My Revolution

Image via Sodahead.

I was sort of clean for Gene in early 1968, you know. I'm that old!

I cut my hair and put on a tie (paisley, no doubt, and four or five inches wide), and did a little door-to-door in our little town, not proselytizing, that was not part of my instructions from the McCarthy campaign, just collecting information on preferences, but I was glad to be a footsoldier. It was a revolution! The youth of America were going to take over, at long last, and wash our country clean of corruption! I felt infinitely superior to friends lounging around listening to Iron Butterfly (as far as Iron Butterfly goes, I guess I still do), or Simon and Garfunkel: I can't hear the new Bernie ad without a garbled lyric coming involuntarily into my mind, expressive of a weirdly wrong sentiment for a primary campaign:

Kathy I'm lost
as we boarded a Greyhound for Pittsburgh
we smoked the last one an hour ago
no
Michigan seems like a dream to me now

It wasn't very interesting work, obviously. I'm sure the majority were refuses-to-say and not-at-homes, and I had few opportunities to express my sincere emotions and deep radical understanding of the political economy and help to bring our noble working classes out of their false consciousness. Make that zero opportunities. And it can't have lasted very long, probably because there really wasn't that much work to do.

Then Senator Robert Kennedy showed up to coopt the movement. I'm not sure anybody wants to remember how hostile you could feel, from the left, toward Bobby Kennedy at that moment. It was as if we were projecting onto him all the anger we might have felt toward our martyred president.

It's got some uncanny rhymes with the way you might feel about Hillary Clinton, in fact: he was no leftist, with his history of Red-baiting and union-busting; he represented an un-American concept of dynastic politics with his fabulously wealthy family and one brother president already; he was a carpetbagger who had moved to New York only because there was an available Senate seat he could buy.

Did he really care about black people or was he exploiting the desire of the young for change? Did he really care about the war that had begun on his brother's watch (when, they said, Cardinal Spellman had personally worked to nudge JFK toward ever more overt support to the Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem)? Was he really Napoleon, mounting the revolution we young people had built as a vehicle for his own personal glory?

Well, no, he wasn't, though the way I came to get that wasn't entirely rational, either; it was when he descended on my town, in the little park with the monument to the International Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen where my high school band had played one Labor Day—I specifically remember it was International because we had to learn O Canada for the occasion, great song. He climbed out of his helicopter and approached the dais tousled and tanned, shining with charisma, and spoke to everybody's higher nature. In retrospect it's as if he might have been fey, illuminated from within the shadow of his approaching death. You couldn't help believing, anyway, that he meant to be inspired by us, to take his inspiration and use it for good. He was okay, he was marked with greatness.

And irrational as it was, it wasn't wrong, as I think everybody who could understand did come to understand between the killing of Dr. King and the killing of Bobby Kennedy himself. It's not clear at all that the revolution could have gone on with him any more than it did without him, though I can't help wishing we'd been able to find out. It's clear that Senator McCarthy, lovely man as he was, wasn't any more a revolutionary than Kennedy was; he was another politician and a good one, just a bit less of a politician when the real politicians were what we needed on our side.