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| Grant Park, Chicago, August 1968 |
By Bob Boldt
Not being in touch much with the mainstream media, I have no idea whether the 50th anniversary of those tumultuous days of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago are passing with little or no mention. If Internet comments are any indication, I suspect they are. I guess nobody wants a reminder of humanity’s last gasp of freedom when a better world actually looked possible.
My connection with the leadership of the protests was peripheral at best. I had passed most of the sixties in relatively peaceful disinterest to both the civil rights movement and anti-war activities. It was not that I was really indifferent. I was more involved in my own art, photography, and cinematography...and a cultivation of the visionary world psychedelics were opening up to my expanding experience. I was not uninformed of what was going on in the civil rights struggles or the peace movement. As a news cameraman for local TV station WFLD, I covered Martin Luther King Jr. and the war-resistance movements. [See “Martin Luther King Jr. & Me,” Moristotle & Co., April 4, 2018.]
I also saw, even back then, the tendency of the mainstream news, of which I was a part, to falsify content and hide their bias against Progressive movements and “subversive” ideas. On the significant issues of the day, the real bread and butter issues, life and death issues, war and peace issues, our press has always been first and foremost a purveyor of “fake news.” Attacking Trump the way they do does not diminish that fact. He is only the straw man they burn as a distraction from the real horror that is going on, and has always been going on.
You can find my own story about the 1968 convention here on Moristotle & Co.: “This was the end – Chicago 1968,” August 17, 2015.
My video footage of the convention events can be found on Vimeo:
CDNC68Beatles from Bob Boldt on Vimeo.
| Copyright © 2018 by Bob Boldt |
As fortune would have it this morning CBS did a full report on the '68 Convention in Chicago 50 years ago.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.cbsnews.com/news/remembering-1968-chicagos-bloody-democratic-convention/
Not all mainstream media is bad all the time. If it were it would be a cakewalk for me to establish my reservations about its veracity. One has to use judgment to separate the good from the bad and the truth from the lies. Nobody does a better job of presenting features than CBS Sunday Morning. It was also great to see my old friend Scott Simon. Word for word he is the best writer in media today.
One thing I would take issue with was attributing so much of the election of Nixon on Chicago. It has come to light that Nixon's boys used back channels to convince the South Vietnamese at the Paris talks that they would get a better deal if they waited until he became president. If that was his promised "secret plan to end the war" it was as fraudulent as it was tratorious. Had he not interfered the war would have ended BEFORE the election, the protesters would have been satisfied, even grateful, and Humphrey would have won the election by a landslide! I am about as certain of this as anyone ever can be about the hypothetical outcome of any event in the past. The war ground on and the casualties doubled. And you will never read that story in any high school American history book. BTW Johnson knew all this at the time and did nothing.
Bob, CBS saw you coming and got a move on!
DeleteAnd hurray to you for your point about Nixon’s fraud, and LBJ’s passivity, which the 2016 film All the Way, with Brian Cranston as Johnson, seems to explain as Johnson’s focusing almost exclusively on passing the Civil Rights Act. Of course, reality was a bit more complex than a film can be.
I read Jost's essay on Bob's Facebook page and it is not to be missed. He doesn't spare the icons of the day, including fellow radicals, in whom he recognized the mob mentality when at one point in the chanting frenzy he states that they would have done anything the mob leaders said, including going into the black neighborhood and killing. Coupled with Bob's always-magnificent video, a montage of his personally-filmed images at the convention in '68 (he was THERE) it is powerful, disturbing and at the same time evocative of our current civil unrest. I was unaware (but unsurprised as well) to hear of Nixon's perfidy, just about a given in hindsight. Johnson's actions are understandable in light of the fact that he and "Ladybird" (who had the real money) were heavily invested in a company which would later become Haliburton (sound familiar?) and they made MILLION$$ off the continued warfare. Seems since Harry Truman and Eisenhower we haven't had a single President who was not corrupt.
ReplyDeleteAs to the make-up of mobs, yes, it comprises human beings of all stripes, whatever label affixes the mob or its announced cause. As Jon Jost says, “I was among those in Grant Park, there with Bolex in hand to shoot, though I recall a strong sense of distaste for the behavior of this mass of people, all taking their cues from the podium, chanting as told, and given the actual mix of people – mostly young, many from the region, I had the nagging suspicion that had someone begun a chant saying ‘Let’s go to the South Side and kill n…..s’ a good part of them might well have done so. Since that time I have always avoided anything with mass crowds.”
DeleteAnd too, too true: “it was a time when we lost, and lost badly. Not merely in the more or less superficial matter of politics, but on a far more profound and deeper level. While the warning signs had already been made, we lunged headlong into a vast materialistic consumer insanity which utterly disregarded what we were doing to ourselves and the small blue planet on which we live. Today we live in an opulent lop-sided world of fantastic wealth and poverty, we are surrounded with technological wonders that bedazzle us into a mindless tizzy of endless distractions. Today the world is on fire, fires lit by arsonists – by ourselves and our bottomless gluttony for things and the wonders of modern life, the imperatives of our religion of capitalism which demands and requires constant growth on a finite planet. The skirmishes on the streets of Chicago (and Paris and Belgrade and Prague and Tokyo and Buenos Aires) all fade into nothing as we face the mirror and see the world we have produced in the last 50 years. It is nothing other than a catastrophe, of which only the first edges have begun to show themselves. The ancient four horsemen are riding headlong towards us – in truth they are already here, though for the most part well-masked, and deliberately so.”