It’s not 1968. The facile comparison and yearning to recapture a year of intensity, hope and rage is all too apparent in the Newsweek cover and Tweety’s laments. Who is the RFK or MLK of 2008? Can we rerun that once more?
I’ll never have that recipe again.
MacArthur Park, 1968
We are not stuck in some cultural loop that keeps replaying so that we never have to grieve what has been lost. The 1960’s unleashed dormant forces in the persons of women and African-Americans who emerged into the bright sunshine of American life. That is now behind us. A continuing integration is underway, but the explosive burst of the civil rights and feminist movements has already happened, and even faded.
A war that posed a theoretical possibility of engagement for all economic classes enlisted many more in activism than could ever be summoned now, when war is now a job that some apply for, but most do not.
And the people of 1968 – they’re gone. Is anyone here still looking for the assassinated? Why? It flattens the living candidates of today, whether Hillary, Barack, John, Joe, Chris, Dennis, Bill..... They can’t reinhabit the lost martyrs who enlarge over time and become saviors that they never were. We have real, complex and flawed human beings who, in their own way, will rise to the challenges of 2008 and beyond.
Anybody here seen my old friend....Martin....Bobby...
Abraham, Martin and John, 1968
Turn off the old tapes and stop staring at the faded photos of all those who were supposed to rescue us. Stop believing that everything would be different if some had lived longer.
The search for heroes is the lasting legacy of 1968, and it’s not a good one. But it continues. What we should learn from that failed search is to abandon the hope of rescue, because a lot of truth is sacrificed as the statues get polished. And the audience just sits back, lapsing into sentimentality and passivitiy. One flawed human will emerge from the battles of 2008, and the truly revolutionary task for all of us will be to recognize our nominee as a fellow traveler, rather than a leader.