Posted on 03/12/2012 2:25:37 PM PDT by NYer
“There were riots in Paris, and Charles de Gaulle fled to his country estate until things calmed down. There were riots and terrorism in Germany and Italy. The anti-war protestors and hippies in America had their counterparts all over Europe and the West.”
Spain was spared this until Franco’s death, at which point they over-compensated for the freakishness he spared them from. Now they’re at the bottom of the pile in terms of culture or faith - like Italians, ethnic Spaniards are contracepting themselves out of existence; like Americans, they’re being replaced by Hispanics.
Well, they are dying: just not fast enough. And even the laggards in the Boomer generation have another years of public life to go. That generation split down the middle, however, and the progressives had fewer children. On the other hand, they came to dominate in academia and the media and even the mainstream churches.
Regarding Bobby, Gene McCarthy speculated that he had provoked Sirhan by his demagoging about Israel. McCarthy hsd reason to be bitter. The Kennedy machine had been lying through its teeth about McCarthy’s record. Sad to say, but we are probably better off that Bobby was removed from the scene.
The think that provoked McCarthy into going against the war was that he knew that Johnson was not telling the whole truth. Lyndon was far too optimistic in public. If he had been more guarded, Tet could have been played better.
It’s no secret that forty years is an amount of time that features prominently in the Bible.
I partly feel that the election and reign of Obama, which may very well be the end of our country and western post-Christian “civilization,” starting exactly forty years after the upheaval of the 1960’s (which is often, as done in this article, narrowed down to 1968) is no coincidence.
The North Vietnamese Winter/Spring Offensive of 1968 was actually a massive defeat, as I myself perceived at the time merely from reading newspaper and magazine accounts. The attack on the embassy was a complete failure, and all of the attackers were killed. However, those who failed to look beyond the images on TV may have experienced cognitive dissonance.
In 1968, MLK had not only been under FBI surveillance for years, but on camera he was seen prophesizing his death the night before it happened. Is it surprising that when he was shot, that his followers suspected the government had something to do with it?
Could be. I was never a supporter of his, so I can't speak for them. However, the facts about the FBI surveillance came out later. The initial news reports--that he had been shot by a white man in a white suit who was driving a white car headed south--deeper into white-dominated Dixieland--might have contributed to the anger of the rioters.
In 1968, RFK stood to challenge the ruling Democratic party establishment when he was struck with a fatal shot which originated at point blank range from his rear. In spite of witnesses and a coroner’s report that placed Sirhan Sirhan to the front of him at all times, the LAPD harassed witnesses and withheld contrary evidence of a likely multiple-shooter scenario in order to arrange a quick one-person conviction in court. Is it surprising that outraged RFK supporters would gather to protest outside the convention hall in Chicago?
I'm not an RFK assassination buff, but I recall at the time that Sirhan seemed clearly to have done the deed--he had the pistol in his hand. I don't recall hearing any conspiracy theories about the assassination until much later. And although some of the protesters outside the convention hall in Chicago may have been RFK supporters, they were led by hard-core leftists--Tom "we are all Viet Cong" Hayden, Jerry "kill your parents" Rubin, David Dellinger, a self-proclaimed "non-Russian Communist," and the like.
In any case, the public turned away from this angry crowd of malcontents and elected Richard Nixon, who spoke for “the forgotten Americans, the non-shouters, the non-demonstrators.”
That’s true. And history is nothing but accretions. Sometimes it can become necessary to knock off a few, but it’s simply not possible (or desirable) to go back to some imaginary “pre-accretion” time.
The Roman rite was actually already receiving the care that it needed. There were a few parts which, over the centuries and mostly as the result of monastic practice, had gotten out of their proper order or were somewhat unclear. And it was good to try to focus people on the Mass when they were there. I remember when so many people were busy praying the Rosary during Mass that, between the beads hitting the backs of the pews and the background hissing of lots of old ladies saying the prayers, you could barely hear the priest even in the spoken parts. “Active participation” was simply intended to mean that laypeople should stop doing their private devotions during Mass and focus on the event; it didn’t mean they should be clapping, dancing in the aisles, or distributing Communion...
I actually didn’t even have any objection to the introduction of the vernacular for parts of the mass. When I was a kid in New York, we did something called a “dialogue mass,” which was basically just where the people made the responses of the altar boy and most (although not all) of the mass parts were spoken out loud by the priest. This was done in both Latin and English. The English was simply a correct translation of the (very beautiful) Latin original of the Old Mass. All this was before the Vatican II.
I grew up in East Texas in what might be called a mission church, because prior to the East Texas oil boom, there was not a Catholic church between Dallas and Shreveport. No dialogue mass but we did use the missalette with alternating pages in Latin and English. No rosaries during mass. My first encounter was this when I was working in the Rio Grande Valley and went to a Mexican Church where all the widow ladies insisting on sitting up front and causing such a din that, as you say, I could not hear the priest. They did not even pause during his sermon! So I went to the next town where there was an Anglo church.
bumpus ad summum
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