A lot of people asking whether 2020 is like 1968, most of them saying that they weren’t there. I was there – not in the riots, but rather focused on my own life. A few years married, in a job at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory that was below my capabilities but learning a lot about reactors. Just moved into a new house. I was not very political, although the Vietnam War was part of every young person’s consciousness.
Backdrop
In 1968, 400 Americans were dying every week in Vietnam. In 2020, more than 1000 Americans are dying every day from COVID-19. In both cases, disproportionate numbers of Black and Latino people are among them. In both cases, the feeling of danger is palpable across the population.
More people are out of work now than in the Great Depression.
We are still at the beginning of the summer of 2020. The summer of 1968 played out over several months.
April 4: Martin Luther King assassinated
April 4 – 5: Riots, particularly in Detroit
June 6: Robert Kennedy assassinated
August 26 – 29: Democratic Convention and police riot
Presidential Situation
President Lyndon B. Johnson announced on March 31, 1968, that he would not run for another term as president. He recognized that his handling of the Vietnam War would make for a divisive convention and campaign. “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” His vice-president, Hubert Humphrey, became the presumptive candidate, challenged by Eugene McCarthy, who opposed the war. Humphrey was not able to separate himself adequately from Johnson’s handling of the war. Richard Nixon claimed he had a secret plan to end the war.
Donald Trump is a sick human being who is incapable of presidential duties. He has damaged the United States government and sowed division among the American people. His tweets during the riots have been incendiary. Republican elected officials back him unconditionally. The presumptive Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, is a compassionate person with long experience in governing. At this moment, opinion polls show Biden winning decisively in November.
Communications and Media
We have smartphones now. Countless photos and videos of provocateurs and police misconduct are circulating on Twitter. Demonstrators are able to communicate with each other better, as are the police. Many more sources of information, bad and good, are available now to the public. It is harder for the media to overwhelm with conventional wisdom, although Trump’s Twitter feed provides too much distraction. Smartphones also allow for greater surveillance. Influential people in the media seem to be recognizing the problems and are beginning to speak out. Other nations are inserting disinformation.
The Protesters
My sense is that more white protesters are involved this time around, but it’s hard to be sure. Otherwise, the protesters are similar. People who feel they’ve been betrayed, who feel endangered, who feel they have nothing to lose, who feel things must change. Provocateurs are at work, probably were in 1968, but the lack of smartphones allowed them more latitude. We need to understand much more about who has been in these demonstrations.
The Police
In both years, the police response too often is racist. The demonstrations a few weeks ago by armed white men were treated carefully. The police seem to be rioting, as they did in August 1968, during the current protests. More of their animus now seems directed toward reporters. Police are much more militarized today, both in training and equipment, as a result of the reaction to the attacks of September 11, 2001. In a few places like Flint, Santa Cruz, Miami, Fargo, and Atlanta, the police have demonstrated sympathy with the demonstrators and avoided the worst violence. I don’t recall that from 1968.
My Reactions
By the time the 1968 Democratic Convention blew up, my overwhelming feeling was that we had lost the good things that the early sixties won. The early sixties were about opening opportunity and removing barriers, particularly for Black America, but also for women. The later sixties were about reactions to the war, both protests and the retreat to hippiedom and drugs. Everyone lost in the summer of 1968.
I feel more optimistic today, even with the damage of the past few days. We are on the way to removing a disastrous president, and there seems to be increasing recognition that many other things need to be righted.
We have five months to the election, though. There will be another wave in the pandemic. There will be more damaging actions, at home and abroad, from Trump and his allies. There will be more disinformation. White supremacists will continue their activities. There will be more protests.
It’s not possible to predict how things will turn out. My sense, although it coincides with my wishes and is therefore suspect, is that we will remove Trump and rebuild a better America.
Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner
Sister Golden Bear
Fuck Trump.
different-church-lady
I had the idle thought this morning that for a lot of liberals/dems, the entire mindset is like an occupation by Mark Halprin, where anything and everything that happens is good for John McCain. We all just constantly look around for signs of the inevitable collapse. It’s not inevitable — it can happen, but it’s not inevitable.
For the first time in maybe forever white people in this country have faced a genuine experience of powerlessness. My theory is being shook by the pandemic has made some of them more aware of what it’s like to be vulnerable, and awoke some latent empathy for those who have to struggle through vulnerability day in and day out in non-pandemic times.
Bex
From the Friday night news dump: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/30/trump-justice-department-fbi-lawyer-dana-boente-flynn-case-nbc-news
germy
@Sister Golden Bear:
Calouste
I think (but correct me if I’m wrong) that one of the differences, and perhaps an influential one, is that some police seem to be actively targeting reporters. Of course reporters are always at risk of being collateral damage when reporting on riots, but it seems different now. Reporters are getting shot on camera, and bellingcat reports more than 50 incidents involving reporters.
debbie
I think 2020 will be worse than 1968. In 1968, authorities were largely clueless; while now, authorities are ruthless and looking to torch the place at any cost to maintain their power
Yeah, I know, ray of sunshine, etc.
Chief Oshkosh
What is it about LEOs in NYC? We had the NYC FBI assholes who railroaded Hillary. NYCPD in the Occupy Wallstreet days were proud of their hippy punching — over and over we saw that THEY are the ones instigating violence. Now we have dozens, DOZENS, of videos of them just going fucking insane (and throwing white power symbols) over just the last 3 days! How much worse would it be if every white cop in NYC was simply fired?
BTW, did you see the video of the white SLC cop assaulting a little old white man who’d been stumbling along with a cane? WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH THE POLICE?
oopzwtf
I was just out string trimming the yard while wearing a mask, and got yelled at by a neighbor. He said the mask wouldn’t protect me from a stupid libtard hoax.
No one ever said my allergies were a hoax in 1968
germy
@oopzwtf: I thought I was the only one with stupid neighbors.
Kent
I was only 4 years old in 1968 but my vague sense was that a lot of the anti-war protests at that time were based and led by white intellectuals on college campuses and that it was very much a student protest movement. And it was world-wide with massive 1968 protests erupting in places like France, Mexico City, and even Prague.
At the same time there was separate massive civil unrest in the black community after the assassination of MLK that erupted in black neighborhoods across the country.
Today it feels kind of different. Unlike 1968 I don’t see white college students or professors leading any of this. It’s more of an organic civil rights movement coming from and being led by the black community with the chaos seemingly coming from young white rioters bent on destruction who are trying to co-op the protests.
Anyway, as the saying goes. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. The 1918 pandemic was also followed by the red summer of 1919: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Summer
Keithly
@oopzwtf: #NotAllAllergies
Yutsano
It’s impossible to know if there was foreign interference in 1968 but it wouldn’t surprise me.
@Sister Golden Bear: Evergreen post!
Baud
@different-church-lady:
Yes, I agree. The side of good is stronger today than in 1968. That’s why the side of evil is so scared.
Dagaetch
James Fallows has an interesting write-up on the same theme – https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/05/1968-and-2020-lessons-from-americas-worst-year-so-far/612415/
JMG
The overwhelming facts on the ground that’re different from 1968 is 1. A pandemic to which no one is immune (some more at risk than others, of course) as opposed to Vietnam, “The Living Room War,” where most were immune. 2. 40 million unemployed, as opposed to 1968 prosperity.
Wag
@oopzwtf:
real Americans don’t have allergies
Martin
Yeah, I called 2020 a shitty 1968 because at least in 1968 you had a president and Congress that were trying to make things better, with the war being the exception. Assassinations were a backlash to the advance of civil rights, not the rollback of it. And the result was a move away from a liberal administration to a conservative (and deeply corrupt) one. This social unrest is a response to a rollback of civil liberties, a president destroying the rule of law (and we wonder why the public responds in a lawless manner) and a clear sense that the federal government doesn’t mind if hundreds of thousands of us die. The upside, is that I too am optimistic. We will hopefully be moving out of a conservative administration into a liberal one, an expansion of civil rights, a return to the rule of law, and so on. But man, we may have a really shitty 8 months to weather to get to that.
I don’t think these are going to calm down because this isn’t about George Floyd, it’s about all of the other big national failings – which are guaranteed to continue and likely accelerate should Trump lose in Nov. The anarchists embrace the expression ‘it only takes a spark’. George was just the spark.
HuCat
Thank you. Although I lived through the summer of ‘68, I was immersed in my first career out of high school and not paying close attention (reality settled in perhaps four years later). Nevertheless, I could not have told the story better. Again, thank you.
Chyron HR
At least if there’s a virtual convention Bernie can’t order his supporters to riot at it.
You know, again.
HumboldtBlue
I sat thinking to myself the other day as I finished yet another video on war, why I developed such an interest in the military, history, government and world events.
My toddler years were right here in the late 60s and by the time we moved from Philly to Dover and I was in school this country was in the death throes of Vietnam, the public disturbances were still common and political and civil strife were always on the front page.
The walls of the house were filled with family photos and there were a lot of military photos — nearly every man in my extended family served in one branch or another — my parents literally came of age during WW2 and like me (except without the rationing and daily wartime grind) the daily news, the daily drumbeat was of crisis and turmoil.
I distinctly remember seeing a cover of Time that featured ARVN troops on patrol and it immediately struck me that it looked sorta like WW2 (the personal equipment was generally the same) but it was oddly different. It did lead to the encyclopedia to find what I could about Vietnam, but the war felt different, it looked different and it didn’t match my immature view of war as a noble crusade.
The newspapers were filled with work stoppages and union fights and in our house, at least from my mother, the people to follow and look up to were the liberal leaders like Abzug and Chisholm Mink and Westwood (while she was also fighting the Catholic Church for more involvement and better treatment of women which earned my father a rebuke from the Archbishop, I always hated fucking bishops, the further up the chain you got the creepier the fucking clergy got) and it was also a very strict, ordered and patriotic household.
I wonder how much that environment, seeing the color magazines, the giant LIFE pictures and when in third grade, going to school with new classmates who were Vietnamese children who had fled the country, painfully shy and out of place (Dover AFB is a major MAC base and many flew into the base once they fled), the daily newscasts with baritone-voiced-serious-men incanting the latest developments was there every day, every night had on me.
I have read a lot of books on military history but it wasn’t until I was in my late 20s, maybe even early 30s that I finally turned to Vietnam. It was too hard for me in a sense because it wasn’t the glorious WW2 victory (as a boy first reading about the Civil War I would skip a lot of the stuff from 1861-62 because we Yanks were getting our asses handed to us) and it had none of the sense of national unity about it and there was always a lingering sense that both socially and in the closing of the conflict that nothing was resolved, the wound really never scabbed over and that there was something left to be done.
Maybe we can do that starting next January, but man I am hoping for some deep and meaningful movement but I have to temper those hopes because the letdown may just be too much.
I’m not sure why I typed all this out. but there it is.
P.S. Watching Emtywheel eviscerate and confound Eli Lake and his stream of nonsense about Flynn and his treason is an absolute joy.
Mike R
Late summer of 1968 was coming home from my southeast asia excursion, was greeted by the sound of gunfire from rioting. First thought there is no gravity the world sucks.
Yutsano
@Chyron HR: No no no no no. See, Wilmer wrote a stern letter you see! All of his little goslings are totally going to behave now you see? You doubt the power of their Saviour?
Cheryl Rofer
@HumboldtBlue: Thanks.
thebewilderness
I was 22 in 1968.
It feels very much the same to me now as it did then.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
On CNN, just watched someone moving from cop car to cop car with a pair of bolt cutters doing something to each car. Suspect they’re cutting brake lines.
ETA In Philly, just before the vehicle fire started.
mrmoshpotato
@Chyron HR:
True. Fuck Bernie.
Bill Arnold
@germy:
Just to be personally on the record, I am very opposed to Fascists and Fascism. My father was also an anti-Fascist, and in fact as a young man personally killed many Fascists in Europe with a rifle. And grenades.
He could smell Fascists, at least the German variety, an ability which was greatly appreciated by his platoon.
He is deceased, but he would, if still alive and in my estimation, not be amused by D.J. Trump.
Ladyraxterinok
I was pregnant, and we moved from grad school in CA to IA in Aug of 68
Dates/events that formed the era
*Spring 1963 Medgar Evers gunned down in his driveway in MS
*June 63 JFK speech in Berlin
*August 63 MLK ‘I have a dream speech’ in DC
*September 63 Birmingham Church bombing
*November 63 JFK assassinated
*1964 start of Vietnam War and teach-ins on college campuses
*1964
*1964 Mississippi Summer, murder of 3 Civil Rights Workers
*1965 murder of Emmet Till, mother displays his body so whites will see reality
*1965 VietNam Summer–summer of massive teach-ins
Baud
I’m glad that I no longer have to think about Bernie. Is there some reason to do so in this context?
Martin
@Chief Oshkosh: I can’t speak too directly to the NYPD, but my family still has a lot of control over FDNY, and it was always used as an apparatus to favor my family, others like my family (white, irish catholics), and punish those they didn’t want to have power (blacks, women, etc.)
I think democrats tend to underestimate how enduring and powerful culture can be. One you establish that culture within the institution, even if the individuals who initiated and perpetuated it leave, the culture tends to live on quite strong and is difficult if not impossible to replace. One really key reason why companies go out of business is that they can’t change their culture to adapt to market realities. And many corporations deal with that by starting completely different companies that aren’t infected with the old culture and are encouraged to develop a completely different one. We had a situation at work where we were building a new department that we didn’t want to pick up the culture of the departments it was going to be most closely affiliated with. We physically removed them from the affiliated departments – putting them physically some distance away, and decided that we would hire completely new staff for the department rather than draw from our own ranks. At first the new department disliked being remote but after about a year they thanked us for doing that because they realized it allowed them to develop their own culture which they felt was more collegial and productive than their peers (and it was, and remains to this day 20 years later).
A lot of police departments need to be effectively burned to the ground and rebuilt to knock that culture out of them. Lots of well intentioned chiefs go in there to change the culture, and simply can’t. It’s just too much for a chief to solve – at least in a large PD like a major city.
Baud
For people looking for good omens.
Ladyraxterinok
@Ladyraxterinok:
@Ladyraxterinok:
Till was murdered in 1955!!
West of the Rockies
Thank you for your post, Cheryl. I am an optimistic misanthrope. Things are shit now, but I would like to believe we are on the cusp of change. This right wing nationalism that has been on the rise for some time now (here, in the UK, France–see LePen–India, etc) clearly does not have any answers or solutions. People are growing weary of it.
With Biden, I hope we have a return to civility, someone who takes climate change and systemic racism seriously.
Perhaps social media can be made less problematic. Perhaps systemic consolidation of wealth and power can be addressed.
Anyway, this I hope. I hope this is the weakened, frightened rasping of a wild, mad beast, and that clearer thinking is ahead.
Kent
No more reason to think about Bernie than say Buttigieg. At least as far as I can see.
Bill Arnold
Thread, about a Oath Keepers demonstration. The city where this happened is not majority-white, not by any stretch. I, um, recognize the location. There were no Floyd riots in town, that I’ve heard of at least.[1]
At least in the first photo most of the “demonstrators” were wearing masks, even outside. This being NY (mandatory indoor face coverings order) in a county with a fairly high SARS-CoV-2 tested-positive infection rate.
[1] 1967 there was a “riot” against a white supremacist group: Rally Blaming Jews, Negroes for Country’s Ills Triggers Riot in Newburgh, N. Y. (July 31, 1967, Jewish Telegraphic Agency historical archive)
Mike in NC
Anybody who in 1968 believed Nixon really had a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam was an idiot. Anybody who in 2016 believed Fat Bastard would build a beautiful border wall and force Mexico to pay for it was in idiot. Sadly, there is no cure for such stupidity. We just have to outvote them in November.
Zelma
I was going to reference the Fallows article but Dagaetch beat me to it. Fallowes seems to be less optimistic than Cheryl is and I have to say that I tend to agree with him.
I was at about the same place as Cheryl in my life – working on my dissertation. That spring and summer of 1968 were dreadful and in some ways similar to today – without the political assassinations. I had campaigned for McCarthy and ended up voting – reluctantly – for Humphrey because my Black friends convinced me that Nixon would be a disaster for civil rights. And he was in many ways but at least he was not an avowed racist. And he wasn’t an idiot.
Fallowes is worried because he is afraid that moderate suburban voters whom we need to defeat Trump will move rightward because of the violence. I share that fear. If there is a mitigating factor, it is that Nixon was the outsider while all of this is happening on Trump’s watch. Of course, Trump will say that it is not his responsibility. Will enough voters disagree?
Miss Bianca
Thank you for this essay, Cheryl. I was around in 1968, but I was only four years old. Growing up in a lily-white suburb of Detroit. But young as I was and white as my surroundings were, I could feel the tension. I am sure that that is almost 100% due to the fact that I had much older brothers and sisters, and most all of them were very much affected by the tenor of the times. One sister was still in high school, one had just graduated, both of them involved in protests and young lefty social/political scenes. One brother who was basically forced into the Navy as a result of several personal and academic screw-ups. My father, a Navy man himself during WWII, doubtless thought it would develop his character. It did, I suppose, but not in a good way, from what I was able to observe.
I still remember him waking me up to kiss me goodbye as he was leaving for basic training. I remember being very upset because he was my favorite brother, I adored him, and I was afraid. And besides, I could tell my mother was upset, although she was trying not to show it. I had already figured out that going off to war was not a good thing, and that I might not ever see him again, even if he didn’t make it all the way to Vietnam.
I remember the riots – at least, I remember hearing about them. My mother was an out-and-proud racist, and she and one of my sisters, who was actually living down on the east side of Detroit at the time and rubbing shoulders with the Yippies and the Black Panthers, were constantly getting into it. In our neighborhood, talk was as far as the action got. In my sister’s neighborhood, tanks were rolling down the streets.
However, I also remember, oddly vividly, 1968 being the year that the Tigers won the pennant. For some reason, that got me wound up enough to circle the block on my tricycle an untold number of times.
raven
I started the year in Korea and on the 19th of January the North Koreans sent a 31 man commando team across the DMZ through our AO down to Seoul to take Park Chung Hee’s head back to Kim Il Sung. A few days later they took the Pueblo and we moved out to the field thinking the balloon was going up. I left Korea in April and by October I was in Vietnam after watching the Chicago Convention in the barracks. Was it worse than this? Does it matter? Nope.
germy
They’re more open about it nowadays.
Roger Moore
@different-church-lady:
I think there’s more to it than that. One thing that’s shown up in polls is that liberal whites are now actually more worried about racism than blacks, and this is something that’s been building for several years. IMO, a huge part of it, and an understated political development since the late Obama years, is that the Democrats have been solidifying as a coalition.
At least since FDR, the Democrats have been a broad coalition of a wide range of groups who don’t necessarily have a lot in common except for being out groups who the Republicans don’t like: labor unions, ethnic and religious minorities, people who want economic justice, etc. This is a key reason we’re always seen as being in disarray; we’re always having to convince one group to back something of interest to another group that they don’t necessarily like.
But we have been working at getting everyone in the coalition to agree to back everyone else’s particular interest. It’s interesting to see, as an example, black churches backing LGBTQ rights when a generation ago they were much more socially conservative. Similarly, white economic liberals are a lot more likely to see systemic racism as a key social problem than they used to be.
IMO, this is a big reason Bernie Bros were so divisive. Even though Bernie himself is quite socially liberal, he always talked about solving all our problems by dealing with economic inequality, and that meant he attracted the kind of white liberal who didn’t want to think about racial and gender inequality as fundamentally different problems from economic inequality. A lot of the anti-Berner energy was about people telling them they needed to get with the program and start backing the specific interests of everyone else in the coalition.
germy
@Martin:
The writer of this thread met with most Democratic presidential candidates, including Joe Biden.
opiejeanne
My high school years in Southern California were marked by the usual teenage despair, elation, and heartbreak, set to a dystopian background of rioting and burning cities, plus the constant drumbeat of news from Vietnam.
In 1965 I was 15. My dad worked for the city of Los Angeles, in their electrical testing lab (just like Underwriters) and sometimes he had to go to places in or near the rioting, and I was worried. He came home on the 12th of August, the day after the riots started and quietly put his WWII pistol in the trunk of his car. He said he wasn’t sure what good it would do him but he had been told to do so by his boss, because he was an “officer of the law”. That was a really long stretch, but while he had to go into the area twice, he only came back with funny stories.
In 1968 I was a senior in HS and later a Freshman at Cal Poly Pomona. Those years in between are full of stuff that should have ended up in HS history books, like the Six-Day War, and the summer of 1967 when Detroit and other cities rioted and burned, but our history books ended at JFK’s inauguration and we didn’t always recognize that what we witnessed was history.
Martin
@Bill Arnold: The Minutemen here out west were a similar cosplay group dating back to the early 2000s. Most of them got arrested for sexually assaulting children or murder. Oathkeepers is no different. I understand the Klan formed a border patrol group decades ago, so they’re all in good company there.
JoyceH
I was just drawing comparisons to 1968 over on Facebook. To me, the main difference between then and now is that back then I had fresh young knees and the music was good. I was thinking that these days I have less willingness to watch the riot coverage for very long, but I’m not sure that’s true, because I don’t think riots were given live coverage start to finish back then. By the time of the Rodney King riots, then it was continuous coverage, but I don’t think 68 had more than a recap and some images on the half hour of nightly news.
raven
@Martin: In the early 70’s they sent letters to activist in Champaign-Urbana saying “The crosshairs are on your back”.
p.a.
I too am optimistic abt victory in Nov (my natural default however being: ugh), but as for a rebuild, really feeling the fed judiciary has been corrupted for a generation. Possibly we can flood the system w lawsuits then resort to ‘court packing’ as a solution to the overwhelmed court system problem. Of course this means winning a working Senate majority…
opiejeanne
@germy: Then my dad was a terrorist.
Chyron HR
@Baud:
You might feel differently after Krystal Ball, Nina Turner, and David Sirota all come out with their fake rape accusations against Biden.
KSinMA
Just to pile on … In 1968, the three TV networks were not owned by entertainment companies. Also, the NY Times was an excellent paper, with really liberal opinion writers (and also Russell Baker). Imagine that!
opiejeanne
@germy: No, I have stupid neighbors too.
Bill Arnold
The OP by Cheryl Rofer is really good by the way. I read it a couple of times; it captures the important uncertainties and variables.
Surveillance by citizens is a really powerful difference. Many of those white agitators/provocateurs will, even though masked, be identified and their lives both online and offline examined quite extensively. Plus those who carried phones (that were not fully powered off) will be trackable by authorities and anyone who buys “anonymized”(hah) tracking data.
J R in WV
We landed on the F’in Moon in 1969, that was pretty cool. And Woodstock happened, free love and R&R, whoot!!
But otherwise, Cheryl has it pretty close. Assassinations, followed by riots. And then as now, the harder the cops “crack down” the worse the violence gets… in America, no one gives up when crack down happens, we just get mad, want to get even.
I was a freshman at college for the first time, in 1968… took me til 1984 to nail down a BSCS degree and start a career. Not that all the other stuff I learned, how to plow with a horse, how to plumb a hot water baseboard heat system, fortunately the boiler came with really good instructions and illustrations, including all the other parts I would need, etc, etc. was all valuable life experience.
I still nearly folded up the other day when the tree hit the house — so sudden, never had THAT happen before. Was hard!
Hoping so hard that 2020 isn’t much worse than 1968, but really, it’s already worse because people are dying from a plague, way worse than the unrest and at this point much worse than the deaths from ‘nam. Will be twice as bad really soon. I’m just hoping we don’t get worse than WW II in terms of death toll and injured past recovery, as it now appears that not dying isn’t the end of the disease at all.
dopey-o
Is 2020 going to be worse than 1968? Too soon to tell.
Rome wasn’t burned in a day.
Omnes Omnibus
@Kent: Buttigieg still has a future in Democratic politics.
Cheryl Rofer
@West of the Rockies: Yes. Another way to say what I said in the OP is that a similarity between the two years is that they are endings. Sadly, 1968 ended a lot of the positive hopes for the sixties. (Although I remind myself that there was progress in civil rights after 1968, even though not what it should have been.) Now we are ending the reactionary run that developed in response.
Salty Sam
Good point! I’d much rather hash over “Beto- Ready for prime time or not?”
JoyceH
Hey? I just had an idea. It might not stop the violence, but it would stop the blame for the violence being pinned on the anti-police-brutality protesters.
Ready? Here it is. Designate the protests WOMEN ONLY. No men allowed. Yeah, a lot of times women march for their issues, and some men march along to show they’re supportive. Not this time. Sit this one out, guys.
Why does this work? Because women don’t riot. (At least, she said with narrowed eyes, not YET.) AND any men who show up will be obviously not part of the protest, and will therefore be easily identified as people who just want to break things and cause trouble.
You think we could get this word out? Protests – women only. When the men show up, they’re something else.
And I think maybe with the streaming video everywhere, police would be less likely to violently attack a bunch of peaceful women marchers, and a lot more likely to be fired if they do.
Aziz, light!
I was there, in high school then, marching around in demonstrations in the street. Much more galling to us than the hundreds of American soldiers dying every week were the thousands of Vietnamese whose lives they were taking. The gross immorality of this elective war against a people who did nothing to us and who posed no threat to our security made us ashamed to be Americans. I learned for the first time that America is a nation of bedwetters whose inchoate fears drive them to murder civilians in large numbers somewhere in the world every 10 to 20 years.
debbie
@germy:
That right there is why 2020 is worse than 1968. In 1968, people knew fascism was the enemy. Now, maybe most of his supporters still know it, but they’re willing to ignore what they know in favor of their loyalty to Trump.
JaySinWA
Unlike 1968 the opposition could run on a law and order platform and did. I don’t think that works for BIden. It is good that the lead seems to be growing for him, but I think there is a risk of rise of a third party attacking the chaos and taking an unpredictable slice from each candidate. Not enough to win, but enough to make the outcome uncertain. We can’t take anything for granted.
The pundits have decreed in years past that nobody is paying attention until Labor day, or at least they don’t make up their mind. As I recall there was a lot of attention paid in 68, and there was a lot of demoralisation of Democrats. The same could play out for Republicans over the next few months. But for the moment there are way too many variables to predict victory or defeat. This promises to be a long and anxious summer.
CaseyL
In 1968 I was 12 years old, so what I know about it is in retrospect, from hearing and reading accounts and histories of the time.
In 1968 I think there was, still, a quality of naivete: we really believed the arc of the universe was toward justice. We really believed that better communication would result in a better society. We really believed that most people wanted a better society, and only needed to be shown the path to it.
In 2020, I don’t think we still have any illusions about our fellow Americans. The ones who are racist and support racism do so in full knowledge of what they support; the ones who support T* do so with the full knowledge of what that means.
In 2020, we know about 30-40% of the country is fine with fascism, and are unreachable to reason and logic, never mind appeals to the non-existent angels of their better nature. That was also probably true in 1968 – Nixon did win, after all – but I don’t think we realized it quite as viscerally as we do now.
Frank Wilhoit
America disintegrated in 1980. It has taken forty years for [a critical mass of] the pieces to hit the ground.
germy
@opiejeanne: I guess mine was, too.
He enlisted right after Pearl Harbor. Got sent to Europe as a rifleman.
Miss Bianca
@different-church-lady:
My God, I think you’re onto something here.
Not just the pandemic, tho’ that’s an intensifier – I think that while some white people feel empowered in their white supremacy by Trump, a lot of other white people are experiencing a sense of being profoundly *dis*empowered – I know I did. I went through a long period of feeling alternately infuriated and completely numb. I felt so discouraged I almost gave up political activism. I was so disgusted by what I saw white people doing on the right *and* the left – realizing that white supremacy was a thing on the left, as well as the right, however vehemently we white liberals would deny it, and that a lot of so-called “progressivism” was plain old updated White Populism, now with the racism hidden behind a Woke! veneer.
It was so bitter to have to chew on that cud and realize how much unacknowledged white privilege had gone into some of my earlier political stances and beliefs. I felt confused; I felt ashamed.
And finally what I feel now is a cold, focused rage. Fuck Whiteness. Fuck it. It’s about damn time all of us *at the very least* acknowledge the truth of what it means to be a POC in the US. It’s impossible to be a good faith Democrat, I contend, without that, and without committing to the Democratic Party as the only one on our political scene really committed to equalizing the playing field, even if in at times partial, cautious, and imperfect way.
Cameron
I can’t make a personal comparison of the two time periods. I was 17 in 1968, but I was so full of alcohol and chemicals from then through the next 20 years that I don’t remember a hell of a lot.
frosty
My semi- serious take:
1918: Pandemic
1939: Great Depression
1968: Civil unrest and riots
.
2020: Hold my beer
Dorothy A. Winsor
@oopzwtf: WTF is wrong with people? They not only won’t wear a mask, and thus risk their own and other’s health, they have to go after people who make a different choice.
Cheryl Rofer
@Zelma: Here’s the Fallows article.
I thought about linking it in my post, but decided that he and I are doing different things. I just wanted to lay out things that are the same and different about the two times to clarify them for myself. There are a lot of places you can go with them, and he goes to a different place than I do.
The common wisdom about civil unrest is that it turns voters toward a strong leader, or one that promises to eliminate that unrest. The common wisdom says that favors conservatives.
I think it is becoming obvious that Donald Trump, who brags about hiding from the protesters in the White House and who is mostly hiding today, is not a strong leader. I think that people are beginning to realize that the way to eliminate civil unrest is to eliminate the injustices.
But I tend to run optimistic, and I’ve been wrong before. Setting a marker that you can check back and see whether Fallows is right, or if I am. And, as I said above, a lot can happen between now and November.
Matt McIrvin
@Roger Moore: A lot of the strife was just that the current coalition is slightly different from the coalition that opposed Bush.
If you weren’t particularly interested in domestic policy but were with Obama in 2008 mostly because you were against US imperial aggression in any form, there was a good chance you ended up disappointed by the drone war or Obama’s inability to close Gitmo, and you ended up opposing him and Hillary Clinton along with Greenwald and that gang, maybe even becoming a fan of Julian Assange and alt-right curious.
Meanwhile, we’ve got some old never-Trumper neocons coming into the coalition and intermittently grousing about it being too full of liberals.
Jess
Has this been posted yet?
https://twitter.com/TheoShantonas/status/1267096096825905152?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Eembeddedtimeline%7Ctwterm%5Eprofile%3ARealRBHJr&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Fdoonesbury%2F
Ray of hope!
Bill Arnold
@Frank Wilhoit:
We quote your classic comment at crookedtimber on conservatism here all the time.
Respect, for that comment.
Kent
In 1968 the US was 88% white and the voting population was even more white. Probably over 90%?
Today the US is 59.7% white
That has to mean something when we compare 1968 to 2020. It isn’t the same country anymore.
Omnes Omnibus
How this year compares to 1968 largely depends on us.
J R in WV
@germy:
OK, lessee here, now, if you’re against anti-fascism, that make you PRO Fascist!!
Have I got that correct!???! I believe I do! No surprise, Trump has obviously been a fascist for most of his life, still is, this is my not-shocked face!
Baud
@Chyron HR:
I’ll be ready to meet them if and when they begin their next ratfuck attempt. Today is not that day.
JoyceH
@Cheryl Rofer: “The common wisdom about civil unrest is that it turns voters toward a strong leader, or one that promises to eliminate that unrest.”
That works less well when the ‘strong leader’ is the incumbent. If Trump has the utter gall to try to run on Lawn Order, the obvious response is, hey, where were you in May when the cities were burning? If you couldn’t stop it then, why should we think you can now?
Aziz, light!
One thing that hasn’t changed is what was said by Mayor Daley:
“Gentlemen, let’s get the thing straight, once and for all. The policeman isn’t there to create disorder; the policeman is there to preserve disorder.”
Jinchi
@debbie: I don’t think the authorities were clueless in 1968.
germy
@JoyceH:
Yes, it makes his “Only I can fix this” rhetoric less effective.
NotMax
Parallels with 1968 are tenuous. If comparisons must be made, would look to 1967.
Also, a side note for those who weren’t there in ’68: Humphrey did not directly compete in any primaries. After LBJ bowed out, HHH initially became the prohibitive favorite by default but applying “presumptive nominee” is a stretch, IMHO, until after RFK’s assassination
Cheryl Rofer
@JoyceH: Yes. I didn’t emphasize it in the OP, but a big difference is that in 1968, Democrats were the incumbents and thus blameable for the troubles, but this year, it’s clearly the Trump Party that is responsible.
The Man Himself even called for a change in 2020 via a tweet the other day.
West of the Rockies
@JoyceH:
1st Amendment issues… Oh, and the damn Prime Directive.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
“Killing Eve” season finale tonight on BBC and AMC.
The season has been awesome. (trailer)
Brachiator
I remember 1968. Everything seemed possible. Everything seemed impossible
January 30, North Vietnam launched the Yet Offensive
February 27, on a CBS News piece, anchor Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America, declared the Vietnam War to be unwinnable. The only way out had to be through negotiation.
This offended conservatives, who ever since, have been trying to restore the fantasy that America can do anything.
The war was shown more honestly on television.
The US became part of the world of global protest
Prague Spring, and the subsequent brutal invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union
Student protests in America, Poland, Mexico, Italy and France. In France, de Gaulle dissolves the National Assembly and calls for elections
Protests are part of the Olympic Games
The first statewide teacher’s strike happens in Florida
My Lai massacre occurs, will become known to public in 1969
150 feminists protest the Miss America pageant
Military juntas take power in Greece, Panama and Peru
The Troubles begin in Northern Ireland
Yale University announced that it will admit women
The Beatles release The White Album. The Rolling Stones release Beggars Banquet. Led Zeppelin make their first live appearance. Elvis appears on television in his comeback special.
In 2018, the US and India were named the deadliest countries for journalists.
Ruckus
@different-church-lady:
There have been times when some white people, have had to struggle through vulnerability. There have been times when most people were vulnerable, like the depression. Black people were of course, always more vulnerable. But few alive today have much memories of the depression or the political similarities of the federal government to attempt, or at least sound like they were attempting to fix the situation. The conservative side of the aisle fucked that up as well. The party of business thieves slathered itself in the same level of glory they are repeating today. And for the same reasons.
We have history available to tell us how not to do this that we are going through now, I’m just wondering if it’s time to not repeat the methodology that always follows when liberals fix the messes that conservatives always make. Can we do this smarter or are we always destined to make the same mistakes over and over and over and over……..
Omnes Omnibus
@David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch: The episode where Villanelle visited her family was nuts – in a good way.
Martin
@germy: Thanks, that’s a good thread.
SiubhanDuinne
@Chief Oshkosh:
Not for the first time in my life, I find myself wondering: Do police departments go out of their way to screen for authoritarian, sociopathic bullies, or do they recruit nice ordinary kids and poison their minds once they’re hired?
JaySinWA
I don’t think it was idiotic to believe the war could end, but the belief that Nixon was going to do it was naive.
The wall and who would pay for it was mostly a Shiboleth. Almost nobody believed it to be literal, but it signaled an intent. Of course the intent was open to interpretation, racism, protectionism, or anti-immigration, depending on what they wanted it to be.
Kelly
I was 12 in 1968. The first national news I recall was JFK’s assassination. The wildness of 1968 just seemed to be the way the world was. The draft ended when I was in high school which took care of a tough decision. Nixon got the boot. I really thought liberty and justice for all had happened. It took GW Bush to persuade me I was wrong.
Miss Bianca
@Frank Wilhoit: I tend to agree with you. I remember watching the returns for the 1980 election and feeling very queasy. (I was already a Democrat by age 17, despite being brought up in a staunchly Republican household and town).
My entire adult life, as a student, as a worker, as a woman, as a citizen, has been marred by Ronald Reagan and Reaganism. I would so, so love it if the last ten years of my effective working life, we managed to start undoing some of the bankrupt GOP ideology that stemmed from Ronald Reagan’s election.
Another Scott
COVID19.HealthData.Org for Virginia seems to be smoothing some of their data now – it’s a little less noisy. Virginia’s Daily Death numbers are rising again from a local minimum and are near the previous global maximum. I haven’t seen that happening in other nearby states that I’ve checked, so I’m not sure what’s going on there. But it’s worrying.
I remember some of 1968. Some great cars, some great baseball, some great advances in the American space program, some very dangerous politics for the country. Vietnam was always on the news, and always in people’s minds. It was also the year that George Wallace ran for President and won several southern states…
(I’m convinced (probably wrongly) that Nixon won in 1972 not because McGovern was somehow so terrible but because Kissinger said “peace is at hand” just before the November election and too many people believed him.)
1968 should be a cautionary tale for those who want to inflame passions, or those who want to ignore the importance of ruling with the “consent of the governed.”
Thanks Cheryl.
Cheers,
Scott.
BBA
My mind doesn’t go to 1968. Is this what it was like in Germany in the early ’30s? Brownshirts and Antifa and Iron Front fighting in the streets, leaving the populace hungry for a strongman to restore order?
Ruckus
@debbie:
As Cheryl said the police are also better/worse equipped to handle this type of issue, depending on your political views. Some police seem to want to make it worse by any means they have, which is all violence, rubber bullets or not. There is a picture of a woman reporter on twitter who has a big gash in her forehead and a swollen eye from a rubber bullet. Seems she may lose sight in that eye. I believe she’s the reporter whom the cop stopped, turned left, raised his gun and shot at her face not that far away. And she was identified as a reporter, with the press, where they were supposed to be. Is that a rogue cop, or department policy? Will it ever be addressed in any way?
IOW yes, I agree. With our lack of federal leadership, except always the worst answer possible and the police departments that think it is their duty to violently control anyone/everyone they desire, this will probably be worse than 1968.
Tom Q
I was 16 in 1968, and, though you’d think it was impossible, I was pretty much apolitical. I noticed all the things happening around me, but perceived them simply as events, without a political filter. (My only filter was Teenager.) I’ve of course come to learn far more about the events, through that political lens, in the decades since. There’s no question the political world has never been the same since.
But that doesn’t mean the political world has remained static in all those years. As Kent notes just above, the demographics of the country — not just racial, but religious/secular — have shifted dramatically. Barack Obama would have been soundly defeated under 1968’s metrics, but he instead won two solid victories.
I note some Never-Trumpers think politics are still frozen in 1968, and they’re screaming that Trump will grab the Nixon law-n-order banner and ride to victory on it. One of these Never-Trumpers is Mona Charen — and I cite her because I particularly recall her saying the precise same in 1992, after the Rodney King verdict/LA riots. And she was 100% wrong: HW Bush’s numbers did a polling nose-dive after that (though it was somewhat masqueraded by Perot’s presence in the race), and he never recovered.
I’d argue, in terms of these riots, 1992 is the truer analogy than 1968. HW Bush was already unpopular because of the economy, but holding his own in polling until the riots created a “Make it stop!” feeling in the populace. The Rodney King incident was, like the Floyd killing, a case so flagrant that significant numbers of white people saw the injustice and joined the outrage. More to the point, Bush, like LBJ in’68, was held responsible for the ensuing uprisings. Incumbents are debited or credited for things that happen during their terms; they don’t get to say the other guy would have done it worse. Trump as challenger could ride on public reaction against Ferguson. But he’s been in charge for 3 1/2 years now, and this all goes on his tab.
Miss Bianca
@NotMax: Yes, those two years tend to run together in my mind, which is why I keep thinking the Detroit Riots were in ’68, not ’67.
Of course, the only thing I remember with *crystal* clarity about the summer of ’67 was that “Penny Lane” came out on the radio, and I was running around the house singing it, completely enchanted by it. Of course, I thought it was about a girl named Elaine, and so I was actually running around the house singing, “And Elaine is in my ears and in my eyes”.
Maybe the fact that I remember the Beatles more clearly than anything political from that year reveals some deep inner clue about my pursuits as an adult. ; )
bluehill
@germy: Trump isn’t strong, but IMO this crisis is one suited to his “strengths” as opposed to covid. He can/will tie this to dems and their soft-on-crime policies. I think it is more likely to resonate in a way that the Ukraine, China and anti-covid manufactured villans don’t. It won’t matter in the blue states, but maybe in MI, AZ, FL, WI, OH. It could help him keep one or both senate seats in GA. He just needs to replace the fear of 4 more years with the fear of the country being overrun by “those people.” Given everything that’s happened in the past four years, that could be tough, but he doesn’t have many options.
Feathers
@Kent: @Miss Bianca:
Team 4-in-68 represent! I have no memory of the fighting in Vietnam or the riots or the assassinations. Grew up in a close in VA suburb, with very political parents, but apparently they made the choice to keep us kids away from the TV news. My father went to the March on Washington in 63 (on his lunch hour, he worked nearby) and later talked about the riots breaking out while he was at work and everyone worrying about the safety of their black co-workers. Again no memory, but I am told we drove to Arlington Ridge Road to see the smoke over the city. My mother would have been five months pregnant with my brother. Probably another reason the bad news wasn’t discussed. I have a vague memory of a discussion with playmates trying to figure out what was going on, but no reality to tie it to.
Oddly enough, we moved to Ireland in 1969, and I have full memories of the Troubles there, the bombings, the angry news broadcasts filled with anti-Irish invective. We were dirty, nasty, had too many children, didn’t know our place. I guess you can’t look away when you are the victim. It certainly gave me a different perspective on racism when we returned to Virginia in time for school busing. As my mother told me, the English said the same things about us as the racists are saying about black people – it wasn’t true about us and it’s not true about them.
I also remember having friends whose fathers had died in Vietnam. In middle school we had a sudden influx of Vietnamese kids. Every church was sponsoring at least two families. The house I lived in for my teen years (and my parents until last year) had no garage and an odd layout on the first floor. It had been adapted to the specifications of a military family coming back from Vietnam. A man who worked for the father had been killed. His widow and children were brought to the US and lived in the house with the family. Apparently the visa and permissions were easier for live in help from Vietnam coming to the US and being live in help here. That room became my bedroom.
Sorry to ramble. It started with I don’t really remember ’68, but then realizing how many other memories fall under that category when truly considered.
WaterGirl
@Chief Oshkosh:
They were born too late to be part of Hitler’s SS?
Mike R
@WaterGirl: Good one.
Ladyraxterinok
@Ladyraxterinok:
More dates
* 1953 US, UK depose govt of Iran
* 1954 Brown v Boatd of Education
* 1955 Emmet Till murdered
* 1956 Hungarian Uprising
* 1957 Little Rock HS desegregated—Ike calls out military
* August 1961 Soviets put up Berlin Wall
* Fall 1962 James Meredith enters U of MS—JFK calls up 1000s of military
* October 1962 Cuban Missle Crisis
@Ladyraxterinok:
JoyceH
@SiubhanDuinne: “Not for the first time in my life, I find myself wondering: Do police departments go out of their way to screen for authoritarian, sociopathic bullies, or do they recruit nice ordinary kids and poison their minds once they’re hired?”
This reminds me of a couple things, and I’m going to cite them though I can’t give you a reference; this is from memory.
I recall ages ago being in a class where I was told that there is a certain personality type that could go one of two ways – this personality type tends to become a career criminal OR become a policeman. Well of course, these are the sort of cops who should never have been cops in the first place and we would all be better off if they could be screened out somehow before they ever join. And I do think this personality type are the ones who wind up with the vast vast majority of the excessive force complaints, and they probably do ‘infect’ some of the younger cops who think they’re cool.
The other thing I remember is from the run-up to the Iraq War. Watching a panel discussion on whether or not the US should invade Iraq, and one of the panelists said that this would be a war of choice, not necessity, and those should be avoided because you seldom achieve the objectives that were the reason you went to war, and also because of unintended consequences. One of the unintended consequences the guy cites was that after EVERY war we’ve ever fought, there has been a significant upswing in police brutality. War vets come home and join the police forces and bring with them the habits and mindset of being part of an occupying force in enemy territory, which is obviously not conducive to friendly neighborhood policing.
Miss Bianca
@BBA: Yeah, but a critical difference between then and now is that the so-called “strongman” that the populace is yearning is already in the White House – visibly cowering and visibly fomenting disorder, not claiming to be able to quell it.
Or do you mean that Joe Biden is going to be seen as that strongman leader? : )
laura
@Martin: and they stole the name of the real minutemen – the San Pedro punk 4some who raged in the reagan days of funding fascists in central America and what it was like when your brother came home from Vietnam shattered.
Sab
@Martin: Boy is that the truth about police department culture. Since the Iraq/ Afghanistan wars police departments have been almost exclusively recruiting from the armed services. And they aren’t getting the career people, because those are too old. So what we are getting is kids who go in for six years with no intention of staying, spend most of their service time training for and being deployed as an occupying force in a foreign country, and then they bring those skills home to police forces in American cities.
Also too, in Ohio at least police cannot be required to live in their work communities. So they don’t. They are no longer policing their own communities. So a lot of them just don’t care anymore.
Omnes Omnibus
@Feathers: I turned four in August of 1968. I don’t remember much of it. I do know that I was at the Democratic Convention in Chicago.
FelonyGovt
Great post, Cheryl. I’ve been reflecting on 1968 as well.
I was 14 in 1968 and sadly, what I remember best is my creepy, 20-something year old neighbor using “Quite a scene at the Convention!” as an attempted pickup line. Ugh.
debbie
@Jinchi:
I don’t think they expected the responses to their actions; I think Trump knows exactly what the responses to his actions will be.
debbie
@SiubhanDuinne:
FWIW, I think they screen less or not at all. Standards have been lowered to get more applicants.
Miss Bianca
@Feathers: Fascinating!
ETA: Actually, this is one of the most fascinating threads I think I’ve ever read on BJ, home of many and many a fascinating thread. We’re all “rambling”, really, and it’s all very thought-provoking stuff.
Roger Moore
@germy:
This is more or less my take as well. The Rodney King riots did not help Bush Sr. win reelection.
Krope, the Formerly Dope
Inertia? Contemptful shit-stirring?
Ruckus
@Martin:
I think that culture may be worse now, because of all the military gear and concepts that have been introduced over the last few decades. The basic concept has changed from policing, which was often rather authoritarian in any case to military action, which has always been about overwhelming force. Stun, capture, kill seems to be the entire toolbox. It’s not always that way but is far too often.
Elizabelle
All this, and a curfew tonight too.
oopzwtf
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Facebook
Miss Bianca
@JoyceH:
Well, if that isn’t the meat of the nut right there.
ETA: I know it would never hold up to a Constitutional challenge, but I would love to see a moratorium placed on police departments being able to recruit from the military. At least not unless and until the recruits had gone through and passed an intensive “demilitarization” program.
Feathers
@JoyceH: When I took abnormal psychiatry, when we got to psychopaths, someone asked how do you find them to study? The professor replied that you just do the study at the business school. There are generally enough people high enough on the psychopathy scale to have a reasonable study size.
Elizabelle
I don’t think we were as flooded with guns in 1968. They were there, sure. They were not as much a way of life and reason for existing.
So many reasons for police brutality, but I think a part of it is: they are afraid of us. Because they come from a culture that might have more guns in their own family of origin, circle of friends and community.
They assume WE are a threat to their continued existence.
They will not be honest about that fear. And they assume it is coming from all of us.
Main thing is: say you were in fear of your life. And then it is a good shoot.
Kent
@Ladyraxterinok: I’m not sure what your point is. You can do that with any decade in history. The 2010s were equally as consequential.
https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2019/12/31/790256816/the-2010s-a-decade-of-protests-around-the-world
JMG
Quite old enough to remember ’68. My hometown of Wilmington, Del. had a riot after King assassination then another one when a couple of FBI agents went into a poolroom looking for an Army deserter. Poolroom customers beat the shit out of them. Governor called in the National Guard. Riot ended in a day or so, but the Governor left the Guard on the streets for six months in the belief it’d help him get re-elected. It didn’t. Man were those guys (most of whom not much older than me) pissed to be standing on corners being ignored day after day.
different-church-lady
@JoyceH: Trump is not a “strong leader”, even with the quotes: he’s a non-leader. And people are starting to figure it out.
Ruckus
@Zelma:
Only thing about shitforbrains. He will claim that nothing is his responsibility. OK he might not say nothing, but any list that shows something that he could get blamed for he will claim that he is not responsible for, even if he said ten minutes prior that he would change that whatever. He will never admit it but he knows he’s a total failure. His desperation to succeed in the face of his history of overwhelming failure is nothing new. That is the definition of his entire life.
JPL
I’m not a fan of Peter Baker but he makes an interesting point. I can only copy the link and can’t open so you’ll have to click. jpg file
Elizabelle
@Elizabelle: NOTE: Need to add: “And this goes quadruple for people of color.”
frosty
@SiubhanDuinne: Because my eldest is a nice, reasonable kid, and because he Is now a Pittsburgh cop, your first assumption is wrong. They don’t screen for bullies. They don’t make all of them into authoritarians either.
Elizabelle
@JPL: We are indeed going through a great national trauma.
And fucks like Peter Baker and his Clinton Derangement Syndrome NY Times helped deliver us straight into it.
As Kay points out constantly, Trump was in their backyard.
Krope, the Formerly Dope
Yeah; but if he howls loud enough, bares his backside and slaps it brazenly enough, and raises his hackles high enough; he may trick enough people into thinking he’s a strong leader.
Kent
Being born in 1964 I was only four years old in 1968. Honestly the only national event I remember from the 1960s was the 1969 moon landing which absolutely captured the national attention like nothing else before or since. That is the first adult event I remember watching on TV. Every single kid wanted to be an astronaut back then.
I do remember being in the car and driving around with my somewhat conservative parents who tended to mostly just notice the long hair on guys and short skirts on girls and seemed to be equally appalled by both. We lived in rural Vermont at the time so honestly were about as far from unrest as once could be.
It is amazing how much history of that particular time one just absorbs by being around older teachers, adults, culture and media that has just obsessed with that time ever since. But I also wonder how much my popular culture image of that time is distorted from actual reality
raven
@frosty: That’ll be falling on deaf ears here.
zhena gogolia
@Jess:
That’s a beautiful clip. Although I worry about their lack of distancing!
zhena gogolia
@JPL:
Yeah, Peter, and 90% of the trauma is caused by that guy that you helped to put into office.
JPL
@Elizabelle: I could forgive him, if they admitted their error.. He was correct that it’s more than 68.
nah.. I’ll never forgive him..
BBA
@Miss Bianca: I don’t know. We’re looking at the limits of the electoral process to effect change – Trump was elected to be that strongman, most big-city mayors were elected to rein in police, none of them are actually capable of doing what they were elected to do… I’m getting a feeling that democracy is dying, and what replaces it is likely to be so much worse.
Ruckus
@Kent:
It is a fairly dramatic change, and one for the better.
frosty
@raven: That’s the truth, isn’t it. Pittsburgh requires 30 college credits, it’s hard to get into the Academy and hard to graduate, but hell every cop is a criminal, and every vet who becomes a cop is a killer. It gets old listening to this.
What I learned after Ferguson is that a handful of bad cops are causing these problems and they get fired and rehired somewhere else. That’s the problem that needs to be addressed.
LeftCoastYankee
I think the implication that “restore order” impulse in bad times favors conservatives misses the mark this year. That process already played out in the Democratic primaries. That is the core of Biden’s appeal and strength (compared to the other primary contenders), and why he is the presumptive nominee.
Trump’s comparative failing and flailing has heightened the contradiction in Biden’s favor.
In the event of a reasonably close to normal election, Trump gets destroyed and takes the party with him.
That said, 5 more months of this (and likely worse) is frightening and painful.
oopzwtf
Will the resumption of nuclear testing help the 1968 analogy, or some other terrifying year?
Asking for a friend :(
Kylroy
@debbie: The difference is that in 1968, there was a rival world power. Domestic authorities could not afford to look like monsters in front of the world without the USSR using it to their advantage.
Now? China and Russia are infinitely more concerned with managing their own backyard than trying to actively control ours, and are completely uninterested in any sort of moral comparison with the US. Iran and others in the Middle East might seize on this, but they’re not internationally potent enough to do much that directly harms the US. I’m afraid this will end less 1968 America, more 1921 Tulsa.
JoyceH
@Miss Bianca: I don’t think you should ban police departments hiring war vets, but golly, if you’re going to issue the guy a gun and send him out on patrol, you’ve got to civilianize him first! Maybe do some “Officer Friendly” neighborhood rounds paired with an old timer who knows the neighborhood. With the rookie not yet issued a gun! Get him to internalize that the kids he sees on the streets are not going to be planting IEDs.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@bluehill:
Considering the performance, I’d question that it’s one of his strengths. Remember Trump is in the big chair.
Cheryl Rofer
@Kylroy:
gwangung
@JoyceH: I think that’s too late with at least one generation of police officers inculcated with the occupying force mind set.
Tokyokie
I was 14 in 1968 and living in the most conservative county in Oklahoma. (It went for Goldwater by about a 3-1 margin.) My mother had inherited a vicious racist streak from my grandfather, and that underlaid any political discussions in the household. To me, 1967-68 seemed like one long rolling riot, Detroit one week, maybe Newark the next, and Watts after that. I couldn’t grasp what was happening and it could not be explained using the John Birch-influenced political views with which my mother had equipped me. And for the first time in my life, I questioned the perspective with which I’d been raised. I was ignorant, but it wasn’t until 1968 that I realized that I was. The quest for wisdom and rationality continues to this day, but 1968 was the beginning for me.
JPL
@Kylroy: Both China and Russia are aiding and abetting the demonstrations. We are losing our world power status, which is apparent by State Leaders turning down trump’s G-7 meeting in June.
Barb 2
Thank you for writing this – plus all the replies are thoughtful
what the he’ll is wrong with the cop. This cop deliberately murdered a black civilian. The murder passed and looked up and then went back to making sure his victim was dead.
police forces all over the USA need to be fired and reworked from the ground up. Does this guy expect a pardon? This is the sort of violence the fat Orange one as been asking for.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
I’d bet you meant Jan 30, 1968 was the Tet offensive.
Best buddy, a marine then, landed in Da Nang on Jan 30, 1968.
Ladyraxterinok
OMG! Just heard from friend—protestors have blocked I44 in TULSA OK! where it crosses Peoria. Police blocked off the freeway. Are being ‘good’ guys.
If there are protests in Tulsa—in Tulsa! ….then….
rikyrah
@Sister Golden Bear:
simple truth
Kylroy
@JPL: I guess the difference is…does Trump care? As long as he can toot his own horn and feel important, he doesn’t give a damn if the US cedes the international stage. If he doesn’t care, the GOP doesn’t care, and that means a disproportional part of the US government at all levels has no shame in suppressing protests.
Ruckus
@JoyceH:
I have the same memories. So they must have been more than just local themes/events.
JaneE
I would like to believe that more white people were appalled by the cold blooded murder of George Floyd after watching the video, and decided that it was time to speak up for justice. That is not necessarily true of all people at the protests and I am sure that some are taking advantage of them to advance their own interests.
I am kind of surprised that more people don’t remember the Watts riots in 1965. They went on for days, with lots of buildings burnt to the ground. The national guard was patrolling a large part of South Central LA. People were killed.
rikyrah
@Baud: I
Where is he?
It’s like he has vanished?
WaterGirl
@Omnes Omnibus: Troublemaker!
Philbert
I graduated HS in 1968in the Bay Area, was attuned to the news since the Cuban Missle Crisis. One difference is that in 1968 we had seen a LOT of progress, being fought, but: Brown vs Board, voting rights act, civil rights act, Medicare, cleaner air and water. And a good job market, you could actually apply for a job and get one. Imagine that! So there was some optimism that we could progress. Since? 50 years of backlash, with an occasional moderate, so much less hope or optmism. Trump is George Wallace but from Queens, and he won rather than placed 3rd. Argh
Kent
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/05/bernie-sanders-absent-as-anti-surveillance-senate-amendment-fails.html
Yep, he’s AWOL when it counts.
Ladyraxterinok
@Miss Bianca:
I walked my IA precinct early eve80 election day. Hated to remind laggards to vote. Judt KNEW they were voting for Reaga.
Also there was a referendum to rescind the legislature’s vote to approve the ERA. There had been a massive national and state effort vs ERA led by LDS church.
WaterGirl
@zhena gogolia: That was my response too.
“This gives me hope. Oh my god, no masks!”
Taobhan
With regard to Cheryl’s allusion to winning early in the 1960s only to see gains later slip away, I remember that too. I recall the elation I felt when it seemed justice was finally prevailing in so many ways: desegregating the South, turning the tide against the war in Vietnam, booting Nixon out of office – all the things Samuel Huntington later called “an excess of democracy.” And then we saw the gains slowly slip away as reactionaries regathered and reasserted themselves. I learned then that everything in American political life is punch and counter-punch. No win is ever permanent because the other side will eventually push to reverse wins.
I suspect the founders knew it would be like this when they handed off this form of government to us. We have made progress in a lot of ways but any lasting change is only the residual improvement left after the other side counterattacked to reverse it. The reactionaries have the upper hand now and doing every possible to roll progress back to god knows when. But they’re mistaken if they believe their win is permanent and their countermoves can’t be reversed. I’m encouraged to see legitimate protestors in the streets again, like the old days of the 1960s; so maybe November will be a turning point for us. But it won’t be permanent because the other side never gives up. I hope the younger generation understands this because they’re going to have to fight for justice again if they want it in their lifetime.
Frankensteinbeck
@Krope, the Formerly Dope:
So far, Trump has fucked up every single event that would have given a normal Republican leader a huge boost. Conventional wisdom would have had the Suleimani thing and particularly the rocket attack afterwards surging Trump’s poll numbers and being a big Republican PR victory. He flubbed it. He’s flubbing this, by neither going strong on law and order OR expressing any compassion. When America turned to his television press conference to see Trump’s reaction, he ducked the topic entirely*. The man is incapable of not shooting himself in the dick. The polls of Biden vs Trump have also been unprecedentedly consistent for the last year. This is not going to save Trump.
*Personally, I think it’s because he loves the police violently attacking black protestors, and like a petulant baby he’s going “Nuh-UH!” when people tell him to condemn that. His history of telling cops they should be more brutal, and his reaction to Charlottesville, suggest it.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@JaneE: Good number of those buildings but burnt are still empty lots today.
charluckles
I don’t see how Trump pulls off the competent and strong leader who is capable of restoring order and greatness shtick. He’s already defined himself for too many Americans. And people are going to look at Biden and think about the relative peace and prosperity of the Obama years.
Trump tied his entire political fortune to the economy.
WaterGirl
@frosty:
It’s not just a handful of bad cops. It’s also every cop who covers for them, every copy who stays silent or looks the other way, and it’s every department that gives those cops free rein.
Kristine
Late as usual, but thanks for this, Cheryl. I spent the day working outside because I couldn’t bear to follow the news. I need to believe that we will dig out of this pit and work to make things better, but it’s hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel through the smoke.
bluehill
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I was thinking of stoking racial hatred vs overseeing a coordinated response to a faceless contagion.
Krope, the Formerly Dope
@Frankensteinbeck: Yeah, I am kind of encouraged by Trump’s persistent bad poll numbers though all I see before me are eggs, not chickens.
I’m still pretty sure Trump’s aggressive primate shtick still holds sway with a big chunk of the electorate.
PJ
@frosty: NYPD used to screen out prospective cops who scored high on intelligence tests. I’m not sure if that’s still the case.
Every PD is different, but the culture of “the blue wall of silence” protecting fellow officers who are corrupt or abusive, above all else, seems to be the biggest problem.
Militarization of the police over the last 20 years is another big problem.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@bluehill: I don’t think that’s overly effective when you are the incumbent.
Krope, the Formerly Dope
It’s like my sister said to me yesterday. If a department has 95 good cops and 5 bad cops, but the 95 don’t act to rein in the 5, how many bad cops are there really?
laura
@Ladyraxterinok: it’s the 99th anniversary.
Laura Koerber
I was “there” in 1968. That is, I was a fourteen year old who had campaigned for Gene McCarthy. My family didn’t have a TV but we rented one to watch the Democratic convention. I watched the police riots. It was a pivotal event in my life; I was deeply and profoundly shocked. I have never really felt like part of America. I have always felt like a critical outsider who is condemned to live here.
That said, in the anti-war years I had hope. I assumed that things would get better. I really believed that. I don’t any more.
Baud
@rikyrah:
I noticed that too. But it’s for the best that be has.
Cheryl Rofer
bluehill
@?BillinGlendaleCA: You’re probably right. The but is that things that should happen haven’t under this guy. Plus my view is that there is nothing he won’t try or do to win and the repubs will let him.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
I am really not doing well. My practice has evaporated with COVID, my formerly lovely and fun office district is a shattered and graffiti-filled war zone that is going to impoverish me, and when hiking today, after hearing the countess say “what path do you want to take now”, I barely avoided saying “divorce”.
I so want to spend about $8000 on a reliable Harley and ride off to NOLA or Austin or Phoenix or LA to start over.
Miss Bianca
@JPL: Yeah, but HER EMAILS, Peter.
Baud
@Baud: be = he
Baud
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
can you spend that $8000 to take a vacation now that things are opening up?
JoyceH
@Laura Koerber: ”
I was “there” in 1968. That is, I was a fourteen year old who had campaigned for Gene McCarthy. My family didn’t have a TV but we rented one to watch the Democratic convention. I watched the police riots. It was a pivotal event in my life; I was deeply and profoundly shocked. I have never really felt like part of America. I have always felt like a critical outsider who is condemned to live here.
That said, in the anti-war years I had hope. I assumed that things would get better. I really believed that. I don’t any more.”
Oddly, I feel the opposite, though we’re pretty much the same age. When I was fifteen, I felt like things would just get worse and worse and couldn’t imagine that the wars and violence would ever stop. But this time I feel like we’re watching the death throes of a dinosaur. Very dangerous while it’s happening, but then it’s gone.
Maybe it’s just because the alternative is too grim. Or maybe I was brainwashed by Star Trek.
Miss Bianca
@frosty: It’s true, that not every cop is an authoritarian asshole. Not every priest is a pedophile. Sure, it may just be a small number of both cops and priests who indulge in seriously bad behavior. But both cops and priests are part of authoritarian systems that are resistant to community scrutiny and accountability. “Trust us, and only us, to deal with our own.” But rather than actually deal with their own problem members and cast them out, both systems have for decades merely shuffled the same bad actors around to other locations, crossed their fingers behind their back and depended on luck and institutional omerta to keep wind of more scandals from erupting. In the meantime, confidence in the integrity of cops and priests keeps eroding the more that the bad behavior of a small, perhaps, but admittedly mighty, group of malefactors comes to light.
That’s what people are pissed about. honestly, can you blame them?
I’ve known good cops, and I’ve known good priests. But most of them would have looked the other way when it came to confronting one of their fellows.
It’s taken decades of intense public scrutiny, outcry, naming and shaming, and yes, trials and lawsuits to get the Catholic Church to finally start addressing the failings of their system. Let’s hope that it doesn’t take that long for police departments around the country to start cleaning up their acts.
FelonyGovt
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: I’m so sorry. This is just such an awful time.
debbie
@charluckles:
Wait ’til you see his campaign ad. //
debbie
@WaterGirl:
It’s also the sanctioning of lethal force.
Ruckus
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
I have a very nice actual motorcycle for sale for not much more than that right now.
Matt McIrvin
@JoyceH: I was born in 1968 and my childhood was in the 70s. I remember the messages I got about The Future being really contradictory: on the one hand, there was still a lot of leftover Jetsons optimism going around, on the other, there was this very 70s doom narrative of everything constantly getting worse (crime, inflation, pollution, overpopulation, garbage, scarcity) and about a dozen types of extinction just around the corner. And both futures somehow coexisted in people’s minds.
debbie
@Laura Koerber:
I distinctly remember the cop clubbing a demonstrator as he was climbing into the paddy wagon. Chicago was very pivotal to my thinking at that time.
debbie
@Baud:
What a great idea!
JoyceH
@Matt McIrvin: I know what you mean about mixed messages. But doesn’t it seem like all the future fiction has been dystopian lately? I was glad to hear quite recently of a new genre called ‘solarpunk’, which envisions a NON-dystopian future based on renewable energy. Let’s at least IMAGINE a better future, and maybe we can make it happen.
Rozziegirl
The big riots in Detroit and Newark, really rebellions, happened in 1967, and, at least as far as Detroit is concerned, pretty much cured that city of rioting (excepting winning the World Series in 1984), so it’s striking that people are marching now.
HumboldtBlue
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
I can offer nothing but words on a screen, but I hope it gets better for you.
HumboldtBlue
@Cheryl Rofer:
Hah! I had set that aside for an open thread.
rikyrah
You can’t fake this
trollhattan
@Ladyraxterinok:
To your list I will add 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act. These delivered the South to George Wallace and Richard Nixon, and henceforth the Republicans.
WaterGirl
@debbie: Yep.
oldster
@Bill Arnold:
The Francis Wilhoit whose quotation so ably sums up conservativism died in 2010.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_M._Wilhoit
“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
trollhattan
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
“…reliable Harley” Uh, can we talk?
Miss Bianca
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Oh, God. I am so sorry.
CaseyL
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: I’m so sorry. You’ve been hit by everything at once.
Did you almost say “divorce” because the marriage is failing above and beyond all the other crap happening, or because you want to escape your life?
Matt McIrvin
@JoyceH: THE single most hopeful trend I can see right now is that renewable energy, particularly solar, is getting cheaper at a rate exceeding all past predictions considered reasonable. And mass energy storage is too, though it’s still in its infancy.
It’s such a strong trend that the vast majority of new power generation being installed in the US is renewable, even though Trump is actively out to kill it through policy. This is something that reasonable people would just scoff at as a stupid hippie fantasy in recent memory.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Baud:
Probably. But the Harley might ferry me off to something better.
Ruckus
@Matt McIrvin:
What’s even funnier about that is one of the leading states is…..
Texas. A state that not all that long ago was seemingly totally dependent upon oil.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@CaseyL:
If I have to rebuild everything, why not start from scratch?
Looking at my courthouse and shattered office blocks every day seems too oppressive.
Tom Q
@Miss Bianca: I certainly share most of your feelings — I’ve long wanted to shake policemen, make them understand how much so many of us want to support them, if they’d just stop sheltering that small minority off cops who I know THEY hate just as much as we do.
But I wonder if the problem of tribalism is more endemic to society as a whole, not just to institutions like the police department and the Catholic clergy. I’m thinking of when the Obama administration made some mild criticisms of Fox News, and Jake Tapper squealed that they were “our sister network” — I know damn well Jake doesn’t think of Fox as an equal, but, for publication, that was his position. Likewise, good lawyers may look down on ambulance chasers, but they’d never criticize them in public. Doctors don’t go after even the worst doctors. And of course family members have been known to close ranks around one another, however egregious some individual’s behavior.
I’m suggesting it’s a deeper human thing, rather than something that can be solved by bearing down on police departments. (Not make it sound hopeless — while I live I hope. But it’s a very tough instinct to quell.)
aliasofwestgate
@JoyceH: Yeah. Solarpunk has finally started gathering steam from just a bit of a speculative genre on tumblr where i first saw it mentioned. :D Just a bit of art, but to see written fiction? i can’t wait.
rikyrah
Brachiator
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
These are tough times. I hope things get better for you.
Brachiator
@rikyrah:
There was a curfew in Los Angeles yesterday. They shut down buses and trains. Quieter today, so far.
trollhattan
@Rozziegirl:
John Lee Hooker memorialized the Detroit riots with this song.
Frankensteinbeck
@rikyrah:
I am extremely not black, but from his tweet
sounds to me like just about the best thing he could say – and do.
@Matt McIrvin:
Growing up in the 80s, the message was “You’ll get a dystopia if you’re lucky and survive the nuclear war.”
Nora
@JoyceH: And maybe make it a requirement that the cop live in the neighborhood he or she patrols. Much more likely for cops to see people as people if they live next door and shop at the same deli.
Matt McIrvin
@Frankensteinbeck: The thing about the 80s post-apocalyptic scenarios is that the people writing them seemed to at least halfway want them. They were Westerns with a different haircut–this cool playground of violence. There’s a reason it’s still a really popular setting for video games.
Mary Ellen Sandahl
As a fellow member of Cheryl’s age cohort who was pretty political in the late 60s, I have to disagree on one historical point. The resurgence of feminism, known at the time as Women’s Lib, didn’t become a notable force or movement until the decade was nearing its end. Kate Millett’s “Sexual Politics” was published in 1970. Things were starting to rumble audibly among female members of the anti-war and civil rights groups earlier on, but in the late 60s, not the early part of the decade. Stokely Carmichael made his (in)famous remark, “The only position for women in the movement is prone” in ’66. This may seem like quibbling over just a few years, but when things are changing as radically and quickly as they were then, a year or 2 can make a big difference.
Matt McIrvin
@Mary Ellen Sandahl: I’ve sometimes thought that if the Sexual Revolution had waited until second-wave feminism was a thing, we might have had a much easier time of it.
CaseyL
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
I may not be the best person to opine on this, because I spent a goodly number of years in my youth doing exactly that: packing up and lighting out to find adventure or even just “something better.” So I am sympathetic to the urge.
But it’s one thing to do it when you’re young; it’s another when you’re older and don’t have as much economic flexibility.
Are you flat broke? Do you have no assets at all?
Is your practice ruined for good, or can you do what you do from home? Are any of your files online and therefore recoverable? Can you join another practice?
Is what you do something you can do anywhere?
Is your wife sympathetic, maybe in the same boat, and as anxious to get out as you are?
And: the question no one likes to ask, but I leapt and landed hard enough often enough to know you HAVE to ask it: Do you have a Plan B? And possibly a Plan C?
Imagine that you have gotten on that Harley and ridden off.
Now imagine where you are in one week, one month, one year.
Are you sleeping on the ground next to your bike? Waking up cold, stiff, and gritty from head to toe?
Have you been dumpster-diving for food and trying to bathe in public bathrooms?
Is your bike out of gas and you have no way of filling it up again?
Are you standing on a street-corner with a hand-lettered sign asking for spare change?
You have to consider what can go wrong if you bolt for freedom, because everything CAN go wrong. Believe me.
Where you are is awful bad. But where you might wind up could be even worse.
Brachiator
So, Trump going after Antifa is a big bunch of nothing, so far.
Note that I still think that Trump is dangerous even though he doesn’t know how to get into the authoritarian toolbox. He needs to be voted out before he can do more harm to the country.
Matt McIrvin
@Ruckus: I used to hear people say grimly that “there’s no Moore’s Law for energy”. But there is, almost literally. There’s even semiconductor tech involved.
geg6
@Cheryl Rofer:
This is my belief also. My BA in PoliSci has finally come in handy. We studied these very types of cycles and this idea that we are at the end of a conservative and reactionary cycle is how it looks to me. I hope we’re right.
Subsole
@Bill Arnold:
This. My grandfather hated fascists with a passion, having spent three years getting shot at by both Italian and German varieties at Anzio and sundry points northward. By all accounts he got very,very good at shooting back.
(Hated communists too, but that might have been his time on a hillside in Pusan.)
My other grandfather was too gentle a man for hatred, but he brooked no foolishness. And he thought nazis of any stripe murderous and contemptible fools.
I am grateful they did not live to see this shit.
Frankensteinbeck
@Matt McIrvin:
They may have been having fun, but as a child going to bed every night knowing there was a decent chance I wouldn’t wake up because of a nuclear war was less than entertaining.
Cheryl Rofer
@Mary Ellen Sandahl: For me, the books were Simone deBeauvoir’s “The Second Sex” (1949) and Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” (1963). So early sixties it was.
frosty
Deleted. Point made by others.
WaterGirl
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: I know you know this, but when you are experiencing so much loss and so much pain from all the changes, this is the absolute worst time to be making a big decision about the state of your marriage.
Based on what you’ve said, it’s just not possible for you to have the perspective you would need in order to make an accurate judgment. Also, think of the hell you would be putting your spouse and family through by even talking about that in the midst of everything.
I can understand the perverse draw of maybe blowing up the one thing that is left standing, but I don’t recommend it. :-)
Be kind to yourself and to your family.
frosty
@Frankensteinbeck: You and your generation weren’t alone in that. I was too young for “Duck and Cover” but I distinctly remember huddling in the school hallway during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Subsole
@JoyceH: If the cops are attacking news teams -many of which include women- live on-air, I sorely doubt they will back down from blackjacking a woman in a pink hat.
Subsole
@Ruckus: A line from The Wire has been running through my head the last couple days:
“Train cops to be warriors and pretty soon they’ll be going ’round looking for a war.”
Subsole
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Damn, man. Sorry to hear all that.
Hope it gets better for you.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@WaterGirl:
I’ll see if there’s enough Xanax in the cabinet to haul me through this funk and keep my tongue in check. Maybe.
trollhattan
@Subsole:
My dad and pretty much all the neighborhood dads fought in WWII. They would NOT have been pleased by the likes of Trump, Bannon, Miller, et al reviving and mainstreaming Nazism.
Subsole
@frosty:
So serious question, as a non-cop:
What are the good cops doing about it? What CAN they do about it?
I mean, if officer Fuckup J. Mc Klanhood is out there pulling this shit and making my job harder and trashing my reputation and harming the community I swore an oath to defend, my patience with officer fuckup is gonna evaporate con muy pronto, tootsweet.
That don’t seem to be happening.
What seems to be happening is half the badges in this country are in full fucking mutiny because the civvies dared to question their divinely-sanctioned right to execute us peons whenever they deem it just.
Where are the good apples?
Or more to the point, what is stopping the good apples? I have seen departments marching in solidarity with protestors and engaging peacefully. So yeah, they exist. I believe you there.
I am afraid you may be vastly overestimating their #s, though. Else we wouldn’t be seeing this shit. Again.
Bill Arnold
@oldster:
OK. Both the crookedtimber comment and our current commenter point at https://www.broadheath.com/, “Contemporary Classical Music by Frank Wilhoit”
So I was going with that commonality after noticing it.
Subsole
@Ruckus:
Yep. Lotta windmills out here.
Right next to rusty old pump jacks.
We have the tools to turn this around. We just have to make it profitable to do so.
Sab
My city’s second protest is winding up right now, peacefully, after 3 hours. They have been told to disperse and they are. The police want them gone before dark, which makes sense. A couple of hundred people, mixed racially but more white than not.
Subsole
@Kent:
Bernie has a long pattern of not being around when actual work needs doing. All the way back to his commune days, or so I hear.
Subsole
@Matt McIrvin:
Why so?
Duane
2020 has wars, riots and a plague to boot. It has the worst president in US history. The only things 1968 has over us are assainations and better music. Doubt we’ll get better music.
Matt McIrvin
@Subsole: As it was, it seemed to be a bit too much about men claiming the right to screw whoever they wanted, and women considered as objects. With an idea of equality built in from the beginning, modern notions of consent might have been incorporated more easily.
Krope, the Formerly Dope
True, but we’ve also done worse for music than we are now.
Matt McIrvin
@Frankensteinbeck: That was how I felt too. Seemed like a nuclear fireball might engulf me at any moment.
Here’s the interesting thing about the 80s, though: if you ask people who were young at the time whether they had those fears or not, about half of them will claim the thought of nuclear war never really crossed their minds and they never even heard of anyone who was scared. The duck-and-cover business, that was all back in the 60s. They never took it seriously. But somehow, people like us did. (And, in hindsight, the concern was rational: we came very, very close to a global nuclear war once or twice!) Haven’t really figured out that phenomenon.
Subsole
@Frankensteinbeck:
And the 90s was this bizarre mishmash of “Corporations will farm us like livestock” cyberpunk and “the government will farm us like livestock” sci-noir conspiracy. And the lovable xtreem rebels who stood up to them, of course.
Looking back, that seems to be when a lot of sci fi seemed to forget the stars and just turn inward…mired in a future free of the old demons and trembling at tomorrow’s devils-yet-unseen.
Krope, the Formerly Dope
I was young in the 80s and for me the threat of nuclear weapons has always felt like a real danger, but sort of remote. Other threats have always seemed more present and with nukes it has always seemed like something major would have to change for them to be the threat they once were.
Granted, that can cascade quickly.
Matt McIrvin
@Subsole: Cyberpunk began in the 80s (well, the very end of the 70s really) and became mainstream in the 90s, when everyone started to notice the things that science-fiction novelists had been thinking about for a while.
The interesting thing to me is how much Space Age styling there still was in the early cyberpunk. The novel that introduced a lot of people to the genre was William Gibson’s Neuromancer. But Neuromancer has all this super 70s space-fan stuff in it: there’s a Rastafarian space navy with a giant wheel station, and the whole last act is in a Gerard O’Neill cylindrical orbital colony accessed via commercial spaceliner! It’s practically a Jetsons world, only grubbier and more chaotic. Gibson himself had been a major-league space nerd back in the Disco Era, contributed to the Co-Evolution Quarterly issue on colonizing the Lagrange points.
As the subgenre went on, though, that stuff got de-emphasized.
Subsole
@Matt McIrvin: Intriguing.
WaterGirl
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: Everyone needs a goal. Keeping your tongue in check and not uttering words like ‘divorce’ should be yours. :-)
I mean that in the nicest possible way.
Duane
@Krope, the Formerly Dope: A better president will be enough. I can live with the music. Biden just needs to fix everything else.
Subsole
@Matt McIrvin: I was born in ’81. All I remember was that everyone knew we were going to have a big war, bigger than WWII real soon. And all our cities would get nuked, and people would die. And we would totally win, of course. But it was gonna happen, and it was gonna kill people.
And I remember being scared in an abstract way, but as background noise. Like how you know you’re gonna grow up and be a teenager in another 10 years. But that’s like, waaaay away past tomorrow. Same vibe.
And then we grew up and Armageddon…
just…
didn’t…
happen.
Krope, the Formerly Dope
@Duane: Hey, at least we aren’t having to live through the 70s or 80s music-wise again. Uggh.
Matt McIrvin
@Subsole: The first time I remember being conscious of the whole thing was something my (awful) second-grade teacher said, around 1975. We had a tornado drill at school, and she mentioned that when she was a kid, she had air-raid drills, but the nuclear bombs got so much more powerful that they decided there was no point in even bothering any more.
(She was correct about that. We were really close to Dulles Airport and I can only imagine that in any large exchange, the Soviets would probably have wanted to bullseye that sucker with a warhead big enough that we wouldn’t really have time to think about it.)
Duane
@Krope, the Formerly Dope: The disco music of the 70’s was a shocking turn for a child of the English invasion and hippie music.
NotMax
@Subsole
Cue Mr. Lehrer.
Subsole
@Krope, the Formerly Dope:
We’re bringin’ disco back, baby!!
Subsole
@Matt McIrvin: Yeah. I am constantly struck by how experimental the genre was. You had stories about urban shamans using tech-spirits to fight the police state. You had stories about neo-medievalists and living gargoyles finding Jesus after a mass psychic awakening. Mozart from a parallel timeline discovering synthpop and corporations using time-travel to treat the past like a third world country. An AI manipulating cyborg combat vets to trade with aliens. Drug cartels awakening ancient Aztec gods that went on to mix it up with streetgangs out of Armies of the Night.
And then Snow Crash. A hilarious send-up of the whole thing that nevertheless made brilliant points.
And then much grittier tales, too.
Reading back it is crazy how much of today they saw coming, like Global Warming, militarized carceral states, etc. Hell, the Internet.
And then you read what they thought the internet would look like and…man.
sgrAstar
@CaseyL: great comment. I was there- Berkeley 68- and I agree. Today every last shred of idealism has been ripped from my heart. The 40 percenters are not coming back to their better selves- those selves are dead and buried…if they ever existed in the first place. The only way out is through.
?
Subsole
@Matt McIrvin: Eek. That sounds gut-wrenching.
I wonder how much 21st century lunacy is just everyone decompressing from the realization we probably aren’t going to nuke ourselves extinct.
We lived on the border. We knew the refineries at Corpus would eat it, but we figured we’d live. At least long enough for the fallout.
We were frankly more worried about invasion. Ridiculous as that seems now.
The white folks just knew Mexico would invade to help their Soviet buddies – which is fukken hilarious if you know anything about the PRI. Like, some folks NEVER got over the Zimmerman telegram, I guess.
Subsole
@NotMax:
“Ze rockets go up…”
God, to have that wit…
Ruckus
@Subsole:
It already is profitable. The biggest impediment is automobiles
Regine Touchon
@CaseyL: I was 12 also and I so remember MLK’s assassination in the spring and RFK’s later in the summer. I remember sobbing, knowing we had lost 2 great leaders. I apologize to my millennial daughter for our generation and how a lot of us have forsaken our humanity and have sunk so low that they , the majority of old white men and women, voted for this depraved man. I still need to hold on to Cheryl’s optimism though.
dopey-o
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: the harley might ferry me off to something better…..
Um, that didn’t work out for Captain America in Easy Rider. Just sayin’