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Watergate: The source of a widely used suffix or a real lesson?

<![CDATA[Jeff Barr’s Blog » What was Watergate?: Just heard this from downstairs. My 13 year old daughter shouted to her brother: “Andy, what was Watergate?” Jeff, tell them over and over. I was thinking today about how long it has been since my childhood. Watergate shook my little Republican world; I flew the flag at […]

<![CDATA[Jeff Barr’s Blog » What was Watergate?:

Just heard this from downstairs. My 13 year old daughter shouted to her brother: “Andy, what was Watergate?”

Jeff, tell them over and over.
I was thinking today about how long it has been since my childhood. Watergate shook my little Republican world; I flew the flag at half-mast the day Nixon resigned because of what had happened to the country, and I was just 13 at the time.
When I talk to my son, who loves comedy (of the Redneck variety), about Lenny Bruce, it is based on the same distance in time as my dad talking about Will Rogers. Tea Pot Dome happened 40 years before I was born, and who remembers that? World War II was 16 years, not 50 years, behind us when I was in diapers, but that war is trundled out in misty outline to justify today’s wars, because it is just a word now to people who use it as a propaganda tool rather than seeing it and its human consequences as history we can learn from.
Talk about what really happened in the past, not the slogans attached to those events.

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