Two Excerpts from a Work in Progress

These two riffs, from a work in progress, expose the dizzying, dramatic, intensely personal relationship between two home-grown Southern Californians: President Richard Milhous Nixon and Author Stephen David Geller.They also show what happens to our country, once it is bereft of the first president of the United States who demonstrated an exceptional profile in courage, guts and glory: to know exactly when to resign his office. Think of Lenny Bruce, and how the comic's encounters with...
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These two riffs, from a work in progress, expose the dizzying, dramatic, intensely personal relationship between two home-grown Southern Californians: President Richard Milhous Nixon and Author Stephen David Geller.They also show what happens to our country, once it is bereft of the first president of the United States who demonstrated an exceptional profile in courage, guts and glory: to know exactly when to resign his office. Think of Lenny Bruce, and how the comic's encounters with the Law provoked a personal tragedy - but the effect of which was to pave the way for generations of future comedians, who took his material, or world-view, and made it their own.Without comic Bruce fighting the good fight, as President Nixon later had done, there would have been no laugh-makers, today, to push the gags light-years farther than ever they'd gone before.Or post-Nixonian patriotic laws, to make our civilization shine.