The Past Should Stay Buried

 I woke up with this word in my head: capitulation. 

If you are a fan of Rowan and Martin's Laugh In, I might suggest you look it up in your Funk and Wagnalls. If you are not privileged enough to have lived long enough to internalize that catchphrase, then I would simply ask you to Google it. If you are not prone to breaking the spell of this wondrous moment of literary engagement, then I will tell you that capitulation means to succumb or yeild to an opponent. 

Surrender. 

You may be unfamiliar with such a concept because it is very much not in vogue right now, nor has it been for many decades. We can trace the death of this idea back to around 1968 when Richard Nixon, a truly awful human being who happened to become President in spite of how awful a human being he was. One of the ways he countered this public perception was to go on Rowan and Martin's Laugh In to show what a regular guy he was. This was not capitulation. This was manipulation, which was much more in line with the way Dick Nixon did business. When it became apparent to the rest of the planet that America's involvement in the Vietnam War was essentially unwinnable, the notion of "peace with honor" was floated out as a stopgap between escalation of the conflict to straight up admitting that we should surrender. This strategy stayed in place through the election of 1972, which allowed Dick and his administration to avoid actually admitting that defeat. For you students of history, specifically those who come here to learn about the distant past, Nixon won that election in a landslide, and in January of 1973, the Paris Peace Accords were signed, bringing an end to one of the longest and bloodiest wars in America's history. Three days after Richard Nixon was inaugurated for his second term as President of the United States. The one that didn't end so well for Dick. A little thing called Watergate? 

And why am I bringing all of this up right now? 

Look it up in your Funk and Wagnalls.