Power and Denial : Mark Felt and Nixon Were Born the Same Year

Nixon’s conditions reflected on terms to describe power and guilt, denial and illness as well as delusions of grandeur. Lawyers took delusions to the next step by developing creative terms to describe impeachment proceedings, moral certainty to indictment, and executive clemency. Farmers will tell city folks that the apple does fall far from the tree. This is true, but why did the apple fall is what Isaac Newton asked. The fell because the fruit was ripe and prepared to go bad. Spoiled apples receive too much attention from the sun. Before discoloration turns the apple black, the weight makes the apple fall to the earth. On a side note, I love Leo Tolstoy. Professors introduced Tolstoy to me in 1986 and his novels led me to study and eventually live in Eastern Europe as close as I could get to Tolstoy’s home outside of Moscow, Russia. Leo Tolstoy philosophize about apples. In his novel, War and Peace, Tolstoy teaches us about apples, “Why does an apple fall when it is ripe? Is it brought down by the force of gravity? Is it because the apple’s stalk withers? Because it is dried by the sun, because the apple grows too heavy, or because the boy standing under the tree wants to eat it? None of these is the cause. Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own freewill is in the historical sense not free at all but is bound up with the whole course of history and preordained from all eternity.”