I Was a Teenage Existentialist #17: 1968 a Year of Ongoing Violence.

Low-Key Ongoing Grieving

So my 13th year was the start of being a teenager, and it was 1968, a big one. People forget the tone of that time. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April while he was trying to get a living wage for the garbagemen of Memphis. Preachers, like lawyers in America, tend to get paid what their clientele get paid; and King was going to advocate for sanitation workers who were triggered to go on strike by two of their fellow collectors, Black men, were crushed in compactor at the back of a garbage truck because they weren’t allowed to sit in the cab. King got killed in what we were told was the act of a lone gunman; I was more numb than suspicious. But I can tell you this now: If some public figure is killed, and they name the assassin within 24 hours, and then the investigation stops immediately, then you know the guy named “assassin” is a Patsy, who has been set up. Lee Oswald, James Earl Ray, Sirhan, Mark Chapman. Do your own research; Coretta thought it was the US Government.

Every major city in the United States had a riot as a result of King’s death, including Minneapolis. The National Guard was called out. On the live album from NYC, “Band of Gypsies,”Jimi Hendrix said before his song “Machine Gun” that “This song is dedicated to all the soldiers in New York, and all the soldiers in Detroit, and all the soldiers in Chicago, and…oh yeah, all the solders in Vietnam.” It seemed like President Johnson was going to just send troops everywhere, with orders to keep shooting.

We got very sad, because King meant something to us, he gave us hope that things could change, that the church could matter. That hope transferred to Bobby Kennedy, who had talked to a crowd of supporters in Cleveland that night. He broke the news, told them he knew what it felt like; and that was the only major city in America that was not torched by angry rioters.

Then Bobby got murdered, a double echo of JFK and MLK, by a Christian Palestinian, so we were told; Sirhan Sirhan was in front of Kennedy, but Bobby was killed by a bullet fired from behind him. 12 shots fired, Sirhan had a gun with 7 bullets. But we did not know that at the time. We fell for the cover story. And we were flattened. It was beyond our comprehension that this was the doings of anyone but a random crackpot. It let the air out of the Civil Rights Movement, and me.

I’ve been haunted ever since.

We were still in bed, me and Scott, Dad came down the stairs and said, “I have some sad news. Bobby Kennedy was killed last night.” Then he went back up. Dad never knew what to say; no one counseled us on how to deal with the despair, of knowing that the American war machine was coming for us too, and anyone with any pull who talked peace was going to get shot in the head.

1968 was an election year. As= Frank Zappa said “Elections are the entertainment division of the Military- Industrial Complex.” It was the year that the Presidential Election ended up running right down the middle of the State of Minnesota. The VP was Hubert Humphrey, who had lusted after the White House since 1960, when he was thwarted by JFK in West Virginia using Daddy’s money and Bobby’s smarts. But he had been a Democratic Civil Rights Pioneer in 1948, as mayor of Minneapolis, when he said his famous speech. This from the NY Times, 7/7/23:

“His speech at the Philadelphia convention, imploring delegates to ‘get out of the shadow of states’ rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights,’ convinced a decisive majority of the delegates. The Southerners bolted the convention to form a third party nicknamed the Dixiecrats. And Truman, left with no option but to run for re-election as a civil rights candidate, won his upset victory over Thomas Dewey thanks to a surge of Black voters in swing states.”

So we thought of Humphrey as a Good Guy, and that pioneering moment of social justice colored how we thought of ourselves in the State of Minnesota, and still think of ourselves, as a righteous place of progressive White people. What we have found out since then is that Minnesota is one of the worst states for Black people to build generational wealth, or to advance in corporate businesses. George Floyd was killed about an 8 minute drive from my house, on 38th and Chicago, by a very racist police department that was run by a police union full of MAGA Trumpers. (I knew they were racist, but I pretended it wasn’t that bad. They had killed a Hmong teenage tagger on a bike and planted a gun on him, and got away with it. Me, gaslighting myself, the guy teaching Dr. King in College and in Churches, somehow it didn’t register). I live in Minneapolis, which has not even had a Republican candidate for Mayor in 50 years.We looked away and gave ourselves the benefit of the doubt. Americans.

But those days of remembering Humphrey for his pioneering Civil Rights work were over by 1968. Sen. Eugene McCarthy of MN had come out early on as a Peace Candidate, punched LBJ in the proverbial nose in the New Hampshire primary and drove him out of the race, which lead to the ruthless Bobby Kennedy joining the race. And Humphrey could not win a primary against a Kennedy, Hubert didn’t have that kind of money or looks or history or legacy, and the Primary system was not fully established, so Humphrey announced he would not run in the Primaries, but would just lock up the delegates and the nomination through The Machine, which was still in LBJ’s tight grip, which cost Hubert his legitimacy in the eyes of the peace wing of the Democratic Party, which had been mounting an insurgency through Eugene McCarthy, then Bobby Kennedy, then George McGovern.

And that meant Hubert had no chance. He had LBJ tied around his neck like a 500 pound block of cement. Now the Democrats were about to divorce the Dixiecrats, who joined George Wallace in leaving the party. And when the election came, Humphrey was up against Nixon and Wallace, who squirreled away four southern states to tip the balance.

Nixon’s evil genius, which we did not know about until years later, focused on two things: The Southern Strategy, by which he connected to the White Segregationists who had not gone with George Wallace’s States Rights party; and by scuttling the peace negotiations with the South Vietnamese government. Through the anti-Communist Claire Chenault, word was passed to the South Vietnamese government that if they made peace with LBJ, and if Nixon was elected, he would cut off any further military aid; but if they sidetracked the peace talks and Nixon won, they would get his total support. Humphrey’s only shot at bringing the party with him was to secure a peace treaty, but he could not serve as LBJ’s VP and talk peace at the same time, so he tried to straddle the two, and he was screwed coming and going. McCarthy, who had the ego of a self-ordained poet, did not endorse him until the last minute, which meant the party could not unite against Nixon. HHH lost a tight race (That was echoed later, when Ted Kennedy ran against Jimmy Carter and would not endorse him, so Reagan took over, ushering in 40+ years of oligarchy). Nixon won with 301 Electoral votes, Humphrey had 191, which was 20 less, and Wallace had 45 Southern Electoral votes, which would traditionally be Dixiecratic votes, but Humphrey had ticked them off too much. Nixon took the rest of the South (except Texas) and all of the west, especially his power base of California, and Humphrey lost the popular vote by a hair. He went down in history as a principled man who lost track of his ethics, but worse than that, He Was A Loser. And Americans Hate Losers.

We watched Mayor Daley unleash the police on the peace demonstrators, a Democratic city pounding the fuck out of Democratic non-violent peace protesters, and it was like watching a wild animal eat its young. And it felt like The Seal Boys were next.

#30#