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Sometimes The System Doesn't Work

The great French anthropologist, Levi-Strauss, once said that the job of myths is to re-tell a story without the messy contradictions.

Take the myth of the Watergate scandal. If we re-cast it as myth, we would say that Richard Nixon was the big bad wolf; Little Red Riding Hood was the Constitution, and the rescuing woodman was The System. Richard Nixon was trying to devour the Constitution but the System (the media, Congress, and courts) stopped him, and so the System worked. We all felt great.

In fact, though, the story is a lot more complex. If a night watchman hadn’t noticed tape on a door at the Watergate Building in Washington, the burglars never would have been caught in the first place.

If Richard Nixon had taken the advice of some of his allies and burned the White House tape recordings, there would have been no evidence against him.

If he hadn’t been presiding over a slowing economy, or if he hadn’t been struggling with how to get out of Vietnam without losing the war, he’d have had a lot more political clout.

The woodman inevitably saved Little Red Riding Hood from the Big Bad Wolf. But there was nothing inevitable about the System’s working during the Watergate years. It was a matter of happenstance and luck.

This is Tom McBride, and that’s my Perspective.

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