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Shhhh…you’re scaring the straights…

I was going for stink lines and flies, but I think I ended up with “smoldering tire fire struck by plague of locusts.” Oh well. Don Martin I ain’t.

Anyhoo, now is probably a good time to remember that most everything you’ve read about the politics of the Sixties/Seventies was written by someone who was there, in the streets, possibly wearing a giant papier-mâché puppet head. Someone who LOVED it. Who looks back at the period as the high point of his/her miserable life. (High point. Heh).

I was ten in 1970 and experienced the era as a giant national everything-lurching-out-of-control. I remember the Kent State shootings, and was most surprised to read this in the Telegraph today:

Shockingly, the public had little sympathy. A Gallup poll found that 58 percent blamed the students for the deaths, 11 percent blamed the National Guard and 31 percent expressed no opinion.

Would you have guessed that was the reaction? The writer adds that two years later, Nixon was re-elected in one of the biggest landslides in election history. American politics didn’t actually lurch left until a few of those hippies got a haircut, put on a suit and ran for office. The normos — the people who get up and drop the kids off at school and go to jobs — they don’t really cotton to this violent street theater shit.

So to the peoples of Occupy Wall Street, I say — carry on, chaps! Don’t lose heart now!

October 11, 2011 — 10:12 pm
Comments: 27