congenial-speak

Citizens United looked good on paper, in minds, in pockets of Kochs and Trumps. It was a billion dollar idea. Along comes the independently vigilant senator from Vermont, out of the sequestering shadows of the house chambers, out into the grounds for lobbies and special interests. He saw the greed, the manically derived malicious seed that feeds off the 98%. Hillary wasn't immune. She could not honestly claim no complicity with the manufacturing of the PAC (political action committee) and corporate handouts that add up to bought (and paid for) elections.

I relaxed with Ten Years and Change completed. I reflected on the book I'd churned out, meted from my past and the political stories that waited within the confines of my childhoods. Our first house was the scene of many grassroots seedlings for Eugene McCarthy's 1968 presidential run. My Mom's voice on the phone and the fastidious swish the stuff of envelopes as sound filled the walls. The chapter “When Cats Walk” recounts the tumultuous Democratic National Convention that year. As a delegate, with an estranged amnesty to the violence, my dad's experience was conflicted by the converging death of his father. Our second house lent itself as a venue for the senator's poetry in 1974. In the form of a DFL fundraiser, 300 people collected in a 2,200 square foot house to hear McCarthy read.

Hubert Humphrery won few accolades from dissident Democrats as LBJ's yes man, as the pecker-in-pocket, as “kiss my ass in Macy's window at high noon” type. After he won the Democratic nomination, he finally bisected the rigid band of firmament had gone along and sent thousands of frightened young souls to Vietnam. The former mayor of Minneapolis with the song of civil rights in his heart, the squeak in his passionate atones at the 1948 DNC, had drifted to the manipulation, the bubble-born PAC corruption Secretary Clinton rode last year. Senator McCarthy had it. Senator Wellstone had it. Senator Sanders had it. They recognized the greed, the sickness, the veiled Citizens United.

A smattering of opportunities have come along to level the playing field, to tilt the garage, to remove stumbling blocks from the racetrack Camus used metaphorically in his book The Plague. In my memoir the inner workings, the wants, the motivations the visions and conceptualized futures of the DFL (Democratic Farmer-Labor) are my immersion to politics. I first voted in the 1984 election. I remember my Mondale/Ferraro button. “Fritz” espoused watchwords, humanistic tenets that I, as a working-class disabled person grew up knowing. I saw them implemented, or at least placed at the doorstep for political mulch. I write in my book about Mondale, his actions in the anti-war movement and his relationship to my dad. Mondale advised my dad on securing funds from the penuriously divested Nixon administration. In my dad's role as director of the University of Minnesota's HELP (higher education for Low-income People) Center he had to go once a year before a committee in Washington. Senator Mondale coached him on what to say. He also introduced much legislation designed to ultimately help the family, children and women's role in the workplace.

The idea of a woman in the white house, or even in the navy blue house down the road, thrilled me. I had watched as my mom, in 1972, campaigned for and gave a nominating speech for Shirley Chisholm. My first year of college began in the fall of 1984 at Winona State University. I believe an absentee ballot was sent to me and my vote was heard. Reagan won by . . .just a few. . .votes. Hurdles were uprighted on the racetrack garages tilt right, life goes on in a malevolently quieted democracy.

Trickles are the brain-children of Godot. You never see enough climate change to really make a noticeable difference. The Koch Brother, Goldman Sacs (in my book I mention Alexander Sac's role in the origin of Nixon's sabotage of Paris peace talks), all the Wall Street investors and CEOs (who Obama—perhaps foolishly—bailed out when the bubble burst) support party politics. Indirectly, directly—sometimes the difference is negligible. Hillary gets her speaking fee from Wall Street. It is a business. No, it is LIFE. The course to equality, if anyone should know she should, is not paved with green.

So I look back. I analyze. I compare the texture of the 1968 presidential campaign to 2016. I conclude that in 48 years the core political gizmos are faulty—within the Democratic Party as a start. The parallels are disturbing and tell of humanity's refusal to let go of the battle of the bulge (bulging wallet).

• Senator McCarthy (Eugene) had no vested interest in the Vietnam War and could end military operations in Southeast Asia expeditiously and cleanly/ Senator Sanders had no vested interest in Wall Street and I believe had the best hope of permanently shoring the economic divide in America
• Secretary Clinton (a former McCarthy supporter) was a Washington insider with positions as senator, FLOTUS and secretary of state/Hubert Humphrey was vice president with former positions as senator and senate Democratic whip
• Clinton's campaign relied on many surrogates/ Humphrey's campaign relied on “favorite son” surrogates
• Uncontrollable factors led to McCarthy's loss of delegate votes and, eventually, the nomination. Assassinations, and their subsequent splintering of the party, DNC regulations such as the New York Democratic Committee limiting his take-away from a June, 1968 win/ the use of super delegates hurt Sanders and he lost the nomination in spite of his motivations of millennial (what would correspond to to generation that cleaned for Gene)

Its strangely watered down in trickles. The sad fact is that all those safeguards I wrote about in my book, the commissions, the 1972 McGovern-Fraser guide to prevent things such as a candidate like Humphrey from winning a nomination without doing the primary contests. No more Mayor Richard Daley's ensuring a win. (Now, I guess, we have Putin for that.) I still see paid party politics trumping human dignity, justice, equality, the festering potentials of over half a huddled nation seething to be free. Just look at the onslaught each executive order sparks, the indivisible movement, the pink pussy movement, the deer-in-headlights senators tending their constituents at town halls. They are scenes plucked from the French revolution.

Still, the child in me wanted, and now the adult streamer of MSNBC wants to rebel, to sigh and tell of the nature of the beast. How money is still, facially, in the driver's seat, how the hippies may have had a critical secret that was beaten down, ruled out as INCONCIEVABLE the moment it was articulated, how many have gone down on bended knee, walked the streets for that seed of an idea. Ah, those filthy hippies, god bless 'em. The dollar was as distant to them as a bar of soap. The concept of money and the greed that inevitably follows in a group dynamic was so repellent to them. They were filthy, ripe, tangential to a spray of water (unless their skin was really black). Imagine, a group of humanity that found the concept of money (and its pursuant greed) so repugnant that they would waive the Maslowian need for belonging to a general population. The counter-culture, communes, an independence of material gratuities began in the early 60s, when hair protruded to grow, when cigarettes became full of green, when music and mind games changed what was seen.

On a March morning in 1965, somewhere in the world, snowflakes fell softly from clouds. In North Vietnam bombs containing napalm fell from F-105 Thunder Chiefs. The meat-grinder, the green machine, the never-ending story of blind man's bluff, the rampant domino theory conspiracy tore through America for the next three years. In 1967 Al Lowenstein rooted out the Catholic “peat bog” Irish senator from Watkins, Minnesota. The hippies, the less educated than—Tom Hayden—were the target demographic to fight the war. They were working class and, I'm speculating, many may have not sought an education if they had not been seeking a college deferment. Push came to shove, literally, and they dropped the bandanna, lowered the bar and cleaned for Gene.