Marathon Pundit: SDS' 1968 Tragical History Tour

I remember the good old days, they're gone now.

Elvis Costello said that to a heckler at a concert I attended at the Rosemont Theater in 1997, one who kept demanding he play "Clubland." Elvis said the statement came from rhythm and blues singer Little Wille John.

Last month, Tom Mannis traveled with camcorder and tripod in hand to Loyola Univerity's Rogers Park campus to record a reunion of Students for Democratic Society activists.

Click here to see Mannis' work.

The reunion was largely an long winded flashback of the so-called glory days of the what was then the New Left, it also reminded me that next year we are in for an onslaught of anniversary remembrances of a truly unhappy year, 1968.

That year brought us the Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations--riots destroyed parts of many large cities, neighborhoods such as Chicago's North Lawndale still have hundreds of vacant lots where homes and businesses once stood. The Tet Offensive, a military battle that won by our forces in Vietnam, was a political defeat for the Johnson administration, that led to LBJ's decision not to run for re-election that year. Seven years later, the Communists won the war, which Bob Brown, one of the panelists at the Loyola event, views as a good thing.

Within a few years, however, the phrases "boat people," "re-education camps," and from neighboring Cambodia, "killing fields" entered our language.

One panelist, Michael Klonsky, did manage to bring up the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, another 1968 downer, one that should have resonated among the Left who the really bad guys were then, if they possessed common sense, that is.

Power to the People!

The 1968 Democratic National Convention protests were a glorification platform for the SDS and the New Lefties, but it was a Pyrhhic victory--the chaos of old guard Democrat Richard J. Daleys cops' beating up the newbies ensured Richard Nixon's victory a few months later.

Even some of the good things that happened in 1968 ended up badly. A welcome diversion from the turmoil was pitcher Denny McLain winning 31 games while leading the Detroit Tigers to a World Series Championship. But even before '68, McLain was consorting with gamblers, and his professional and personal life collapsed in the 1970s--leading to two prison sentences for the man who should have been set for life.

The Beatles recorded their biggest-selling single of their legendary career, "Hey Jude," in 1968. Later in the year, they released their fabulous White Album, but the solo feel of that massive song collection foreshadowed the Fabs break up two years later.

In my Stokely Carmichael post, I wrote a bit about the reunion's first speaker, Michael James, who owns Chicago's Heartland Cafe, a vegetarian restaurant. James is still an anti-war activist, Mannis' video contains a shot of a split-in-two Navy missile prop that adorns the roof of Heartland. For a long time, Tom tells me, the veggie victual vendor proudly hung a portrait of Chairman Mao inside the restaurant. The ChiComm, who forced his nation through the Cultural Revolution and the grossly-misnamed Great Leap Forward, probably killed more people than either Hitler or Stalin as a result of the executions, but especially the famines that resulted from these catastrophic policies.

Interestingly, Heartland Cafe uses a non-union workforce, which led Mannis to add a caption onto his video, "How about paying your workers a living wage, Mr. James?"

James talks about bring back groups such as SDS--there is a group calling themselves that now, and the Gray Panthers--which still exist, but remember what Little Wille John and Elvis Costello said about the "good old days." Besides, most people just don't care anymore.

In Mannis' edited version, the second speaker, Franklin Rosemont, was snipped out because he was "painfully boring." I watched him speak in the earlier cut, he talked about his hitchhiking and hooking up with some members of the ultra-left union, the Industrial Workers of the World, better known as the Wobblies. Despite having a cool nickname, the Wobs were never a large union--membership peaked in the 1920s--and they were a motley collection of completely ineffectual socialists in the 1960s, and they remain so today.

Rosemont talks meeting some Chicago Wobblie hobos--wait to you see this guy--it appears he is part of the Boxcar Willie Nation.

Next up was Bob Brown, a former Black Panther. He wasn't much better of a speaker than Rosemont, but he did spew this bit of nonsense, making the claim about my junior senator Barack Obama, "Barack even on a good day cannot get more that 20 to 30 percent of the African (American) community on a good day."

Brown has a problem with reality, which in 2004 led him--this isn't in Mannis' video--to file a 183 page class action slavery reparations lawsuit in a federal court against Queen Elizabeth II, President Bush, Spanish King Juan Carlos, Pope John Paul II, the governors of Illinois, Virginia, Louisiana and Texas, some ports, and a whole bunch of businesses and banks.

Brown didn't hire a lawyer for the suit--most likely, no one would take the case.

Michael Klonsky spoke next, he has the dubious distinction of working as a co-author with former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers. The Weather Underground was an offshoot of the SDS.

Klonsky did not say he was a communist, but he admitted he grew up in a communist household, one that for a while proudly displayed a portrait of mass-murderer "Uncle Joe" Stalin.

Now I need to divert. While these men were supporting the Viet Cong and trying--but failing--to push America into the far Left, Mrs. Marathon Pundit was living in the Soviet Union. In that "worker's paradise," my wife, like many Soviet citizens, lived in a home without central plumbing or heating. Meals were cooked on a wood fire stove. She lived in the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic, which "requested," along with Estonia and Lithuania, to join the Communist behemoth in 1940. Luckily, these nations were able to provide electricity to their residents in the 1930s, before Soviets ruined the illegally annexed countries.

When I visited her home in 1994, I thought I'd walked into Abraham Lincoln's Kentucky cabin--only with electricity. Mrs. Marathon Pundit's home has stone walls, at least, and wooden floors. (I have to put that in there, I don't want to sleep on the couch.)

Essentially, the standard of living in the Baltic Republics were frozen at 1939 levels. And ironically, this reluctant part of the Soviet Union was considered a better-off part of the Evil Empire.

My mother-in-law of course knows many people who were shipped off to Siberia by Stalin. Over 100,000 Latvians were still wearing their summer clothes by the time they reached the taiga or the tundra a few months later in the heart of winter. The Soviet system couldn't even repress efficiently--executions by firing squad being an exception.

More on Klonsky: At least he admitted that the name "Students for a Democratic Society was a misnomer. Not too many SDSers actually went to school.

It reminds me of those "students" who stormed our Iranian embassy in 1979, and held our staff as hostages for 444 days.

And as I mentioned earlier, Klonsky did bring up the crushing of the 1968 Prague Spring.

Last to bat was Penelope Rosemont, who was only a slightly better speaker than her husband Franklin. Like Michael James, she attended that after-prep-school haven Lake Forest College.

She uttered a couple of zingers: "Understand the young people who want to be anarchists and should be anarchists." How special. That was followed with, "It seems all we do is build up capitalism, certainly it's frustrating." My mother-in-law knew some of the forest brothers, the almost forgotten post World War II anti-communist guerrillas who undoubtedly found it "frustrating" to be hunted down like animals by the KGB and it predecessor organization. Few of them lived to see the 1960s. Yeah, I know Ms. Rosemont doesn't say she was a communist in the video, but to me, being against capitalism is a tacit admission of such.

Sadly we've got almost 400 days of 1968 love-ins to suffer through. But there is good news. In 2009 we can celebrate the 20th anniversary of the revolutions of 1989. This time, "Power to the People" wasn't just an empty phrase.

Headline inspiration comes from The Rutles, the "Pre-Fab Four" who "made the Sixties what they are today."

And finally, don't forget to visit Tom Mannis' The Bench.

Related posts:

Stokely Carmichael: A look back at a radical

University of Illinois at Chicago's Bill Ayers: Not a jarhead

The Weather Underground and Ward Churchill-UPDATED!

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