User:Mikado282/Remembering 68

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User Mikado282 Victory68.png
Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes.
Captain Kirk - taking 1968 off[1]

Remembering 1968 is a listing of things I, Mikado282, remember happening in 1968, for comparison and contrast with the style and Storyline of Team Fortress 2 (and, apparently, to what people think is happening today). Try all of the links (because most are links to TF2 wiki pages that are related to what actually happened in 1968), check the citations to read more about the actual history, and let me know whether you enjoy the references.

When I started playing and learning about the 1968 Storyline, it was apparent to me that this tumultuous interval in U.S. and World history was only cartoonified, if it was given any attention at all, within the game's content and media. But I remember real Hippies, the Vietnam War, racial integration, inflation, atomic testing, etc (those poor Monkees). The Vietnam War was on the TV news every night, but there is no mention within TF2 other than the odd cosmetic. Between the war and Watergate was the foundation of activist media. Young adults and children in schools then built the Internet and Team Fortress. College Gradatuates of 1968 have dominated the US Presidency from 1993 on.

A particularly notable element of this is the friendship of Soldier and Demoman ("Forgetting for a minute that we don't condone friendship, its almost ..."). I have to imagine that young players today think nothing of the races of Soldier and Demoman, but even as late as 1968, their association would have been regarded as novel in the Jim Crow south, which included New Mexico, which was still effectively segregated at that point in history. Such was the state of affairs that even Hippies (largely middle class white kids) and Black Power organizations kept themselves rather separate, nominally because their concerns and objectives were very different. I suggest a study of the Badlands experiences of Sammy Davis, Jr., and his relationship with the Rat Pack.[2]

Look at 1968.
Joe Scarborough - professional DNC(CDR) memo reader

1968

  • The Tet Offensive scuttled any hope of reelection for then-President Johnson.[3]
  • Civil Rights Act of 1964 required racial integration. Seriously, you kids have no idea how historically recent segregation was to us in back in 1968! New Mexico schools remained segregated until 1968.
  • Clair Huffaker wrote the screenplay Nobody Loves a Drunken Indian in 1967, which when completed in 1969 was titled Flap, for the nickname of the main character, Flapping Eagle.[7]
    • Not much of a movie as such, but it does preserve what pre-urbanised Badlands and downtown Teufort actually looked like in 1968.
  • Arthur Ashe became the first African American to win the U.S. Open singles title[9]
  • Broadway debut of Hair.[12] From the title song's lyrics:
    • She asked me, "Why?" I'm a hairy guy. — The Heavy[13]
    • Oh, say, can you see, my eyes? — The Soldier[14]
  • "You procured the poppy flowers[17] required for the medicines that gave me succor from the pains of my many warring ailments." Involved in hundreds of thousands of overdose deaths today, the synthetic opioid Fentanyl was invented in 1968.[18] Hippies and their politics are noted for their particular promotion of opiods (see Hair).
  • History shows again and again[22] how the band Soft White Underbellies[23] made their first recordings for Elektra Records this year.
    • 3 Golden Years later, they would introduce the umlaut to the American high school English Language.[24]
  • The Moon Shot was originally scheduled for this year, but was delayed until 1969 following the launch pad deaths of three U.S. astronauts in 1967.[27]
  • The Monkees died this year.[28]
  • The third highest-grossing film of 1968 in the United States was The Odd Couple, about mismatched roommates, one a slob, the other a neurotic neat freak.[29]
  • Paul Ehrlich's book The Population Bomb published this year predicted world-wide famine and disease and global economic collapse by 1980, or thereabouts.[30]
    • As if to demonstrate his global calamities to come, the Asian Flu was first detected this year in Hong Kong, which went on to kill 1 to 4 million people.[31]
  • The iconic tropical detective drama that started it all, Hawaii Five-O debuted this year and made Aloha a household word.[34]
    • What city kid with a television in '68 didn't know that show’s theme?[35]
    • It ran until 1980, when it was replaced by iconic tropical Vietnam War veteran detective drama Magnum, P.I..[36]
      • The popularity of Magnum, P.I. spawned similar war veteran detective shows, like Riptide.[37]
"Book 'em, Danno!"
  • This was the last year that D&RGW locomotive #50 serviced trains into Lumberton and Chama, New Mexico (Thunder Mountains on the Map of Badlands) and the tracks were soon abandoned. (The tracks and engine would probably been retired somewhat earlier were it not for the underground nuclear testing that was conducted in that area.)
Steamworkshop tf2 soviet showoff thumb.jpg
  • Use of the term "Tankie", meaning a Westerner unquestionably loyal to Soviet Socialist political action, was amplified this year when the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact countries used tanks to crush the Prague Spring reformers in Czechoslovakia.[39][40][41]
    • Soviet Showoff Bernie Sanders moved to Vermont to begin evolutionary infiltration of the U.S. Congress.[42]
  • Invoking the argument of Continuous Revolution, Chairman Mao instigated the Cultural Revolution, which broadly transitioned from Organizing to Action this year. Aside from the millions of deaths from the resulting violence and famine, most statues with Ming dynasty mustaches were cancelled.[43]
  • The Mafia thought it could outsmart Bullitt.[44]
  • Speaking of DeGroot, Kamala Harris had her fourth birthday in 1968. Her paternal grandmother's maiden name was Finnegan; so, Kamala is also some part Irish, like Mikado282, Barack Obama, Muhammad Ali, and Kansas Basketball Legend Wilt Chamberlain.
  • This year was dubbed the "Year of Inflation".[46] The high and worsening inflation[47] was an intention of Keynesian[48] Demand-Side[49] deficit-spending by the Kennedy and Johnson governments. It got worse:[50] Nixon increased social spending and Carter accepted high inflation as inescapable. Reagan ended the inflation.
  • Nixon's secret Red Wheat deal: The one thing that wasn't inflating was grain prices.
    • In 1968, Mikado's first farm economics lesson was how increasing US farm productivity resulted in the lowest wheat prices since the Great Depression.
    • But, just a couple years later Mikado282 recalls a specific conversation amongst his father and uncles excitedly discussing suddenly $4/bushel wheat![51]
    • The USSR had been keeping a secret of a total failure of their red wheat crop.
    • So, in good old 1972, Nixon secretly acquired the entire national reserve of golden wheat and shipped it to the USSR, with the agreement that the USSR would force the Viet Cong to negotiate a peace with the USA.[52]
  • Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in a black power salute as they received their medals at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City.[9]
  • Gabe Newell had his 6th birthday this year. Mikado282 was a bit older than that.
  • Mars Needs Women; but, they are confused that they can't find any in the TF2 Spawn Rooms.[58]
  • Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. briefly stood as a candidate for U. S. President in 1967.
    • His Vice-Presidential runningmate was Dr. Benjamin Spock.[59] (Yes, Gene Roddenberry named Star Trek's Spock after him.)[60]
    • At the time, Dr. Spock was the most famous pediatrician; Mikado282 remembers Dr. Spock's book Baby and Child Care sitting on his parent's bookshelf.
    • Elements of Dr. Spock's Progressive advice was not particularly well-founded in science; his recommendations resulted in over 50,000 infant deaths from SIDS in Europe, Australia, and the US.
    • Dr. Spock's popularity was plummeting when the 1968 edition of Baby and Child Care had weak sales.
    • Besides Dr. Spock being openly opposed to the U.S. Action in Vietnam and promoting Socialism, two generation of Americans raised as "Spock Babies" were known for their Entitlement.
  • In fact, there has been a long series of protest occupations of Washington, D.C.. In early 1968, Reverend King began organizing the Poor People's Campaign occupation.[61]
  • Reverend King Jr. was murdered in 1968, triggering nation-wide riots, exceeding the riots of the long, hot summer of 1967, prompting the the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 during the riots, and assisting the election of Nixon.
    • 1200 buildings were burned in Washington, D.C., alone. In terms of building fires, the 2020 Summer riots were much smaller.
    • The Civil Rights Act of 1968 is also known as the Fair Housing Act.
    • Title X of the same law also made it a Federal felony to travel between states to vandalize statues.
  • Hippy Riots occur in Chicago,[62] protesting the Democratic National Committee's involvement in promotion of the Vietnam War and its Congressional role in the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex. This accelerates the long transition of the DNC from the Party of Segregation to the Party of Socialism.
    • In direct response to the riots, John Lennon, a Maoist, writes Revolution, calling for non-violence and criticizing the violent Marxist elements of the riots.[63]
  • The Prisoner ran one season 67-68; Mikado282 was indelibly fascinated, but didn't understand any of it. (Did anybody?)[65]
  • Kansas Gas & Electric donated the grounds of their abandoned Powerhouse to the Kansas Raccoon Sanctuary.[67]
  • Mason Williams released Classical Gas.[68]
    • Williams was the head writer for television show The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (1967-1968) and performed the instrumental several times on the show.[69][70](Play a 1968 performance of Classical Gas on that show.)
    • In spite of the anti-war bent of the show, Classical Gas was the soundtrack of the Army recruitment video that got Mikado282 to enlist.
  • Frank Kameny originated the slogan "Gay is Good"[72]
    • The Stonewall Riots occurred the following year[73] (named for the Stonewall Inn, which operated between 1967 and 1969.[74]
  • Wendy Carlos, the composer for the movie A Clockwork Orange (see item description), recorded Switched-On Bach this year. She also began living as a woman this year.
    • Wendy disclosed this after 11 years and came to regret that she had kept the secret: "The public turned out to be amazingly tolerant or, if you wish, indifferent ... There had never been any need of this charade to have taken place. It had proven a monstrous waste of years of my life."[75]
  • Richard Nixon won the 1968 election with a promise of "peace with honor" in the Vietnam War, but was later sapped by his own tape recordings.[78]
    • Before she used those tapes to impeach Nixon, Hillary Clinton left the Republican Party to join Donald Trump in the Democrat Party, because, to HER, the segregationist, Jim Crow Dixiecrats were somehow maybe less racist than Nixon?!?!?!?!?[79][80]
  • OTOH, Mikado282 wasn't old enough to sit through 2001: A Space Odyssey; but the movie gave him the nickname "HAL9000" the rest of his school years.[82]
  • Speaking of computers, Mikado282's first reading assignment of this school year was about a boy who didn't like doing his math homework. But his father operated a mainframe computer. So, the boy learned to program the mainframe to do his homework. The teacher found out and was going to flunk the boy, but was eventually convinced to give him credit for the programming (you have to know the subject well enough to actualy program the solution correctly).
    • In college, compensating for dyslexia, Mikado282 made every opportunity to use the line editors and immediate-mode BASIC on the mainframes and the WANG 2200 to do Calculus, English, and Physics lab reports.[83]
    • MSYN, his educational and professional start was assembly code on 68-hundred series microcontrollers.[84]
    • He won an open house competition on an 68HC11 project.
    • His first professional 68xx project was the first system qualified on a new product class; and units have been operating for over 20 years with no bugs. Ditto the next project.
  • Author of Unsafe at Any Speed, Ralph Nader was hugely notorious at this time as an advocate for consumer product safety and this year founded Nader's Raiders.
    • Nader famously stated a totally false but widely cited and accepted claim that Plutonium was the most toxic substance known to man.
      • He stated that dispersing one pound of Plutonium into the atmosphere would kill aver human on earth, when he knew full well that atomic testing had already dispersed hundreds of pounds into the atmosphere; dozens of pounds of the stuff in the Badlands. (Mikado282 was just there, they're fine.)
    • Later, Nader would be kicked out of the Revolution, being blamed for splitting Marxist votes and costing Al Gore the US Presidency.

Graduations

  • George W. Bush graduated from Yale University. Because he became a pilot in the Texas Air National Guard, he was accused of draft dodging by Presidential Campaign opponents.[85]
  • Bill Clinton received a Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service degree from Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Because he continued to attempt to maintain educational deferments, he was accused of draft dodging by Presidential Campaign opponents.[86]
  • Joe Biden graduated from Syracuse University College of Law, early in his Senate career reversing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (reimpose de facto school segregation).[87]
    • Biden received 5 student deferments from the draft, and in 1968, the athletic young Biden received a "1-Y" medical classification, which meant he could only be drafted in a national emergency.[88]
  • Donald Trump graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor's degree in Economics and began a career as real estate developer.[89]
    • Trump received 4 student deferments from the draft, and in 1968, the athletic young Trump received a "1-Y" medical classification, which meant he could only be drafted in a national emergency.[90]
  • Hillary Clinton submitted her senior thesis this year and graduated the next year.
    • Her thesis concluded that the Alinsky Method of radical organizing was great and all that, but she didn't believe that it could be scaled nationally[91]
      • Barack Obama, who was born on the same day as Mikado282 (or not, depending on the actual place of birth, relative to the date line), would later prove her wrong.[92]
    • Hillary avoided the draft by being a girl, which was acceptable back then; but, that was a HUGE dilemma for the women's justice movement back then - on one hand, full equality would mean women should get drafted, too, but on the other hand, demanding the draft for women would legitimize the U.S. Military.
    • Six years later, her academic research on procedures of impeachment contributed to the resignation of Richard Nixon.[93] (Not to mention how handy that education came in the impeachment trials of her husband Bill Clinton and her opponent Donald Trump.) ("What is it with you!?)
    • Continuing with her interest in 1930s Italian political action systems, Hillary Clinton's 1993 Healthcare plan was to follow the Italian system of organizing industrial sectors into state-monitored bureaus.[94]
  • Al Gore also graduated in 1969.
  • Dale Chihuly graduated with a Master of Fine Arts degree in sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1968. He avoided the draft by losing an eye and arm in a car accident. Thereby losing the ability to blow glass by himself, he was freed to direct monumental glass sculptures.
  • Ross Perot became Texas' "fastest, richest" millionaire by taking EDS public this year. This action eventually made Perot rich enough to oppose George H. W. Bush's presidential candidacy, handing the Presidency to "Billary" Clinton. Perot particularly opposed unfair international trade deals, like Clinton's NAFTA. The independent reformer Donald Trump at one time ran as a successor Presidential candidate for Perot's Reform Party.[95]

Family

  • The movie Yours, Mine and Ours was released.
    • My Father and Stepmother, both widowed with children, married, founding a family of Yours, Mine, Ours, Somebody Else's, and Who Knows, and gave me memories of '68 and many other years.

References

  1. Star Trek, the series was canceled in 1967. In 1969, it was renewed for just one more season.
  2. Rat Pack
  3. Tet Offensive
  4. The Green Berets
  5. Planet of the Apes
  6. Night of the Living Dead
  7. Flap
  8. Hellfighters
  9. a b 50 years after the Kerner Commission
  10. Gary Gygax
  11. Gen Con
  12. Hair
  13. Hair lyrics
  14. Ibid.
  15. Hot Patootie – Bless My Soul
  16. Bat Out of Hell
  17. Heroin
  18. Fentanyl
  19. Cookie Monster, Muppet Wiki, Fandom.com.
  20. Children's Television Workshop
  21. Oscar the Grouch, Muppet Wiki, Fandom.com.
  22. Godzilla (Blue Öyster Cult song)
  23. Blue Öyster Cult
  24. Metal umlaut
  25. MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors The show featured plot-advancing announcements over a pair of speakers.
  26. Stolen valor
  27. United States Apollo program
  28. The Monkees (their Saturday morning show was canceled in 1968. Mikado282 remembers the airing of the last show, it was weird(er)).
  29. The Odd Couple
  30. The Population Bomb
  31. Hong Kong flu
  32. Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB
  33. The Unicorn
  34. Hawaii Five-O (1968 TV series)
  35. Hawaii Five-O Theme
  36. Magnum, P.I.
  37. Screaming Mimi, Riptide
  38. Arnold Schwarzenegger
  39. Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia
  40. Prague Spring
  41. Tankie
  42. Bernie Sanders
  43. During the Cultural Revolution, enormous damage was inflicted on China's cultural heritage. The Ming Dynasty relics were particularly targeted for eradication, which typically illustrated facial hair styles influencing the Fu Manchu moustache.
  44. Bullitt.
  45. Society for Creative Anachronism
  46. 1968-Year of Inflation
  47. Inflation
  48. Keynesian economics
  49. Demand-side economics
  50. 1973–1975 recession
  51. H. J. Maidenberg, Wheat Tops $4 a Bushel To Reach a Price Record, The New York times, 1973.
  52. James C. Thomas, The Secret Wheat Deal, 2016.
  53. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
  54. Chariots of the Gods?
  55. Area 51
  56. The cake is a lie.
  57. You Can't Always Get What You Want
  58. Mars Needs Women
  59. Benjamin Spock
  60. Spock
  61. Poor People's Campaign
  62. 1968 Democratic National Convention protest activity
  63. Revolution
  64. Chicago Seven
  65. The Prisoner
  66. Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons
  67. Rocky Ford State Fishing Lake
  68. Classical Gas
  69. Mason Williams
  70. The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour
  71. Tiny Tim
  72. "Gay_is_Good"
  73. Stonewall Riots
  74. Stonewall Inn
  75. Wendy Carlos
  76. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
  77. Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In
  78. Nixon White House tapes
  79. Hillary Clinton
  80. Dixiecrats
  81. Blackbeard's Ghost
  82. 2001: A Space Odyssey
  83. Wang 2200
  84. Motorola 6800
  85. George W. Bush
  86. Bill Clinton
  87. Joe Biden
  88. Camille Caldera, Fact check: Biden, like Trump, received multiple draft deferments from Vietnam, USA TODAY, Sept. 17, 2020.
  89. Donald Trump
  90. Ibid.
  91. Bill Dedman, Reading Hillary Rodham's hidden thesis, NBC News, 2007.
  92. Barack Obama
  93. Carl Bernstein, A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton, 2007.
  94. Clinton Health Plan Salutes Italy's Past, Wall St. Journal, Oct. 26, 1993 (p.A22)
  95. Reform Party of the United States of America