^{It took a parody Twitter account to shake me by the shoulders, slap me across the face and bring my attention to something we’ve all been missing. A week ago, Dick Nixon, an ongoing act of performance art worth a follow if you’re into that sort of thing, tweeted a word that has fallen out of our lexicon almost entirely.}

^Peace.

^{Obviously there’s an irony to that word even being uttered by a parody account of a dead president Hunter Thompson once described as a kind of evil only someone who believes in the physical reality of the Devil could understand. Nixon was not a peaceful person, and his presidency was not peaceful, either.}

^{But it was a word the real Nixon unironically used often, either when promising “peace with honor” in our withdrawal from Vietnam, or in his last memoir, “Beyond Peace.”}

^{Peace then was something people wanted.}

^{His predecessor, Lyndon Johnson wasn’t afraid to speak of peace, either, even in his infamous attack ad against Goldwater, who he portrayed as a dangerous soul who might lead us into nuclear combat.}

^{In the ad, the little blond girl counts the petals of a daisy before being obliterated by a nuclear fireball.}

^{“These are the stakes,” Johnson says in the voiceover. “To make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.”}

^{Online – www.huntsvilletimes.com}