Rest easy, this piece is not all about the Kavanaugh fight. It is a facet of writing that people react one way or another to what you write. After a recent piece, Not a Civil War, a Civil Divorce, some friends and associates on Facebook and in other venues told me I was being alarmist. They compared other times in our nation’s history, namely 1968, allegedly worse and surmised if we survived that intact as a nation we would survive our current travails. But, they miss my point.
I don’t believe the rot that afflicts us is primarily political, but cultural, and politics is but a symptom of the wider cultural degradation. So let’s indeed go back to 1968 and compare it today.
It was no annus mirabilis. The King and Kennedy assassinations, riots, the Democratic convention in Chicago where the police were provoked into an overreaction, Vietnam protests, the presidential election, feminism was beginning to rear its snout, the capture by the Norks of the USS Pueblo, the crushing of the Prague Spring, and the US tactical victory but strategic loss in the Tet Offensive. That’s a partial list of not exactly cheery events of that year. A little detail on the national and international turmoil…
A young generation of spoiled pseudo-educated brats took to the streets while their best and brightest served in Vietnam. The specter of domestic violence, long foreign to America, took shape in political killings and urban riots that saw whole cities set to the torch. I heard it myself, for there were riots in Newark, NJ, and my family was next door in Irvington.
The Democratic convention in Chicago saw the hard left make their play. Only to be denied a complete takeover of that sad pathetic conglomeration until the next presidential election. The US was humiliated when Intel ship Pueblo was boarded and seized by current pals, yeah right, the Norks, subjecting the crew to horrendous torture. Czech leader Alexander Dubcek tried “socialism with a human face” in Prague, Czechoslovakia, heretofore since the coup of 1948 a loyal Soviet ally. The Sovs, recognizing the inherent dichotomy in his wish, ordered their forces and other Warsaw Pact allies to crush him. And they did. When Dubcek protested that he was only trying to make socialism better he was told by Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, “Don’t talk to me about socialism, Alexander. What we have, we hold.”
And to top it off, at the end of January 1968 the North Vietnamese lured their ostensible ally the South Vietnamese Viet Cong to launch a go-for-broke military offensive against US and allied South Vietnamese forces. We know now that it was a ploy, the North knowing that Charlie would get their ass kicked when they finally came out and played in the open. And so they did, gutting Charlie and leaving the North an easier eventual takeover. But that’s not what American media showed. It showed only the very initial successes of the Viet Cong and deduced that the war was now irretrievably lost. Thus a tactical victory was turned into a strategic defeat by the American media. Associated Press Bureau Chief Peter Braestrup tells the tale in The Big Story. The loss caused one of our negotiators with the North Vietnamese, US Colonel Harry Summers, to tell his communist counterpart after the fall of Saigon, “You never beat us on the battlefield.” To which the officer responded, “True. And also irrelevant.”
But during this period of upheaval, what was America thinking? How were we living our lives? How does it compare to today?
Then broadcast television mirrored much of our 1968 cultural tastes. Bonanza, Gunsmoke, Gomer Pyle, The Beverly Hillbillies, The Ed Sullivan Show, Bewitched, My Three Sons, Green Acres, and The Red Skelton Show were all top-rated programs. All of them not being politically correct diatribes or offerings laden with gratuitous sex, dark depravity, and twisted violence, as are common fare today in broadcast, cable, and online television. Ok, they weren’t rather clever intellectual shows either. Though, Elizabeth Montgomery was superhot.
Music had gone psychedelic after the previous year’s release of Sgt. Pepper. But even the most far out were far more innocent than the rap music of today and the last twenty years.
As Charles Murray points out in Coming Apart, in 1968, though Americans were different in many ways, we still largely lived according to a shared set of mores and values. Employment lethargy was looked down upon, it was standard practice to get married before having children, many if not most went to church, citadels of authority were given appropriate respect, and college education did not yet proselytize against the nation and parents. Men weren’t portrayed as cretins by the popular culture, women weren’t taught in school to hate them, and all marriage wasn’t defined as rape. That is only a partial telling of the story of how traditional America still was in the driver’s seat.
Those of us who grew up in the sixties and seventies remember, perhaps with affection, the world of our youth. We also can easily contrast then with now and do the obvious math as to the comparative cultural health and aesthetic legitimacy of American society.
And then there was the presidential election.
I won’t belabor you with what you already see and hear. You can ken what is going on with Kavanaugh. You know what happened, and continues to, about the election of 2016. Hell, you remember the election controversy of 2000 not quite with joy. You see elected officials acting like vicious children and most of the media as the compliant lapdogs of their leftist masters. You understand what Washington has become.
1968 pitted Richard Nixon versus Hubert Humphrey, with hard-right segregationist George Wallace thrown in for ignorant spice. As the country was in trouble, both Nixon and Humphrey called for peace and calm. While having major policy differences, both treated the other with relative respect and decorum. Nixon didn’t say a word about Humphrey’s sitting out WWII. Humphrey didn’t deride Nixon as a supply officer. A small digression…
For veterans, possibly the best line ever in the television series M*A*S*H was when Hawkeye cautioned Radar not to reveal the identity of the new surgeon in the OR, a captured North Korean doctor, by saying, “Radar, he’s with the enemy.”
Which prompted Radar to respond, “You mean he’s with Supply?”
Back to work…
Wallace, for all of his weirdness, did not call either opponent treasonous or call for their immediate impeachment upon entering office. They all went at each other hammer and tongs but they knew where and when to stop. They did because they were grownups, adults “tempered by war and disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.”
Incidentally, after Nixon was elected, after he had beaten the Democrats for the presidency, his Supreme Court nominations Warren Burger, Lewis Powell, Jr., and Harry Blackmun were confirmed by the full Senate comprised of both Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, by 74-3, 89-1, and 94-0 respectively.
Let that sink in.
Regarding that 1968 presidential election? Through all the riots, protests, turbulence, and the supposed peak of student activism (read: snotty leftism) the Republican and the hard-right candidate received 347 electoral votes to Humphrey’s 191. Nixon and Wallace combined, votes for the conservative and hard-right candidate were a combined 56.9 percent, a veritable landslide. Again, at the then height of liberal agitation.
No country divided into left and right in 1968, but a solid conservative majority.
In 1972 it gets worse for the left. The Dems nominate hard-leftist George McGovern who by today’s standards would be a centrist in that party. Nixon beats him in 49 out of 50 states, by 520 to 17 electoral votes (yes, 520-17), and shellacs him 60 percent to 37 percent in the popular vote. Now, compare that to the vote in 2016. If you do that honestly you just can’t tell me 1968 is comparable to today. Then we had a traditional conservative majority. Today, the nation is polarized close to 50-50.
Another year brings to mind today. 1919, after the carnage of WWI, when W.B. Yeats wrote this in his poem The Second Coming:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity…
Want a more modern description? Here’s fictitious Admiral Joshua Painter from The Hunt for Red October, “This business will get out of control. It’ll get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it.”
The Admiral’s got it right. Unless we do something to avoid the violent reckoning. And do it soon.
