Three nights a week after work I take Japanese classes with some other English teachers, but we are often tired from working all day and it can be hard to study at night. Our teacher understands this, and so she sometimes just lets us practice our Japanese by conversation instead of studying grammar points.

“Has there been anything interesting in the news recently?” she asked.

“They finally found out who ‘Deep Throat’ is,” I answered. Because our teacher was Japanese, she didn’t understand who Deep Throat was, and we had to struggle to explain it in Japanese (good practice).

After class, I was talking to a girl who had arrived late. “What did I miss?” she asked.

“Absolutely nothing,” I responded. “We just talked about ‘Deep Throat’ for the whole first half hour.”

She turned to me shocked. “You're joking!”

“No, I’m serious.”

In an accusatory tone she demanded, “What were you guys doing talking about deep throating with our Japanese teacher?”

Even though she was a fellow American, it turns out she had no idea who the historical “Deep Throat” was, and had only known the term in connection with the sexual act. I compared this with my own development, in which I had known about “Deep Throat” the person long before I realized the word actually had sexual connotations. In fact it wasn’t until my history class at Calvin, when the professor said the term “Deep Throat” came from a popular porno movie at the time, that I finally made the connection. Shows what a geek I am.

Ah, Nixon…All the people he killed in Vietnam, and now his most lasting legacy is that a pornographic movie has become forever part of our history books.

Of course the same irony is true for Clinton. He presided over the period of greatest economic expansion, and now he will be remembered for an X-rated special prosecutors report dealing with cigars and interns, that is also now part of the historical record.