This is an essay about observations, so it’s not going to be sourced to the Mainstream Press that has served as propagandists and gatekeepers to the political status quo for too damned long. These are observations of political trends I’ve noted over more than 40 years of certifiable adulthood, strong interest in all things political, several oaths to protect and defend the Constitution (thus Laws of the Land), and a 40-year marriage to a political sci-guy who is even more obsessed with politics than I am.
The last time the left side of the political spectrum wielded significant political power was back during the dark days of VietNam in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It gained effective – though not much status quo – political power through the efforts of activists who motivated the young in high schools and on college campuses across the country, where the cannon fodder for the right’s dirty little opium war could be Shanghai’d by the draft. This meant that your average Mom and Pop America had a personal stake in the war, and they were darned sick of flag-draped coffins and burying pieces of their children shipped home from rice patties in a far-away country they couldn’t even find on a map. For no better reason than somebody’s terror of dominoes that might interfere with the drug supply and the M-I complex’s desire to make a fortune battle-testing cool shit like Napalm and 2,000# bombs and fancy new fighter jets. Hey, they’d been shafted by the end of the space race, and had to do something to justify their incestuous existence.
Oddly enough, it turned out to be Tricky Dick’s very own generals (plus spooks) who ended up taking him down, even though he made a valiant effort to save himself by abruptly ending a war nobody on this side of the Pacific ever could have ‘won’. That was back in an era when most of the military old-timers – the career officers who served at the Pentagon and commanded the conscripted troops – still took their oaths of service seriously, and they didn’t like what was going on any more than the students who had no choice or their parents did. You don’t really believe it was just a “third-rate burglary” at the Watergate that did Nixon in, do you?