PROTESTS ON THE AMERICAN ROAD 1969
National Guard riots and a culinary roadtrip across USA
It was June and I had just bought a new MGB GT for my Special Forces brother in Vietnam and was delivering it from Boston to him when he landed in San Francisco, his port for R&R.
But before my 101st Airborne and Special Forced brother landed, there was a July 17th Black Panthers Conference in California against the war, that if I was to attend, it would have to be without him.
As the writer Tom Wolfe pointed out, the Panthers had already permeated Leonard Bernstein’s radical chic set “like a rogue hormone.” I had recently marched outside the FBI HQs in DC in a storm of tear gas from the National Guard that the president had called out, so I was a bit over my positive feelings for the self-appointed leaders of the New Left who were wheeling the crowds again into battle with the cops. Always be aware of the pendulum. As my Imperial Russian uncle had always told me. Bolsheviks in 1924 polished off the “libertarian” republicans once the revolution was established.
A month before I was in San Francisco’s North Beach, reading Rolling Stone, Old Mole, L.A. Free Press. I thought about police and revolutions, and a 16-yr old New Yorker at the People’s Park incident who said “I don’t want to live my life the way I see it; I’ll play my life by ear.”
In June 1969 the L.A. Free Press reminded us about Lincoln in 1848, saying that “Any people has the right to shake off the existing govt and form a new one that suits them better.” There was one moment when the police lost clarity, when “The tough moment came when the chicks took off their blouses and ran topless toward the fence and the National Guardsmen behind it reacted by putting on their gas masks.” Rolling Stone #36.
For resisting I was called “a faggot, a draft-dodger and a long-haired dope freak.” Rolling Stone tried to remind the nation of its original brilliance. Of Thoreau and “All men recognize the right of revolution, the right to refuse allegiance.” Of John Adams and “a revolution of govt is the strongest proof that can be given by a people of their virtue and good sense.” Of JQ Adams: “In the theory of our government, the citizen may lawfully resist [an unconstitutional] law.”
All so conflicting.
So, nothing for it but to get on the road across the USA and eat and drink as well as possible.