With 1968 in the Rear-View Mirror

Note: After years of hibernation this story was rewritten in 2012. The illustration was done originally for Richmond.com in 1999. 

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Jan. 23: The USS Pueblo was seized on the high seas by North Korean forces; at least that’s the story I got. At the time I was in the Navy and I had little doubt we would rescue the Pueblo’s crew, even if it meant another war.

Subsequently, as captives, the Pueblo’s 83 men endured an ordeal that was shocking to an American public that had naively thought the USA's Super Power status meant such things could not happen.

Jan. 30: The Tet Offensive began, as the shadowy Viet Cong flexed its muscles and blurred battle lines with simultaneous assaults in many parts of South Vietnam. Even the American embassy in Saigon was attacked.

Mar. 16: In what came to be known as the My Lai Massacre, some 500 Vietnamese villagers -- women, children and old men (animals, too) -- were killed by American soldiers on patrol. However, it would be another 20 months before investigative journalist Seymour Hersh would break the horrifying story of the covered-up massacre, via the Associated Press wire service.

Mar. 31: Facing the burgeoning antiwar-driven campaigns of Sen. Eugene McCarthy and Sen. Robert Kennedy, President Lyndon Johnson suddenly withdrew from the presidential race, declining to run for reelection by saying, “I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination...”

Apr. 4: America’s most respected civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, was shot and killed in Memphis, Tennessee. Riots followed in cities coast-to-coast. The bitterness that remained after the dust settled was scary.

In Richmond, it ended an era. Young adventurous whites who followed music could no longer go in the black clubs they had once patronized. No more Sahara Club for me.

May 13: The USA and North Vietnam began a series of negotiations to end the war in Vietnam that came to be known as the Paris Peace Talks. Ironically, as a backdrop, France, itself, was in chaos. Workers and students had shut down much of the country with a series of strikes. The trains weren’t running, the airports were closed, as were schools, etc.

May 24: On the same day I was discharged from the Navy, Father Philip Berrigan and Thomas Lewis (of Artists Concerned About Vietnam) got sentenced to six years for destroying federal property, stemming from an incident where duck blood was poured over draft files at Baltimore’s Selective Service headquarters.

June 3: Artist Andy Warhol nearly died from wounds received from a gunshot fired by Valerie Solanis. She was a sometime writer and one of the many off-beat characters who had occasionally hung out at Warhol’s famous studio, The Factory. 

June 5: Having just won the California primary, Robert Kennedy was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan in Los Angeles. The hopes of millions that the Vietnam War would end soon died that night. It’s hard to imagine that Richard Nixon would have been able to defeat Kennedy in the general election. Kennedy's death meant the gravy train being enjoyed by big corporations supplying the war effort would continue to chug along.

June 8: James Earl Ray was arrested in London. Eventually, he was convicted of murdering Martin Luther King. Yet, questions about that crime and Ray's role linger today.

July 1: By an act of the General Assembly which was signed by Gov. Mills Godwin, Virginia Commonwealth University was established by a merger that seemed awkward at the time. The School of the Arts the new university inherited from RPI was already the largest professional art school in the country. The Medical College of Virginia was showing the world how to do heart transplants.

July 23: After watching “2001: A Space Odyssey” at the Westhampton Theatre, I saw The Who play live on stage at the Mosque (now the Altria Theater). Looking at the long line to get into the concert, I was quite surprised at how many hippies there were in Richmond. This was in the period the band was into smashing up its equipment to finish off shows.

The acid I took that day served me well.

Aug. 20: Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush what had been a season of renaissance. As it had been with the construction of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis, talk of World War III being one button-push away was commonplace.

Aug. 28: In Chicago the Democratic convention that selected Vice President Hubert Humphrey to top its ticket melted down. With tear gas in the air and blood in the streets 178 demonstrators/bystanders were arrested. Many were roughed up on live television. As cops clubbed citizens in the streets, CBS reporters Mike Wallace and Dan Rather were punched on the convention floor.

Watching the riots surrounding the Democratic convention on television, I began wondering if those who were saying our society was coming unglued might be right. Consequently, for the first time my political ideas were aired out in a newspaper, when my letter to the editor was published by the Richmond Times-Dispatch. That experience began a love affair with seeing my name in print.

Oct. 18: At the Summer Olympics at Mexico City, American track stars Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists during the medal ceremony for the 200 meter race. Smith and Carlos wore black gloves (and other symbolic accouterments) for a protest gesture that was widely seen as a “black power” salute.

Nov. 5: Richard Nixon (depicted above) narrowly defeated Hubert Humphrey. Although Humphrey, himself, was for peace, out of loyalty he refused to denounce Johnson’s failing war policy. It cost Humphrey dearly.

Also elected that day was Shirley Chisholm from Brooklyn. She was the first black female to serve in the House of Representatives.

Dec. 21: The first manned space mission to escape Earth’s gravity and orbit the moon began with the launching of Apollo 8.

Dec. 24: After having its way with them for 11 months, torture and mock executions included, North Korea released all of the members of the Pueblo’s crew but kept the ship. The U.S. Navy seemed to blame the Pueblo’s captain, Commander Lloyd M. "Pete" Bucher, for the entire painful fiasco. Mercifully, the Secretary of the Navy called off any official punishment.

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Note: With 1968 in the rear-view mirror, the general public’s perception of the antiwar movement’s protests as being unpatriotic kaleidoscoped into something else. The Doves began to prevail in the propaganda struggle. Over 1969, the Hawks' picture of how a victory in Vietnam would look steadily faded into a blur ... yet, the bloody war went on, anyway.

All rights reserved by the author.

  

They're Ba-a-ck: Right to Bear Arms in Carytown

Last summer I responded to a news story about guys marching around in Carytown with rifles. I wrote "A Stunt Without a Cause" and posted it on this blog. Well, it seems the summer-like weather we're enjoying in Richmond has the Right to Bear Arms Richmond crew back in the business of trying to draw attention to itself.

RVA Magazine has the story: 

Reggie Bowels, one of The Right to Bare Arms Richmond's founding members, said Memorial Day marked the one year anniversary for the group which made national headlines for their demonstrations in Richmond's busy local shopping district. 

Click here to read the rest of the story.

And, since my thinking about what this monkey business is all about hasn't changed since last summer, here's what I wrote about this group's craving for publicity on July 5, 2014:

A Stunt Without a Cause

Like a good political cartoon, a political stunt can sometimes drive a point home much better than an essay or a speech. However, to be good at cartoon-drawing, speech-making, or essay-writing it takes a certain amount of finesse and practice. Whereas, a stunt might be pulled off by anybody with the imagination and the nerve.

For instance, there was the Independence Day incident that had reporters with notepads and cameras following two young men carrying eye-catching firearms around in a busy shopping district in Richmond known as Carytown. Before that story is examined more closely, to provide context, here's a little history:

The Boston Tea Party, which was perpetrated 241 years ago, is one of history’s most famous political stunts. To protest England’s notorious Tea Act of 1773, the self-named Sons of Liberty dressed up like Indians, boarded a ship in Boston Harbor and flung a bunch of tea overboard. It clearly sent the bold Sons' sentiments about “taxation without representation” across the pond to the King of England.

Fast-forwarding to the 1960s, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on Aug. 28, 1963, which featured Rev. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, received extensive live television coverage that amplified the message of the gathering. Some 250,000 attendees made this pivotal event the largest demonstration anyone had ever seen in the nation’s capital.

Less than three weeks later, in Birmingham, Alabama, a church that had been central to the Civil Rights Movement was bombed; four black girls were killed in the blast. The dynamite was planted by message-sending members of the Ku Klux Klan, white men who wanted to inject a nightmare into the fray.

As different as they were, both of those events in 1963 were political stunts. The antiwar demonstrations that occurred in DeeCee and on college campuses later in the same decade were also designed to express a bitter disapproval of the escalating war in Vietnam in a way that delivered that message to all the world, in general, and policy-makers, in particular.

It was in this era the television industry became entwined with the authors of political stunts in a fashion that has facilitated the promulgation of all sorts of messages ever since. The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11’s hijackings/explosions have underlined how cold-blooded message-senders can be, once they cross the line to become terrorists.

Of course, for all sorts of reasons most stunts don’t end up reaching wide audiences. Modern society has grown accustomed to them. Many simply fizzle, or they don’t manage to send a clear message to anybody -- at least not a message than stands out more than the galling look-at-ME factor. Which brings us to back to the unfolding “open carry” story in Carytown, a story that had been brewing for a while leading up to a July 5th article written by Jim Nolan for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

More than 300 people were invited on Facebook to walk down Cary Street on July Fourth with handguns, rifles and other so-called “long guns” proudly displayed. Two showed up — and they were the organizers of the midday event in the family-oriented Carytown shopping district.

Click here to read the entire article.

Once again, context is important. Two or three guys carrying rifles across the parking lot of a suburban gun store won’t get much notice. Two or three guys walking by the Byrd Theatre with rifles might make some film buffs think of the 2012 shootings in a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado: 12 killed; 70 injured. And, speaking of Colorado, school children might flash on the dozen students shot to death in Columbine in 1999.

Since there’s no practical reason to have a rifle at hand, to leisurely stroll by shops, it had to make bystanders who saw the reporters and guys with rifles wonder what was going on. While Virginia’s laws would seem to allow for an open-carrying stunt in Carytown, some observers had to wonder if the right to own, carry and use a rifle gives anyone permission to provoke fear on a city sidewalk.

Context.

If the wee parades through Carytown keep up -- with loaded or unloaded rifles, how does anyone know which? -- eventually, dear reader, you know there will be some sort of problem. A child will get scared. A dog will lunge. Or some paranoid having a bad day will...

As for the expectations of business owners in Carytown to make a living, aren't they being trampled over? So maybe the trouble on the public sidewalk will come from an angry merchant confronting the perpetrators of the stunt with a question: weirdo Ayn Rand-ism aside, how far can the rights of an individual be stretched, at the expense of the rest of humanity?

Back to context: Unless they had seen some of the publicity the Carytown Riflemen had garnered leading up to the holiday stunt, how would anyone on the street's sidewalks have known in time to make a difference that they were witnessing a what was meant to be a harmless stunt?

Speaking of messages, from here on, what chance is there a shooter with a growing yen to shoot will hear the call to join the open-carry brigade? In the future, how will anyone know the guys with rifles in Carytown aren’t terrorists without a cause?

Music, Movies & Magic

At Hardywood Park on Sunday, May 17, 2015, between noon and 6 p.m. the Bijou Film Center will present a springtime frolic -- "Music, Movies & Magic." The afternoon's variety show will offer live performances by three bands. Short comedy films will be shown between sets by the bands.

Admission to this benefit event will be free. The beer will be cold. For this occasion the nonprofit Bijou will receive a small percentage of Hardywood's take in beer sales. Stay thirsty.

Live Music by: 

• The Red Hot Lava Men are a surf-rock band that formed in 1997. They play righteous covers of classic surf guitar instrumentals from the late-'50s/early-'60s. Personnel: Mark Golden; John Gotschalk; Doyle Hull; Greg Weatherford.   
• The Happy Lucky Combo originated 10 years ago as a trio of local street musicians. Barry Bless, Pippin Barnett and Dave Yohe will be performing what STYLE Weekly's Chris Bopst says is, "timeless vaudevillian musical comedy." 
• Avers: Serendipitously, members of various bands with projects aplenty fell together a couple of years ago. Now Avers is seen as a noticeably talented six-piece rock band with a psychedelic flavor. Avers just knocked 'em dead at the South by Southwest Music festival (SXSW) in Austin. Tyler Williams, James Mason, James Lloyd Hodges, Alexandra Spalding, Adrian Olsen and Charlie Glenn are Avers. 

Classic silent films by breakthrough movie-making geniuses Charlie Chaplin  and Buster Keaton will be screened. Early on, Chaplin saw the making of films as akin to magic. Consequently, much like a magician he went to great lengths to keep his tricks/special effects a secret. Speaking of magicians, John Smallie, who is a familiar busker in Carytown, will also be working the room. Plus some raffles will be held; prizes will be awarded. 

Yes, admission is free but opportunities to contribute to the establishment of the Bijou Film Center will be easy to find at the event on May 17th. It promises to be a splendid party.