Remembering history the way they wished it had been
Won’t You Be Mine? 
No product moving opportunity is missed by the Nixon Library Foundation, whose latest email invites us to associate Richard Nixon and romance, with the sparkling addition of the right’s scariest harridan.
Love Hurts   
Glory Days  
Richard Nixon’s death-grip on the American political imagination has brought us opera, theatre, film and books beyond measure, but somehow the era’s creepiness never fades.
Now the impresarios of nixontapes.org, your go-to guys for hours of he-man presidential chatter, offer up the image of Watergate criminals whiling away their golden years listening to their younger selves plotting crimes with the Chief Executive.
The nixontape-ists are trying to corral the remaints of the Nixon era into its schemes by making them special mix tapes of their White House recordings.
At last, Brookings Bomber wannabe Chuck Colson can review his glory days before Jesus, in the comfort of home, office or car.
Laying It On With A Trowel 
Our glorious tradition of Presidential Libraries was of course launched by Franklin Roosevelt, who famously parked the first one in his yard, and had himself buried there to complete the pharaoh-fication.
 
The special localness of these little bits o’ greatness scattered over the landscape are celebrated by America’s leading purveyor of thoughtful presidential historian mush, David McCullough:
” it is valuable for anyone trying to understand the life of a particular president should come to the place that produced that human being, where his memory is part of the story of that place.“
Stirring words, except Reagan’s location is an accident of real estate after Stanford, where he had no ties, turned him down. Nixon crawled back to Yorba Linda after numerous rejections elsewhere, and Bush Sr is in College Station for ideological congruity, not any local ties.
The great tradition is coming to its logical end at the FDR Library, where the seventy-five year old structure’s roof leaks, the wiring is shot, and damp threatens the Roosevelt papers. A $17 million fix is requested.
Just why this collection of randomly sited mini-archives must be maintained and expanded into perpetuity even as they are pilfered from within is unclear.
