Forever 1968

[Valin]

City Journal:

The social and political forces unleashed that year are acting on us still.

Fred Siegel

July 20, 2016

 

My two literate and thoughtful sons complain that I’m always invoking the sixties to explain today’s pathologies. I hope they now see that events have caught up with the argument. The headlines in the New York Times on the morning after the first evening of the GOP convention exclaimed, in trump’s voice, it’s a new new nixon. The “News Analysis” piece quoted Donald Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort explaining that Nixon’s 1968 acceptance speech “is pretty much on line [sic] with a lot of the issues that are going on today.” Imitating Nixon, Trump has billed himself as “the law and order candidate” who represents “the silent majority.” But Monday night’s WWF-style introduction of the candidate had a campiness that would have made Nixon cringe.

 

The Times gets part of the story right, but misses the context for Trump’s rise. Trump has feasted politically on President Obama’s inanities and inhibitions in the wake of terror attacks and police assassinations. There is another continuity between the current moment and the never-ending sixties: the revival of Black Pantherism in the form of the Black Lives Matter movement and the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates, the new Eldridge Cleaver.

 

 

(Snip)

 

Transparent efforts persist to keep the fever burning. As Powerline notes, a “study” in the Minneapolis Star Tribune found that “implied bias occurs when police target high crime areas.” What’s that? Take also Tavis Smiley’s “defense” of Baton Rouge copkiller Gavin Long, published this week in USA Today: “How many more disaffected black men have to self-radicalize before we take their claims seriously?” Unfortunately, neither presidential candidate seems likely to rescue the country from the frightening vortex produced by the 1960s.

[Valin]

Mainly my memories of 1968 are

 

 

 

 

 

Of course I and those I humped the line with never whet to places like The 5 Spot/The Stereo Club/The A Frame, for they were the abode of loose women. No we were to busy fighting crime evil and the great yellow peril.

that's my story and I'm Stickin With It.