Who Killed the Kennedys?

Why are the 1960s' still interesting? I know that when I was at Madison, I eventually couldn't stand the straw-men put up by the left to describe just how great they were compared to our slothful, indolent, and apathetic generation. I eventually wrote a column on it that was probably the best-received article I've ever written.

But the 1960s are still important in one singular way: they showed how a democratic society, once seriously threatened, supposedly acts like any other government regime: repression, police state actions, and quasi-fascist "spy" organizations that bloomed during times of real threat.

My ancient and wise father once said that he thought that 1968 was the one year he thought a revolution was possible in the US. This is understandable: the French revolution of 1968, actually bringing workers and students together, the campus and ghetto uprisings (or riots, depending on your view), and the challenges to America's military power abroad, especially the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, which showed Americans Vietnamese guerrillas inside our embassy for a fight we said we were winning in Saigon.

But then there is the question of dissent. How much is possible without the government taking counter-action? In Madison, there were University police, the National Guard, the FBI, and various types of military intelligence on campus. Many supposedly "undercover" (one was denounced when it was found he had a wedding band on).

So is the US just like any other ultimately repressive state? Will it kill (like at Kent State) when it finds it necessary to preserve its stature? Are we a democratic state or a thinly disguised republic of lies?

The Chinese present a conundrum in this case: free-market capitalism within a quasi-Stalinist government. No one, it seems, will complain unless the spigot of international commerce is somehow turned off. The state as leader in a pro-capitalist state is difficult to reconcile to its objective of repressing any dissent.

The Kennedy I regret passing is not John, but his brother Robert, or Bobby. Here was a man that was equally attractive to both worker and student, black and white. In an election, he would have easily beat Nixon, who after all barely beat back party hack Hubert Humphrey.

So capitalism is not the great balm of repressive government as advertised. It can bloom without a sound. It is up to us to make some noise.