The Cold Civil War In America Heats Up-In Fear For The Republic-Dump The Trump-No More Years-Channeling Robert F. Kennedy, 1968- Winnowing Out The Challengers-Who Has The Stomach To Go Down In The Mud To Take Back This Country

The Cold Civil War In America Heats Up-In Fear For The Republic-Dump The Trump-No More Years-Channeling Robert F. Kennedy, 1968- Winnowing Out The Challengers-Who Has The Stomach To Go Down In The Mud To Take Back This Country

An on-going series until January 20, 2021 by Frank Jackman

These days, these anguished fearful days I find myself increasingly channeling beloved Robert F. Kennedy, laid low by an assassin’s bullet in 1968 just when his high tide was coming in. In those days among other things which I get around to later in this series when I have little off-hand time for sweet schoolboy reminiscences I was fearful for the Republic, was worried that things were getting so out of hand what with the no end in sight Vietnam War blazing and dividing the country in almost civil war terms then as well, viciously suppressed inner city black community uprisings and the political low road ascendant with all forms of political death in the air including assassinations of political leaders.

At that time, that 1968 what knows what will happen time, being a good old Massachusetts boy who at fourteen years of age had knocked on doors and distributed leaflets for one of our own, our Irish boy made good, Jack Kennedy in the fall of 1960 (while also having in that period attended a nuclear disarmament rally on Boston Common sponsored by what would later be called “peaceniks” but were mainly Quakers and pacifists to show the contradictions  of the times, and the contradictions of one Frank Jackman) I could name the villain of the piece. One Richard Milhous Nixon, petty criminal, low-blow artist and bum of the month who would go to be President of the United States (POTUS henceforth in today’s Twitter-speak) before the wheels went off his train and he sulked his way to eternal infamy out in the Pacific Japan currents.     

I would not have put the matter of my concerns in those days as being fearful for the Republic but in retrospect that is what got me off my dime to go and work like seven whirling dervishes for beloved Robert Kennedy all along the East Coast, working with everybody from idealistic “seek a newer world” college students like myself (not then knowing that RFK had “cribbed” that expression from Alfred Lord Tennyson on the fly but that was okay then, and now) to the old-time still standing ward healer bosses like Meade Esposito and Carmen De Sapio in hothouse New York. Though nothing earnestly committing to what was a united front of all those against the devil, unblessed RMN. These days when I have been able to articulate better my fears I have the same sinking feelings that we are in for continued hard times if we don’t take this country back from the night-takers and new league of bums of the month headed by one Donald Trump, POTUS, petty thief, Putin’s poodle and every evil associated with RMN writ large.       

I headlined this piece which will be a continuing watch word in this series from now until the next presidential inauguration with the dire warning that the cold civil war that has gripped this country for the last couple of decades has over the past few years and particularly the past couple heated up. Heated up enough to get me off my own dime-again. Made me realize that whatever else I might think about the virtues and vices of a Republic (especially against the long discredited “divine right of kings” which seems to be the operating principle if that is the right term to be used in anything talk related to this current administration that is in play now) it is easier, much easier to work my left-wing politics under the norms of a Republic than having to look over my shoulder and worry about being sent to the bastinado every time I get my dander up to go out on the streets and get “uppity” around some cause.     

That feeling has not been one that I have personally operated on for a long time, mainly going about my left-wing business out in the streets without feeling I was headed to some dire blackhole fate. Let me be clear although my experiences in the American Army during Vietnam War times (at a time when Richard Milhous Nixon was ironically my “commander-in-chief”) pushed me in a very different direction from those heady Spring of 1968 days when I was planning to be a consummate bourgeois politician (mucking around with Esposito and DeSapio serving as an apprenticeship) I had not felt a need to worry about the fate of the Republic, one way or the other. Now all bets are off. Now I am ready to make a pact with the devil, make a united front with all who wish to oppose this drift away from even basic democratic republican values.  

So right now, I and a few others, unfortunately not any of my old-time neighborhood corner boys from the Acre in North Adamsville who continue to declare a “pox on both houses,” Democratic and Republican, are working through how to most effectively work to get the country back. Right now, that means, and this is hard for me to say after fifty years of purposefully working against or avoiding the Democratic Party and its various candidates and working instead on the issues, mostly around war and peace, I, we are doing our own personal winnowing out of the candidates, announced and unannounced, who look to challenge the Donald come 2020. Right now, as well we are policy wonks looking to see who has the best projected program if they actually defeat Trump and want to implement things to turn this place around.    

Today, today February 16, 2019, a long year away from the main actions for nominations I have already staked some ground out in what I am looking for in winnowing out candidates. This is where beloved Robert Kennedy rears his head again. Bobby, yeah, let me call him Bobby, could spin pure gold with his visions and his quasi-Irish poet understandings and cut your balls off the next minute if you opposed Jack or wanted to take the low road on some issue important to him-you would wind up in political Siberia and even your family would not weep for your exile. Then, and now too, just my kind of candidate. (In that poetic sweepstakes his then Democratic Party opponent after Lyndon Johnson fell into a crying fit and quit Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy was the real poet without Bobby’s ruthless streak though)

As the field expands to some exponentially impossible number what I am looking for since there are plenty of candidates with at least minimally supportable programs is what I would call the character issue for short. All the great programs in the world will, as is graphically clear these days when things are actually being driven the other way, are so much dust, so much hot air if a candidate does not understand from the past three years, at least that 2020 will be a “street fight,” a nasty affair no question. The question I and my co-thinkers these days will be posing point-blank and in person if candidates show up in Massachusetts or New Hampshire, maybe Maine is do they have the stomach to go down the low road to get elected, to go “down in the mud” with Trump to become POTUS. More, much more later.