Under the Influence - The Bad Ones

This is part two of my entry for Dennis Burgess's Under the Influence contest - these were the bad ones:

Let's start with Mrs. Spencer, my 9th grade English teacher, and her first assignment, an essay about whether you were an optimist or a pessimist. I wrote a very good one on why I was a pessimist. Everyone who chose to be an optimist got an A, and everyone who chose to be a pessimist got a C.   This was supposed to be a class in English, not thought control, and I was deeply offended - it's my first memory of moral outrage. But I am always in Mrs. Spencer's debt for teaching me about bullshit at an early age.

I'm also deeply indebted to a series of early bosses, sad empty corporate suits whose only interest lay in climbing the ladder by any means available. The work environments they presided over were intellectual wastelands, devoid of meaning, and I quickly learned that I would never be happy or productive there.

Later, I was challenged to live up to my beliefs and values, at the cost of my employment, by an employer requiring me to do something unethical. I refused, got fired, and learned that the price I paid was piddling in return for the self-respect I still had.

In the world of real estate, I'm grateful for the object lessons of the greedy, incompetent and lazy. While they are seldom punished for their sins, I wouldn't trade places with them for a moment, no matter how successful they manage to become. And, while they do foul the pond, they make it relatively easy for those of us committed to excellence to stand out, differentiate ourselves, and discover the real value of our craft.

And then there's Richard M. Nixon. To me, he embodied everything evil and corrupt about politics and government. The fact is that he was my boogieman - much of what I did and thought in the 60's and 70's were in reaction to him, his programs and policies, and his goons. I wanted a better world, back then when we believed such a thing was possible, and he was representative of everything that stood in the way of that. Here is a quote from Hunter S. Thompson's obituary of Nixon in Rolling Stone that pretty much sums up my feelings about him:

"By disgracing and degrading the Presidency of the United States, by fleeing the White House like a diseased cur, Richard Nixon broke the heart of the American Dream...If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin."