thor’s Note: As an antidote to the daily chaos we have been experiencing, I took a brief look at what I still remember and feel today was the prologue to the End of the World back then. We kids of today will be alright once again, methinks.
– Marlow
Editor’s Note: That was unquestionably the strangest time in which I was privileged to exist. Marlow is right on.
– Vic
1968
1968 was a year of protest, a year of change, a year of deadly sadness, and a year of strange.
It was the start of what some see as America’s Second Revolution. This revolt played out over the coming decades in the destruction of old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. What was created in their place was a mixed bag of great things — rising incomes and equality across race, creed, sexes, and sexual orientations — and some more mundane replacements — new and different names for people of their own creation and spelling, long hair, metrosexuality, smooth jazz . . . .
Fifty years ago a fascinating, tumultuous, at times eloquent and violent discussion of the place, direction, aims and dangers of American life began. When the year started most of my cohort was 18, in college, barefoot in summer and clad in casual blue jeans. Most of us had not yet turned on, tuned in or dropped out. That would come later. By the end of the year many had been turned off. Many more became a silent majority that would remain so until decades later.
I recall hearing an evidently mildly high Timothy Leary during a 1968 speech at the University of Notre Dame declare: “ Fifty years from now, everyone will be on drugs.” Who knew that this avowed stoned tripper would be so prescient?
Timothy Leary’s 1966 album L.S.D. on the Pixie Records label
Before the year ended, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy would be assassinated; U.S. troops would suffer their deadliest year yet in Vietnam; US troops would massacre scores of civilians at My Lai; the Democratic Party courtesy of street riots during its Presidential Convention would tear itself apart on live TV; Richard Nixon would be elected president; Americans would orbit the moon; American Olympic medal winners in Mexico City would raise their fists in a black power salute; millions would die of starvation in Biafra; and the Beatles would release their White album.
STREET EXECUTION DURING THE TET OFFENSIVE, VIETNAM. South Vietnamese General Nguyen Ngoc Loan, chief of the national police, fires his pistol, executing suspected Viet Cong officer Nguyen Van Lem on a Saigon street on February 1, 1968, early in the Tet Offensive. Lem was suspected of commanding a death squad which had targeted South Vietnamese police officers that day. AP image.
PRAGUE SPRING. Czechoslovakia pro-democracy uprising would be put down by Soviet union tanks and soldiers. AP image.
MLK (l) & RFK (r) ASSASSINATIONS. Life Magazine images.
WHITE ALBUM. The Beatles released the White Album in 1968. I bought an original copy in France. Along with the Steven Stills’ Super Session and Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced albums, the multi-platter White was all we listened to during our sophomore year taking classes at a Frnech unversity. French students thought us square midwestern American students revolutionary
MY LAI. “Was is necessary to destroy the village and its people to save it?” Dead Vietnamese bodies lie by a home, set on fire by American troops — stark evidence of the My Lai Massacre. Image taken from the Report of the Department of the Army Review of the Preliminary Investigations into the My Lai Incident, photographed by United States Army photographer Ronald L. Haeberle.
DEMOCRATIC PARTY PRESIDENTIAL CONVENTION RIOTS IN CHICAGO. Chicage Tribune image.
BIAFRA. Between 500,000 and 2,000,000 Nigerians, mostly children, slowly died from starvation and malnutrit.ion. Biafra was a breakaway state within Nigeria that fought a war for independence from 1967 to 1970. Life Magazine image.
TOMMIE SMITH & JOHN CARLOS. These winners of the gold and bronze medals in the 200-meter run at the 1968 Olympic Games, engaged in a victory stand protest against unfair treatment of blacks in the United States. With heads lowered and black-gloved fists raised in the black power salute, they refused to recognize the American flag and national anthem. Australian Peter Norman was the silver medalist. Getty image.
APOLLO 8 CIRCLING THE MOON. Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the moon, entered lunar orbit on Christmas Eve, December 24, 1968. That evening, the three astronauts read on live American TV three segments from the book of Genesis. NASA image.
“We are now approaching lunar sunrise, and for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you.
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.”
“And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.”
“And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.
And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas – and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth.”
These slices of 1968 hopefully provide some perspective to the coming events of 2018.
Copyright © 2018 From My Isle Seat
www.vicsocotra.com