Posts Tagged ‘1968’
Saturday Morning Post-SFRA Links! All! Tabs! Closed!
* SFRA is over, but ICFA season has only just begun! The theme for ICFA 2019 is “Politics and Conflicts” and the special guests are Mark Bould and G. Willow Wilson.
* And keep saving your pennies for SFRA 19 in Hawaii! Stay tuned for more information soon.
* Ben Robertson put up his SFRA talk on the MCU and abstraction as well as his opening statement for the Avengers vs. Jedi roundtable (which coined the already ubiquitous term “naustalgia”). My opening statement was this image, more or less…
* Other piping hot SFRA content at #SFRA18! It was a great conference.
* The Economics of Science Fiction.
* A book I’m in won a Locus Award: Check out Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler! Congratulations to Alexandra and Mimi.
* Black Women and the Science Fiction Genre: an interview with Octavia E. Butler from 1986.
* CFP: TechnoLogics: Power and Resistance. CFP: Childhoods of Color.
* The early career academic: learning to say no.
* The Humanities as We Know Them Are Doomed. Now What? Jobs Will Save the Humanities.
* Revised Course Evaluation Questions.
* Essentially total victory for John McAdams over Marquette at the WI Supreme Court. I don’t talk about “Marquette stuff” on here because of the slippery nature of my status as an agent of the university, but noted for history. More here. Marquette “agrees to comply” but doesn’t concede wrongdoing.
“The undisputed facts show that the university breached its contract with Dr. McAdams when it suspended him for engaging in activity protected by the contract’s guarantee of academic freedom,” states the ruling, written by Justice Daniel Kelly.
* Things that happen in Silicon Valley and also the Soviet Union. So good.
* Since it isn’t, a simple question arises: where’s all the fucking money? Piketty’s student Gabriel Zucman wrote a powerful book, The Hidden Wealth of Nations (2015), which supplies the answer: it’s hidden by rich people in tax havens. According to calculations that Zucman himself says are conservative, the missing money amounts to $8.7 trillion, a significant fraction of all planetary wealth. It is as if, when it comes to the question of paying their taxes, the rich have seceded from the rest of humanity.
* If Elon Musk can save the trapped Thai soccer team though I’ll definitely forgive him for everything else, for at least a couple weeks. In the meantime…
* Trump’s ethnic cleansing operation is blowing past boundaries that would have been considered utterly sacrosanct only a few years ago. The Trump administration just admitted it doesn’t know how many kids are still separated from their parents. “In hundreds of cases, Customs agents deleted the initial records in which parents and children were listed together as a family with a “family identification number,” according to two officials at the Department of Homeland Security.” The teenager told police all about his gang, MS-13. In return, he was slated for deportation and marked for death. Toddlers representing themselves in court. USCIS is Starting a Denaturalization Task Force. Trump’s Travel Ban Has Torn Apart Hundreds of Families. Trump’s catch-and-detain policy snares many who have long called U.S. home. At 9 He Lost His Mom to Gang Violence. At 12 He Lost His Dad to Trump’s Immigration Policies. After being released from custody in El Paso on Sunday, the parents have now learned the whereabouts of their children, a shelter director said. But there are more hurdles before they’re reunited. Lawful permanent resident freed nearly three weeks after arrest. Sick Child Couldn’t Walk After U.S. Took Him From His Mom. Painful memories of Michigan for immigrant girl, 7, reunited with mom. The Awful Plight of Parents Deported Without Their Children. From behind bars, a father searches for one of the 2,000 kids still separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. Dad, I’m Never Going to See You Again. Feds failing to put migrant parents in touch with separated kids. Former Seattle Chief Counsel sentenced to 4 years in prison for wire fraud, aggravated identity theft scheme. “At night, Andriy sometimes wakes up screaming in the bunk bed he shares with his mother and baby brother.” “My Whole Heart Is There.” “My son is not the same.” “Are You Alone Now?” There was a pilot program. Transport Fees. A Migrant Mother Had to Pay $576.20 to Be Reunited With Her 7-Year-Old Son. Letters from the Disappeared. Listen. Border Agent Threatened to Put Immigrant’s Daughter Up for Adoption, ACLU Says. A New Border Crisis. Separated Parents Are Failing Asylum Screenings Because They’re So Heartbroken. A Twitter Bot Has Joined the Immigration Battle to Fight ICE With Facts. A Twitter Bot Is Posting the Names and Locations of Immigrant Detention Centers Across the U.S. Over the course of three weeks, a major U.S. defense contractor detained dozens of immigrant children inside a vacant Phoenix office building with no kitchen and only a few toilets. The Immigrant Children’s Shelters Near You. Supreme Court just wrote a presumption of white racial innocence into the Constitution. The Trump administration is not answering basic questions about separation of migrant families. Immigration Attorney Says ICE Broke Her Foot, Locked Her Up. This is what Trump and ICE are doing to parents and their children. A practice so cruel that the United States ended it for a quarter-century. It’s only going to get worse. Torn apart. Don’t you know that we hate you people? (Only) 17 states sue Trump administration over family separations. News outlets join forces to track down children separated from their parents by the U.S. We might not even have ever known. New 1,000-Bed ICE Lockup Set to Open on Site of Notorious ‘Tent City’ in South Texas. Potemkin camps. Research suggests that the family of Anne Frank attempted to escape to the U.S., but their efforts were thwarted by America’s restrictive immigration policy. Exclusive: Trump administration plan would bar people who enter illegally from getting asylum. We’re Going to Abolish ICE. Woman Climbs Statue of Liberty to Protest Family Separations, Island Shut Down. How to Abolish ICE. And just for fun: ICE Training Officers in Military-Grade Weapons, Chemical Agents. Dogsitting.
* The Central American Child Refugee Crisis: Made in U.S.A.
* I’ve Been Reporting on MS-13 for a Year. Here Are the 5 Things Trump Gets Most Wrong.
* I feel pretty confident the buried story here is that Trump blackmailed Anthony Kennedy by threatening to destroy his son’s life; I suppose it’ll all come out during Truth and Reconciliation in the 2040s. Anyway this is just about the final end of America, buckle up.
* All of American history fits in the life span of only three presidents.
* Trump Confidant Floats Crazy RBG-For-Merrick-Garland SCOTUS Swap. I am a huge proponent of this deal but you’ll have to confirm Garland first. You understand.
* There’s no returning to a golden age of American democracy that never existed. Donald Trump, the resistance, and the limits of normcore politics.
* What can we learn from 1968?
* Trump Inauguration Day rioting charges against 200+ people abruptly dropped by U.S.
* A major Republican leader in the House has been accused of facilitating the sexual abuse of huge numbers of children in his previous career as a wrestling coach. No, not him, this is a new guy.
* Farmers in America are killing themselves in staggering numbers.
* Been Down So Long It Looks Like Debt to Me.
* In the richest country in all of human history.
* A country of empty storefronts.
* $117,000/year is now considered low income in San Francisco. Class and America.
* How Flint poisoned its people.
* ‘A way of monetizing poor people’: How private equity firms make money offering loans to cash-strapped Americans. With special appearance by Obama Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner!
* Rosa Parks’s Arrested Warrant.
* The Beautiful, Ugly, and Possessive Hearts of Star Wars.
* Every parent’s secret suspicion confirmed: She was worried how a ‘teacher of the year’ treated her 5-year-old son. So she made a secret recording.
* Lows of 80 degrees and higher, now commonplace, were once very rare. They occurred just 26 times from 1872 to 1999 or about once every five years. Since 2000, they’ve happened 37 times or twice every year on average. Probably nothing.
* It’s So Hot Out, It’s Slowing Down the Speed of Stock Trades.
* Flood insurance is completely broken.
* Companies buying back their own shares is the only thing keeping the stock market afloat right now.
* Facebook destroyed online publishing, then quit the business.
* The US Left Has Only Four Tendencies.
* Students in Detroit Are Suing the State Because They Weren’t Taught to Read.
* Doesn’t seem like a great sign, no.
* A great ideas as long as you know nothing about either writing or computers.
Turns out that’s an easy question to answer, thanks to MIT research affiliate, and longtime-critic of automated scoring, Les Perelman. He’s designed what you might think of as robo-graders’ kryptonite, to expose what he sees as the weakness and absurdity of automated scoring. Called the Babel (“Basic Automatic B.S. Essay Language”) Generator, it works like a computerized Mad Libs, creating essays that make zero sense, but earn top scores from robo-graders.
To demonstrate, he calls up a practice question for the GRE exam that’s graded with the same algorithms that actual tests are. He then enters three words related to the essay prompt into his Babel Generator, which instantly spits back a 500-word wonder, replete with a plethora of obscure multisyllabic synonyms:
“History by mimic has not, and presumably never will be precipitously but blithely ensconced. Society will always encompass imaginativeness; many of scrutinizations but a few for an amanuensis. The perjured imaginativeness lies in the area of theory of knowledge but also the field of literature. Instead of enthralling the analysis, grounds constitutes both a disparaging quip and a diligent explanation.”
“It makes absolutely no sense,” he says, shaking his head. “There is no meaning. It’s not real writing.”
But Perelman promises that won’t matter to the robo-grader. And sure enough, when he submits it to the GRE automated scoring system, it gets a perfect score: 6 out of 6, which according to the GRE, means it “presents a cogent, well-articulated analysis of the issue and conveys meaning skillfully.”
* Winners of the 2018 National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year Contest.
* In 1934, an American professor urged that Jews be civil — to the Nazis.
* California reconsiders felony murder.
* William Shatner kicks off July 4th by implying that UW-Madison & Penn should consider firing 2 kid lit professors for disagreeing with him about whether it’s appropriate to note racism in Little House of the Prairie.
* Six decades after being told her mother was dead, she found her — 80 minutes away and 100 years old.
* Between 1984 and the mid-1990s, before better HIV drugs effectively rendered her obsolete, Ruth Coker Burks cared for hundreds of dying people, many of them gay men who had been abandoned by their families. She buried more than three dozen of them herself, after their families refused to claim their bodies. For many of those people, she is now the only person who knows the location of their graves.
* How Universities Facilitate Far-Right Groups’ Harassment of Students and Faculty.
* A location scout’s view of California.
* Not all heroes wear capes: How an EPA worker stole $900K by pretending to be a CIA agent.
* How Pixar’s Open Sexism Ruined My Dream Job (Guest Column).
* Reality Winner pleads guilty.
* When copyright goes wrong, EU edition.
* Academic minute: Geoengineering.
* Anglo-Saxon Studies, Academia and White Supremacy.
* The Millennial Socialists Are Coming. How Ocasio-Cortez Beat the Machine. A Conversation with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Fights the Power. Next: Julia Salazar Is Looking to Land the Next Blow Against the New York Democratic Machine. The socialists are coming! But huge, if true.
* The clearest lesson, which holds now as it did then, is that to rearrange international order in an egalitarian way, you need an egalitarian and internationally oriented domestic politics in the richest and most powerful countries. Otherwise, your best-laid plans can be scuttled by something like what happened then—the neoliberal revolt of capital, the crushing of the labor unions, the turn to the construction of the current international regime of relatively free flow of goods, services, and capital, but not people. Today’s nationalist revolts, most notably the catastrophe in the United States, are another body blow to progressive internationalist aspirations. Ironically, they are directed in part against some of the pieties of the neoliberal order—although certainly not in any constructive or progressive direction.
* A Subreddit Dedicated to Thanos Is Preparing to Ban Half of Its Users at Random.
* lol
* The UK is committing national suicide to satisfy a laughably illegitimate referendum that never should have happened in the first place and no one is going to stop it.
* Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind.
* If there is hope, it lies with the Juggalos.
It is tragic. I’m not a method actor, but one of the techniques a method actor will use is to try and use real-life experiences to relate to whatever fictional scenario he’s involved in. The only thing I could think of, given the screenplay that I read, was that I was of the Beatles generation—‘All You Need Is Love’, ‘peace and love’.
I thought at that time, when I was a teenager: ‘By the time we get in power, there will be no more war, there will be no racial discrimination, and pot will be legal.’ So I’m one for three. When you think about it, [my generation is] a failure. The world is unquestionably worse now than it was then.
* The first superhero movie is more than 100 years old.
* Rest in peace, Harlan Ellison. Rest in peace, Steve Ditko.
* NASA’s Policies to Protect the Solar System From Contamination Are Out of Date. We’re not going to is the thing.
* Space is full of dirty, toxic grease, scientists reveal.
* Man suspected of killing 21 co-workers by poisoning their food.
* There could be as many as 7000 tigers living in American backyards.
* “When I Was Alive”: William T. Vollmann’s Climate Letter to the Future.
* Remembering Google Reader, five years on.
* Very cool: If you use Gmail, know that “human third parties” are reading your email.
* A classic edition of “our brains don’t work”: that’s because your freaking visual system just lied to you about HOW LONG TIME IS in order to cover up the physical limitations of those chemical camera orbs you have on the front of your face.
* Sports corner! The Warriors Are Making A Mockery Of The NBA Salary Cap. A Literary Lineup for the World Cup. We Timed Every Game. World Cup Stoppage Time Is Wildly Inaccurate. Catching “the world’s most prolific criminal fixer of soccer matches.”
* Physics says that our perception of smoothly flowing time is a cosmic accident. So why do we think the future always comes after the past?
* A Dunbar number for place: At any point in life, people spend their time in 25 places.
* Some monkeys in Panama may have just stumbled into the Stone Age. Don’t do it, guys, it’s not worth the hassle.
* I was basically my own editor for 25 years at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. And then the publisher decided he didn’t like what he saw.
* Life as a professional dungeon master.
* Naked Japanese hermit forced back into civilization after 29 years on deserted island.
* An Oral History of ASSSSCAT.
* Peyton Reed (director of Ant-Man and the Wasp) remembers writing Back to the Future: The Ride.
* The Roxy, West Hollywood, CA, July 7, 1978.
* Someone in the club tonight is stealing my ideas.
* The arc of history is long but seriously they really took their time with this.
* What should we read if we want to be happy?
* And Incredibles 3 looks wild. Don’t miss Old Man Incredible! I’m here for it.
Friday Links! Tons of Them! Not All of Them Depressing!
* The kids are all right: the editorial in the Marquette Tribune today is anti-edX, anti-robo-graders.
* MOOC as intellectual neocolonialism. Why online education is mostly a fantasy. The MOOC monster will never be satisfied.
* “I can’t tell you how disappointed I am,” said State Sen. Alberta Darling at Tuesday’s hearing. “Here we have accounts of tuition being squirreled away at the same time you raised tuition. What was your intent?” Scenes from the war on higher education in Wisconsin.
* Depression and graduate school.
Perhaps it is the self-aggrandizement the authors seem to share with the ballooning employer-fix-it crowd, but when I encountered this perennial theory in The Innovator’s Prescription, I finally realized that everything I learned as a bartender at HBS was true: things do work out perfectly when we all nod in agreement, sketch it out on cocktail napkins, and congratulate each other for being in each other’s presence.
* Hundreds of Chicago Students Walk Out of Standardized Test. Chicago Public Schools cancels district-mandated standardized test for kindergartens and first graders.
* What does the ubiquitous cheating in reform-era education mean? It means that reformers are so dumb they can’t even set up arbitrary benchmarks for success; they literally fail their own tests despite having written the questions and answers themselves. Imagine a panel of fish oil salesmen riddled with arthritis and clearly suffering from memory loss and you get some idea. What the cheating proves is that these people are liars and cheats, but more than that, it proves that the systems of accountancy and auditing promoted by the liars and cheaters are themselves a lie. The reform is doubly fraudulent.
* US schools weigh bulletproof uniforms: ‘It’s no different than a seatbelt in a car.’ Well, maybe it’s a little different. Can we agree it’s a little different?
* In short, it’s time to cash out of capitalism. Here at http://stocktips.gerrycanavan.com we’ve been rating capitalism as a DON’T BUY for years.
* Workplace Safety and the Gilded Age Theory of Risk. Hundreds of thousands of Bangladesh’s garment workers walk out in protest over factory deaths. Yglesias shrugs.
* Surprise! The Hostess bankruptcy was union-busting.
* A 2010 report produced by a Dallas investment house found that aside from the richest of the rich, among the remaining 90 percent of NFL players, nine in ten of them would be insolvent within ten years of retirement.
* UCLA professor let his students “cheat” on a game theory midterm. I can’t decide if he should have flunked the Lone Wolves or given them A+s.
* Matt Weiner says Mad Men season six is structured by the Wikipedia entry for Dante’s Inferno.
* The spectacle has to be shaped carefully so that suffering takes on the qualities of an elevating narrative the audience can feel part of, an affirmative allegory of capitalism in which hard work and energetic competition show us the most worthy, the winners. Jacobin vs. the Oscars.
* Rachel Maddow vs. Alex Jones.
* May the curse of labor be cursed, may the ineluctability of production become its sorrow.
* Everything Is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever.
* And I hate it when politicians break kayfabe. As my friend @mikemccaffrey put it: “Can you please identify the president who assaulted your democracy in this lineup?”
Election Links, One Last Time
Hippies Wander Into the Lions’ Den, Maul Lions. Our new, significantly less terrible Senate. Our new, only slightly less terrible House. Why Americans Actually Voted For A Democratic House. Let the Michelle Obama for Senate speculation begin. The Victory for Gay Marriage Was Bigger Than You Realized. High-Level Orc Assassination Rogue Wins Maine State Senate Seat, Humans Tremble At Might Of The Horde. Demographics as Destiny. What happened last night was a demographic time bomb that had been ticking and that blew up in GOP faces. Barack Obama and The Death Of Normal. The Mystery of Why Republicans Were So Sure They’d Win. Cheer Up, Republicans. Obama won Cubans (!) in Florida. Orson Scott Card flips out. NRO flips out. 51st state?
All the Midweek Links
* Both In Focus and The Big Picture visit the 2012 Paralympics.
* Michelle Obama did great last night, but the story of a sick little girl named Zoey whose ability to live was saved by the ACA hits a bit closer to home.
* Who’s going to be the lesser evil in 2012 2008 2004 2000 1996 1992 1988 1984 1980 1976 1972 1968?
* On reporting poverty. Related: Melissa Harris-Perry talks poverty on MSNBC.
* Mitch Hurwitz Talks to Vulture About Reviving Arrested Development.
* The unsuccessful self-treatment of a case of “writer’s block.” These results have since been confirmed.
* The real affirmative action: Researchers with access to closely guarded college admissions data have found that, on the whole, about 15 percent of freshmen enrolled at America’s highly selective colleges are white teens who failed to meet their institutions’ minimum admissions standards.
* How many people have died because Walter White got cancer? And a Breaking Bad Fermi problem: What is a good approximation of how much money Skyler had in the storage unit when she showed Walt how she stopped counting it?
* A portrait of David Foster Wallace as a midwestern author. And more. Words David Foster Wallace’s Mom Invented.
* Report: Student Debt Is Holding Back The Housing Recovery. Are you interested in student debt now, old people?
* In North Carolina, Obama’s 2008 Victory Was Ahead of Schedule.
* Getting spicy: Hacker Group Claims to Have Romney’s Tax Returns.
* BREAKING: Rachel Carson Didn’t Kill Millions of Africans.
* BREAKING: Social Security Administration to arm illegal immigrants with hollow-point bullets to murder taxpayers. Wake up, sheeple! The truth is out there.
* Erin DiMeglio is a third-string high-school quarterback.
* And for the kids: How We Got to Mars. The lives of the cosmonauts. HTML5 Map of the Firefly ‘Verse. And a lost interview with Ray Bradbury:
Friday Links 3
Friday links 3. [UPDATE: Comments closed on this post due to harassment from a banned commenter. Looking into solutions. Reopened.]
* How long will the MSM cover up the heroics of time-traveling Ronald Reagan?
* Another take on Mark McGurl’s The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, this time from the Valve, about transnationalism and the American university.
* More on yesterday’s unjust Supreme Court decision on the right to DNA evidence from Matt Yglesias, including a link to this striking observation from Jeffrey Toobin on John Roberts’s governing judicial philosophy:
The kind of humility that Roberts favors reflects a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society. In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.
* Peak Oil, risk, and the financial collapse: some speculative economics from Dmitry Orlov. Via MeFi.
* Mark Penn’s superscience proves pessimism is the new microtrend. Via Gawker.
* Freakonomics considers vegetarianism-sharing.
* Possible outcomes in Iran from Gerry Seib in The Wall Street Journal. Via the Plank.
* People power prevails. After some period of extended protest, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is shown to be a fraud, his re-election rigged, and Mir Hossein Mousavi and his forces of moderation win a runoff. A long process of changing Iran’s system in which real power lies in the hands of clerics operating behind the scenes begins, and the voices demanding an end to Iran’s international isolation move to the fore. Such a simple and straightforward outcome seems unlikely, but that’s what happened in Ukraine.
* Mr. Ahmadinejad survives, but only by moderating his position in order to steal the thunder of the reformers and beat them at their own game. U.S. officials think it’s at least possible the erratic leader decides to survive by showing his critics that he actually is capable of what they claim he isn’t, which is reducing Iran’s isolation. He stays in power and regains his standing with internal critics by, among other things, showing new openness to discuss Iran’s nuclear program with the rest of the world.
* The forces of repression win within Iran, but international disdain compounds, deepening world resolve to stop Iran’s nuclear program and its sponsorship of extremists. In other words, Iran doesn’t change, but the rest of the world does.
* The protests are simply crushed by security forces operating under the control of spiritual leader Ali Khamenei, the election results stand untouched, and Iran’s veneer of democracy ultimately is shown to be totally fraudulent. That makes it clear that the only power that matters at all is the one the U.S. can’t reach or reason with, the clerical establishment. There is no recount, no runoff, and the idea that “moderates” and “reformers” can change Iran from within dies forever.
* There is some legitimate recount or runoff, but Iran emerges with Mr. Ahmadinejad nominally in charge anyway. He emerges beleaguered, tense and defensive, knowing he sits atop a society with deep internal divides and knowing the whole world knows as well. His control is in constant doubt. What’s the classic resort of such embattled leaders? Distract attention from internal problems with foreign mischief, and use a military buildup (in this case, a nuclear one) to create a kind of legitimacy that’s been shown to be missing on the domestic front.
* Mr. Mousavi somehow prevails, perhaps through a runoff, and becomes president, but he operates as a ruler deeply at odds with the clerical establishment that controls the military and security forces, and deeply mistrusted by it. As a result, he’s only partly in charge, and in no position to take chances with a real opening to the West. He has always supported Iran’s nuclear program anyway and now has to do so with a vengeance to show that, while a reformer, he isn’t a front for the West.
Great Moments in Presidential Inaugurations – 1
The shittrain began on November 22nd, 1963, in Dallas—when some twisted little geek blew the President’s head off … and then a year later, LBJ was re-elected as the “Peace Candidate.”
Johnson did a lot of rotten things in those five bloody years, but when the history books are written he will emerge in his proper role as the man who caused an entire generation of Americans to lose all respect for the Presidency, the White House, the Army, and in fact the whole structure of “government.”
And then came ’68, the year that somehow managed to confirm almost everybody’s worst fears about the future of the Republic … and then, to wrap it all up another cheapjack hustler moved into the White House. If Joe McGinnis had written The Selling of the President about good old Ike, he’d have been chased through the streets of New York by angry mobs. But when he wrote it about Nixon, people just shrugged and said, “Yeah, it’s a goddamn shame, even if it’s true, but so what?”
I went to Nixon’s inauguration. Washington was a sea of mud and freezing rain. As the Inaugural Parade neared the corner of 16th and Pennsylvania Avenue, some freak threw a half-gallon wine jug at the convertible carrying the commandment of the Marine Corps … and as one-time Presidential candidate George Romney passed by in his new role as Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, the mob on the sidewalk began chanting “Romney eats shit! Romney eats shit!”
George tried to ignore it. He knew the TV cameras were on him so he curled his mouth up in a hideous smile and kept waving at the crowd—even as they continued to chant “Romney eats shit!”
The mood of the crowd was decidedly ugly. You couldn’t walk 50 feet without blundering into a fistfight. The high point of the parade, of course, was the moment when the new President’s car passed by.
But it was hard to be sure which one it was. The Secret Service ran a few decoys down the line, from time to time, apparently to confuse the snipers and maybe draw some fire … but nothing serious happened: just the normal hail of rocks, beer cans, and wine bottles … so they figured it was safe to run the President through.
Nixon came by—according to the TV men—in what appeared to be a sort of huge, hollowed-out cannonball on wheels. It was a very nasty looking armored car, and God only knows who was actually inside it.
I was standing next to a CBS-TV reporter named Joe Benti and I heard him say, “Here comes the President…” “How do you know?” I asked him. It was just barely possible to detect a hint of human movement through the slits that passed for windows.
“The President is waving to the crowd,” said Benti into his mike.
“Bullshit!” said Lennox Raphael standing beside me. “That’s Neal Cassidy in there.”
“Who?” said Benti.
“Never mind,” I said. “He can’t hear you anyway. That car has a vacuum seal.”
Benti stared at me, then moved away. Shortly afterward, he quit his job and took his family to Copenhagen.
When the Great Scorer comes to list the main downers of our time, the Nixon Inauguration will have to be ranked Number One. Altamont was a nightmare, Chicago was worse, Kent State so bad that it’s still hard to find the right words for it … but there was at least a brief flash of hope in those scenes, a wild kind of momentary high, before the shroud came down.
The Nixon Inauguration is the only public spectacle I’ve ever dealt with that was a king-hell bummer from start to finish. There was a stench of bedrock finality about it. Standing there on Pennsylvania Avenue, watching our New President roll by in his black-armored hearse, surrounded by a trotting phalanx of Secret Service men with their hands in the air, batting away the garbage thrown out of the crowd. I found myself wondering how Lee felt at Appomattox … or the main Jap admiral when they took him out to the battleship Missouri to sign the final papers.
Hunter S. Thompson on the 1968 inauguration, from his book on the 1972 election, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.
Gerry Canavan 
