I remember going to a movie at Telegraph and Dwight, a calm Berkeley evening, and when we came out a couple hours later, the cops were shooting tear gas canisters down the street. We would go up in the hills above the Claremont district and listen to sirens in the distance, and see bonfires. It resembled the coming of the great darkness in the Lord of the Rings.

As I wrote on my art site, www.sunpopblue.com, in the overload section, 1968 was the year in which our country was stolen from us. I quote:

By 1968, our nation was in full ferment. We were fully engaged in Vietnam; young men were dying for no reason. Our friends who had engineered the killing of JFK were, among other things, shipping massive amounts of heroin from the Golden Triangle to the ghettos of America.  Massive protests against the war and for civil rights—this was before political correctness split the left into a hundred pieces—rocked the nation's campuses. Bobby Kennedy advanced steadily on the presidency. Martin Luther King's rhetoric and influence had reached a new level of power and influence.

On April third, Robert F. Kennedy said:

"We've had difficult times in the past. We will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; it is not the end of disorder."

The very next day, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. For a plausible reconstruction of the plot to kill him, I recommend James Ellroy's,"The Cold Six Thousand." (More on that book later.) 

At Dr. King's memorial service, Richard Nixon, the always Mob-friendly Darth Vader of twentieth century American politics, leaned over to whisper hello to Jacqueline Kennedy, black-draped in the pew ahead, and received an icy stare in return.

And the powers that be were getting nervous.

While Richard Nixon was planning his political comeback, everyone knew Bobby Kennedy would be a shoo-in for the presidency. RFK was, of course, assassinated on June 5 of 1968. I recommend Ellroy's book for a plausible reconstruction of how that plot developed. (As an aside, I came across an interesting article the other day about the RFK killing: Did the CIA kill Bobby Kennedy?)

Nixon was elected President. Four years of nightmares followed, although he was forced to do a few things, like create the  Environmental Protection Agency, which Bush has now nearly dismantled. While running for re-election in 1972, Nixon apparently got very nervous about information that the Democrats might have about a loan Howard Hughes had made to Nixon's brother Donald. A crew was dispatched to burgle the Democratic Headquarters in the Watergate Hotel. This led to the the near-impeachment and subsequent resignation of Richard Nixon as President of the United States.

Interestingly, many of the names in the Watergate investigation were also to be found in any history of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, thought by many to be the Mob's attempt to reclaim Cuba from Castro, with JFK's refusal to supply air support for the invasion to be the final straw, thus sealing his fate.

Right before the infamous eighteen-and-a-half gap in Nixon's Watergate discussion tapes, Nixon instructed his aide, H.R. Haldeman,

"When you get in these people when you...get these people in, say: "Look, the problem is that this will open the whole, the whole Bay of Pigs thing, and the President just feels that" ah, without going into the details... don't, don't lie to them to the extent to say there is no involvement, but just say this is sort of a comedy of errors, bizarre, without getting into it, 'the President believes that it is going to open the whole Bay of Pigs thing up again' ... " 

"The Bay of Pigs Thing" according to Haldeman in his memoir, The Ends Of Power, was Nixon's code phrase for the conspiracy surrounding John Kennedy's murder. In the same conversation Nixon mentions "Project Gemstone" -- intended as "a vast intelligence-gathering and dirty-tricks campaign" against the Democrats and (one would have to say) against the electoral process itself. Given the Republican theft of the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections, and the voter suppression and other dirty tactics of 2006, I sense a pattern.

For more, feel free to visit my site.

I imagine there is a way to bring our country back, but I am at a loss as to how it will be done at this point.

Gee ... young women are "throwing off the strictures of femininity" except when they actually put on a dress and realize how silly it is. So ... they are wearing the dresses ironically? How 1995.

I guess they are throwing out the power of femininity as well.

You trivialize womanhood.

Well, I guess you silly little girls can do whatever you want, because, you know, deep down inside, that some of us, over here, won't be throwing off the "strictures of masculinity" anytime soon.

What would Coco Chanel do?