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“Tricky Dick and Elvis”

You can tell by the title (and the opening line) that this is going to be good, “They just opened the Nixon Papers…and I’m all shook up.” Tales of Leonard’s conflicting relationship with Nixon in the 60’s and ‘70s as told in the context of other conflicts of the culture in that time (e.g. Elvis and Nixon mutual admiration society). One long quote tells all:

It was one thing to blame “dirty dancing” on black people…it was quite another when duck-tailed poor-white southern trash insinuated some rockabilly/hub-cap outlaw variant of the same R&B into the ears and hearts and glands of the Wonderbread children of the…middle class.”

How could Elvis have started all that and also been a reactionary nut case?

New words: semiotics = the study of signs

New learning: Elvis Presley wrote to Richard Nixon in 1970 to say that, “The Beatles had been a real force for anti-American spirit.”