City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works Publications and Research New York City College of Technology 2019 Nothing Is Revealed: An Intimate Look Back at 1968 Aaron Barlow CUNY New York City College of Technology How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/ny_pubs/462 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] Nothing Is Revealed An Intimate Look Back at 1968 Aaron Barlow Cover Photo by Atlas Green (CC0) Published by: Brooklyn, NY 2019 ISBN-13: 9781697690675 PUBLISHED UNDER AN ATTRIBUTION-NONCOMMERCIAL-SHAREALIKE CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE ii For all of those who didn’t make it far enough to be able to look back ii Introduction This project isn’t simply one of memoir. It’s a cultural study from a personal base, one created, also, through a unique temporal framework, a moving narrative composed of blog posts each focused on the exact day fifty years earlier. Its sub- jectivity is deliberate, for the intent is to provide an impression of a significant year through the eyes of a young man in the process of coming of age. It’s also a political tale sparked by the rise of Donald Trump to the Presiden- cy of the United States, one detailing the seeds of that rise and the false populism and white nationalism that are still buoying him in 2019. Sexual violence. Racial violence. Political violence. Drugs. Alcohol. Travel and warped growth. These are things staying with me from 1968—and the things that have stayed with American culture. So these are at the heart of the book. If I have learned one thing through the very process of examining that year long past and completing this project, it’s that nothing happens in isolation; you can’t study any one item while ignoring what sits next to it. You can’t look back at one time without examining the prism of your own. One of William Faulkner’s characters in Requiem for a Nun says, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” People focus on the second part of this, but the key is “never dead.” 1968 lives on in America. The purpose of this study, at inception, was to see if real-time examinations of one year made half a century later to the day in each particular instance could lead to fresh knowledge and new appreciation of the connection between past and present. The apparatus added after the fact and surrounding the real-time blog en- tries is meant to tie what proved to be ninety-nine pieces into one whole--and to explicitly answer the original question. ***** Comparing 2018 to 1968 can be dangerous, especially when the work con- tinues into 2019. We don’t know if what, to some eyes, is a precipitous drop to- ward fascism today has any more reality than it did fifty years ago, when many believed the same thing; we don’t know how events of the more recent year will pan out. At the same time, we may be able to learn by examining the two main years together, understanding a bit better how we have changed. At the very least, this study does show how we can overblow the trivial, seeing cataclysm in the pop of a cork pistol—today, just as we did in the past. My hope is that it does more. For Americans, perhaps the biggest difference between 1968 and 2018 is that we are drowning in information today in a way we were not, then. This has ampli- fied our feelings about any number of things and has convinced us that we know more than we actually do—and maybe that makes us think that what is happening around us is more important than actually it is. The information that chokes us as it floods into our lungs, we mistakenly believe, is freeing us instead. Today, we don’t know we’re drowning; in 1968, we did, though we somehow pulled our- selves to the surface. We were not better informed in 2018 than we were in 1968—we only thought we were. Our opinions on the world, as a group and as groups within the United States, were largely the same as they had been fifty years earlier. A certain portion of the population loved Ayn Rand then; that same proportion does now. The biggest difference is that we talked aloud about things in 2018 that were only whispered of in 1968, including both white nationalism and homosexuality, just to mention two. ***** Objectivity can best be approached by admitting subjectivity and examining it. That thought may have been the genesis of this project’s structure. Studying 1968 through personal experience is subjective from conception, but I am attempt- ing generalize enough to provide insight for even those readers whose grandpar- ents hardly remember the year. The year, too, is specific: I am using it to help bet- ter understand how American culture was rocked in the late-1960s as a lead-in to trying to understand that same culture as manifest today. I don’t believe in objectivity; I don’t pretend to it. Throughout this book, I try to make my biases as clear as I can, allowing readers to judge what I write through understanding of the place of my own subjectivity—which is quite real. And through recognitions of my own pretensions and predilections, which I also do not try to hide. There’s a tri-part structure to this book. The first reflects my memories of 1968 themselves. The second is 1968 as seen through the prism of 2018. The third is the two woven together in 2019. That structure results from the nature of the project, one of process, not product. This book is a study of a culture from both a historical and a personal perspective within real-time constraints. Some of the posts on events surrounding August 1968 are based on pieces I wrote earlier, but even they were changed in the days leading up to the postings. The rest were all written close to the fifty-year date, many of them the evening before the posting. I did not look back to past posts while writing them, and I tried to keep some of what I knew of the intervening years out. The posts can be found at https://1968nothingwasrevealed.wordpress.com/. I have taken out some of lines quoted in the posts out of concern for copyright infringement. I have kept the repetitions that stand-alone posts required, for they reinforce the temporal progression of the project. I posted what follows to be “sticky” on the first page of the blog. Though it was not the first post written, it became the first anyone coming across the project page would see. Here, as will be the case throughout, the italicized remarks before and after were written in 2019. The entries are mostly as they were originally post- ed, though they have been lightly edited for clarity: ii What's This "1968" About, Anyhow? In 1966, my father took a job teaching Psychology at Hope College, a religious institution associated with the Dutch Reformed Church of America. It is located in Holland, Michigan, a middle-class, mostly white town, a type of American community unlike anything my family had ever before experienced. My journey through the sixties had already been a bit unusual for a baby-boomer kid. Starting in Richmond, Indiana, a mostly working-class town, it had taken me from there to Atlanta, Georgia for 4th and 5th grades. As an eleven-year-old, I was accepted into the experimental Ar- thur Morgan School, a junior-high boarding school well away in the mountains of Western North Carolina that was run by a radical group of Quakers. My father, who had been teaching at Emory University, soon ran afoul of his department chair. A fortunate offer of a Fulbright Fellowship teaching in Bangkok, Thailand allowed him to jump ship the next year and the family to experience life abroad for the first time. Back home after another year, it was a return to the school in the mountains for me while the family settled into Fort Wayne, once more in Indiana. The Dutch community of Holland, split between the Dutch Reformed and Christian Reformed churches, was, even so, the most homogenous community I had ever experienced. I really didn’t understand much about that at the time, but I was never comfortable in the town. That’s not to say it wasn’t was a wonderful place to be—if you were a young, white Ameri- can. It was. One of the things I like to do is leaven the general with the personal. Nothing is dispassionate or objective; it all comes from a viewpoint. I try to make mine obvious. Cultural Studies is what I do; I like it best when it reflects my own passions or history. Or both. What we have here is the story of a watershed year: 1968. Each post concerns events on a day exactly fifty years in the past, or a topic relevant to my life that day—or to the life of the country. The posts start with Oc- tober 3, 1967, the day Woody Guthrie died and will end with January 19, 1969, the day before Richard Nixon became president. My personal story of that year is one of violence, hunger and the start of a fall into drug use and alcohol dependency—among other things.