisdom in Chandler’s writing even if he had trouble tapping into it himself.

Finally, there’s the sheer joy of his writing style, including a great line from Marlowe that I used as my July 18 “Wish I’d Said That”: “I drove back to Hollywood feeling like a short length of chewed string.” So compelling was Chandler’s style that a number of his books were turned into classic movies including the 1946 version of The Big Sleep, starring Humphrey Bogart and with William Faulkner as co-writer of the screenplay (and the classic anecdote about the director having to send Chandler a telegram asking who killed the chauffeur and Chandler not remembering; his plots could get a bit tangled). And the 1978 version starring Robert Mitchum.

I do wish Chandler had had a happier life. But while I’m sorry he had to find his true calling as a writer through his vices not his virtues, I’m glad he did have the guts to follow his star and write truly immortal stories of a hard-boiled dick we’d all like to be, at least occasionally.

On this day in history, back in 1987, that visionary leader and great statesman Mikhail Gorbachev heroically gave in to Ronald Reagan’s obtuse belligerence and agreed to a treaty limiting intermediate-range nuclear missiles. Or so they say.

It’s a strange business, and one that may have faded from the radar. But the background is that on becoming President, Ronald Reagan determined to do something about his nation's horrifying vulnerability to nuclear annihilation. For this he was pilloried by liberals in politics and the press.

His “Star Wars” system (their name, not his) was endlessly mocked for its scientific infeasibility by people who’d failed Grade 10 physics. And his refusal to abandon research into methods of destroying incoming warheads, or missiles boosting them into launch position, was castigated as an insuperable obstacle to arms control.

As some of us noted at the time, these criticisms were mutually incompatible. If the system couldn’t work, the Soviets had no reason to make it a stumbling block in negotiations as the U.S. was just wasting money and scientific talent on it. As we also pointed out, if it couldn’t work it was weird that the Soviets were working so hard on it, and just in case it could it was worth checking out. For that we too were ridiculed, though at least we were in what we considered good company.

Then in 1986 promising talks between the Americans and the new Soviet leadership broke down, after Gorbachev succeeded a succession of mummified gargoyles each praised as moderates at the time (the actual order, hard to recall nowadays, was Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, and each was a sinister dud in real life). They broke down because Gorbachev insisted on tying the so-called INF (“Intermediate-range Nuclear Force) deal to the Americans unilaterally abandoning their Strategic Defense Initiative. Which ought to have led fair-minded people to blame Gorbachev, not Reagan.

Instead liberals pilloried Reagan, saying he’d ruined everything waaaa waaaa waaaa we’re all going to die. And when Gorbachev flip-flopped and said Reagan was right, we should deal on INF and not worry about SDI, they all said it proved Gorbachev was right.

Once in a while some liberal commentator will even brush off the canard that Gorbachev, man of peace, persuaded the warmongering Reagan to see the light. As if Reagan had revealed the fatuous hollowness of the American dream while Gorbachev had resuscitated his beloved socialism in Russia.

It might all seem like missiles under the bridge today. But at the risk of clinging to past resentments, I think there’s a pattern here. It’s not just that Republicans still want to protect America (and by extension Canada) with some TLA (Three Letter Acronym) like SDI or BMD or NMD and liberals still say it’s provocative insanity even though it can’t really be both.

It’s that this whole ruckus fell into a pattern of an argument between those who mostly blame the West for trouble in the world and those who mostly blame the West’s sworn enemies. And it bothers me that people can be so wrong about one such issue, especially one this important, then go right on pontificating on the next one and the one after that without so much as an “Ooops,” let alone a “Sorry.”

If we don’t get the past right, we’re liable to botch the future too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWK_Josc0Og So, let’s hear it for “Soul Makossa”. What? Never even heard it? Or of it? Shame on you. Disco lives.

Well no. Disco doesn’t live. Today it would be super-embarrassing to be in a frenzy over this song by Paris-based Cameroonian artist Emmanuel “Manu” Dibango. But the coolest of the cool in ultra-cool New York City were climbing over one another to purchase after it became the first disco record to make the Top 40 back on July 21 of 1973. And the rest is, as they say, lack of history.

I mean no respect to Dibango. But I find it striking that disco, all the rage in the 1970s, would have vanished so completely that its first big breakthrough hit, and apparently the first song of any sort to go from the club scene to the “charts” instead of the other way around, should be remembered today chiefly for being excerpted in a Michael Jackson song (“Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” back in 1982 and no, I’ve never heard it either).

Music trends come and go nowadays with increasing rapidity, like trends in almost everything. Apparently I am a hopeless rube for not knowing rap from hip-hop from house (let alone garage house and UK garage and speed garage and somebody pass me a “b”). Or not knowing whether it’s no longer cool to know the difference or care. Perhaps nobody cares now. Or maybe they do. I don’t, though. I had to Google this stuff just to have no clue what I was talking about.

Sooner or later we will run out of bad ideas, of course. It’s like fashion; how many ways can you dress a woman even if you don’t care if she looks ridiculous? And maybe one day we’ll even discard the ridiculous idea that if something just arrived it’s so good that just knowing about it before other people makes you an outstanding human being, whereas if you know about and enjoy exactly the same thing a decade later you’re Exhibit A in the museum of hilariously clueless kitsch.

I never did like disco. I like classic rock, even more classic country (not, please, “new country” which I don’t think is either) and classical music I lack the sophistication to appreciate properly for which I blame myself not Bach or Beethoven. If Dark Side of the Moon was good in 1973, I say, it’s good today. And on that note I note that a paleolithic flute found in Germany’s Hohle Fels cave, carved from a vulture bone by Wolfgang Amadeus Og or some such some 400 centuries ago, plays a pentatonic scale on which it is possible to render “The Star Spangled Banner” or, fittingly, “Auld Lang Syne” with remarkable fidelity.

If someone finds one of our instruments in 40,000 years, how much do you bet they don’t try to play “Soul Makossa” on it, or “Stayin’ Alive”?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMINSD7MmT4 Obviously July 20 is the anniversary of Neil Armstrong stepping onto the surface of the moon. I know. I was there.

No, no, I don’t mean I was on the moon. I was watching on TV. We were at the cottage and our cottage didn’t have electricity so we went to a neighbour’s to watch it on a fuzzy black and white TV (it didn’t matter since the images were fuzzy and black and white anyway) and then I went outside to look at the moon and go “Ooooh” and try to feel that something important had happened.

As I recall, I failed. A thrill conspicuously refused to run up my spine. I guess I was a precocious kid because honestly, almost half a century on, it just hasn’t mattered much.

True, it is a useful marker of one’s generation. I find you can place people in cohorts by the first public event they remember. For those older than me it’s JFK’s assassination. For those younger, well, they’re such whippersnappers the conversation soon peters out. It might be Nixon’s resignation or New Coke or something. But I digress.

Six years to the day after Armstrong stepped onto the moon, Viking I landed on Mars. I’ve always considered it a bit of an odd name for a space exploration program. I mean, the Vikings were hardy and all. They reached Iceland, Greenland and even their North American “Vinland” in open boats carrying a few dozen hairy unwashed men. But they were bad news just about anywhere they landed; the English language may be endlessly inventive and capable of generating an unlimited supply of new sentences but I doubt anyone ever said “Oh good, here come the Vikings.” But back to the moon.

Or rather, not. After a few more missions, in 1972 humans visited the moon for the last time. The 11^th and last man to walk on the moon was Eugene Cernan; what a distinction. Though mind you he apparently holds the unofficial land speed record for a moon buggy, a blistering 11.2 mph. The thing is, there was nothing there.

No aliens, no valuable minerals, no great scientific secrets. It wasn’t a giant leap for mankind. For my money, the moon was actually better before we’d been there and I find it more than a little depressing that the brightest object in the night sky when Luna is not visible is now the man-made space station. What was wrong with stars and Venus, I ask?

I admire the courage and determination of those who went to the moon, including Armstrong’s incredibly cool and collected piloting of the lander across various craters to a safe site with fuel running out. I like the fact that we now make espresso in space just because we can. And when I hear that space travel is too risky I’m tempted to volunteer to go to Mars. Except apparently the main issue on those trips is being confined, throughout the voyage and for the rest of your life, with a small group in which abrasive personalities can prove lethal. Like mine. On the plus side, if you go to Mars “the rest of your life” isn’t likely to drag on very long. Though it might seem like it because there’s nothing to do.

No Klingons. No canals. No evil emperor Zurg. Just rocks, dust and meteorites. How long a conversation can you have with a meteorite?

If space is the final frontier, we’re about done. Science fiction was better when we hadn’t been there; if you doubt me, tune in to the classic 1950s radio series X Minus 1, close your eyes, and dream. Ideally after gazing at the Milky Way at a cottage without TV.