"One of the reasons 'Secret Honor' is so affecting is that, with the distance of time, we feel sympathy for the man, especially because we are aware of how Nixon-hating..."

"... had a lot to do with a very personal reaction to the man. There was a sort of loathing that wasn't about politics, but about the way he looked and spoke and certain personality qualities of the sort that would have made him unpopular even as a child. And the truly challenging thing to think about is how he could have been politically effective if he repelled people on a deep psychic level. Bush-haters of today might try imagining themselves thirty years in the future, looking back at him as a mere man."

That's something I wrote on February 14, 2005, in a post called "Small and large falls." 

I'm reading that this morning after seeing this new piece at New York Magazine, "In Secret Honor, Philip Baker Hall Plays Nixon As a Wounded Animal." New York Magazine is writing that now because the actor who played Nixon, Philip Baker Hall, recently died. He was 90.

I was writing about "Secret Honor" in 2005 — 17 years ago — because I was teaching the Watergate Tapes case and I had a nice, new Criterion Collection CD of the Robert Altman film. 

That post also recalled the old episode of "Saturday Night Live" that had Dan Aykroyd playing Nixon (and John Belushi playing Kissinger):

In the skit, Nixon and Kissinger were talking about how all the bad things on the Watergate tapes were just jokes. We see a flashback of them saying the various damning quotes, but making faces and gestures that showed they were just kidding. But people took it the wrong way, because they only had the cold transcript.

That skit was written by Al Franken, who said later: "It's really weird: I remember how I hated Nixon, but I now don't think he was so bad. He was really a moderate in many things and, putting aside his unfortunate paraonoia, was a pretty effective president. When I look at the current political scene with our preacher-in-chief, I feel a definite odd nostalgia for ol' ski-nose."

These days, it's George W. Bush who has entered the nostalgia zone. How many cycles of this loathing and empathizing must we live through before we acquire cool rationality about present-day events? If I, like Philip Baker Hall, live to be 90, I will get to see Americans mulling over the human being who was Donald Trump. But I will never see us break the cycle. It takes too long, and if you've been through multiple cycles, you are old and there are new generations seeing the present as fresh and uniquely urgent. It's like first love. First hate.