Phthursday Musings: Another Age

The evening of August 28, 1968, Hubert H. Humphrey, the sitting Vice-President, won his party’s presidential nomination. This would have been one of the absolute pinnacles of Humphrey’s distinguished career of public service, if not for the fact that outside on Michigan Avenue, the Chicago Police Department was violently attacking protesters.

Over time, the historical narrative came to be that what happened that night was a police riot: in other words, that the police attacked the protesters, not vice-versa. But this of course was not the common understanding nationally at the time.

Humphrey was ultimately doomed in 1968 for a number of reasons. Humphrey didn’t start or accelerate he war in Vietnam, but he was running as the establishment candidate, so he was a de facto war candidate - nevermind that his opponent was actually more of a warhawk. Humphrey was a staunch supporter of civil rights, and civil rights were popular, but a lot of Americans were weary of civil rights for one reason or another, that reason often being along the lines that while whites thought Blacks should have freedom, they still shouldn’t move in next door. Humphrey would have continued the War on Poverty, but let’s get real, that’s pretty much never a winning issue. Still, maybe he could have overcome all of that… but.

Humphrey essentially lost the election the night he won the nomination.

Richard Nixon should have been finished by 1968. Really, he should have been finished long before that. But somehow he kept coming back, and no comeback was more extraordinary than 1968.

Nixon’s campaign had a number of distinguishing features, but three in particular stand out. First, he said he had a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam. He… did not. But this wound up being a very clever way to make Vietnam an ongoing problem for the Democrats without having to deal it with himself.

Second, he campaigned on a platform emphasizing “law and order”. This notion was placed in contradiction to unlawfulness and disorder in their various forms, including protesters and hippies, but primarily meaning Blacks, as in, the Black rioters in Watts and Detroit and elsewhere.

Third and closely related, Nixon’s campaign embarked on a “Southern Strategy”, which involved overtly courting white racists in Southern states. The Deep South had been a Democratic stronghold since the Civil War, but it was tipping. The Democrats under Kennedy and Johnson had become associated with civil rights, and so Nixon steered a course where he wasn’t exactly opposed to civil rights per se, but made it clear he wasn’t going to entertain any further civil rights advancements.

Nixon of course won a resounding victory in 1968. He won several Southern states, while outright segregationist George Wallace won most of the rest. He did even better in 1972, winning an astounding 49 states.

In 1973, his Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, resigned in disgrace.

In 1974, Nixon resigned in disgrace.

Phil Ochs was there in Chicago in 1968. He was there with the Yippies, he was part of the contingent that nominated Pigasus for President, he sang songs for the protesters.

He was irretrievably broken by what happened in Chicago, and it was only compounded by Nixon’s win. You don’t have to take my word for it. This is the cover of Rehearsals for Retirement, released in April 1969:

Phil wasn’t alone, but he stands as perhaps the best example. There were people who had a certain understanding of America in 1968, who had bought into the dominant American narrative that America just keeps getting better, that we overcame the British and we overcame slavery and we extended the suffrage and we defeated fascism and now we were working to overcome segregation and we could also make this obscene war in Vietnam end… and Chicago crushed that understanding, that faith in America, a faith that many of them perhaps they didn’t even understand as such. Think of 1968 in its totality. In just seven months time, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, the Democratic National Convention spawned a police riot, and Richard Nixon was elected. That’s a lot to absorb for someone who - whether they knew it or not - had so completely bought into a particular vision of America.

My fear is that November 5, 2024 will prove to be the day that many of us broke.

It’s not that I think the breaking will be so severe. Phil Ochs was bipolar, and I believe that his mental health issues were there and became more prevalent after 1968, and I don’t expect we’ll all suffer quite like that. But at the same time, I believe that the collective mental health issues in this country are immense, and I worry about what this means for a lot of people. I think our collective national trauma seems to keep growing. And whatever you might think about Richard Nixon, if nothing else, he truly did care about America, in his own warped way. We all know that Donald Trump only cares about himself, and now this terrible, vengeful man has been given the access to wreak intense damage to the country.

That’s my fear.

The thing is that deep down, I still believe in this ridiculous country. I believe in spite of the evidence immediately before us.

And I don’t know how to reconcile the abiding fear with the faith that’s still there. What I do know though is that my energy to not just believe but to meaningfully act out on such belief… it’s very depleted. I’d like to think that as we get past this week, as the shock wears off, as we breathe, we’ll get energy back, we’ll get focus back, we’ll find a path forward.

I write about Humphrey and Nixon because I see tremendous parallels with our current situation. Recognizing these parallels can be both uplifting and maddening, uplifting because it feels like we can learn and do better and be inspired by how things did turn around, but also maddening because, come on, do we never fucking learn anything?

But, you know, I wasn’t given the name Hubert, I wasn’t given the name Richard. I was given the name Phil. That’s the character in that drama which I can’t help but relate to. And that’s where a lot of my fear comes from. I know that you can try to fight it - and indeed you can leave behind a rich legacy as you engage the fight - but you can still be broken.

My point, though, isn’t to dwell upon all that. My point, rather, is to confront it. We will not get through this by engaging in denial.

So I choose to confront it. I choose to fight it. I’m not sure how, but I have fragments of ideas.

The first fragment I have is that I find that we have become incredibly isolated. We’re isolated from our neighbors, we’re isolated from our co-workers. Isolation is nothing new, but in recent years, I think the isolation has been exacerbated by the rise and fall of social media, certainly by the pandemic, and absolutely by how much isolation and distance and difference have been weaponized by haters and grifters and the like.

I’m not saying that we all need to be showing up for huge rallies or kumbaya circles on a nightly basis… but I am saying that as exhausting as it can be to be with people, it’s also restorative, and we need to be with each other, we’re social animals, and like it or not, we’re political animals too.

At the same time, I think we need to better confront that a lot of the institutions which act as arbiters of our connections are deeply poisonous. I myself have all but deleted my Twitter account - you can “find me” there at @ph8159682311 but there’s not much to be found. I think we need to blaze new connections.

To that end, I’d like to solicit creative partners, or perhaps accomplices, or if you prefer to think of yourself as such, co-conspirators, in acts of creativity. I do not have a lot of great ideas about this, but one thing I’ve thought about doing for a while is having a podcast where my guests are people I’ve known from different times in my life, and we talk about what they do and have done, with an emphasis on creative endeavors. I know many people who have published books which, even if I’ve read them, I’ve never talked to anyone about! Not even the people who wrote them! This seems very silly and this seems correctable and why not correct it in a way that can connect with more people?

Here’s a huge part of what I believe: millions of people made a truly horrible decision this week, and they did so because they’re largely stuck in negative feedback loops, and those negative feedback loops can largely be understood as the social weeds which grow in an untended garden of civility. Yes, the metaphor can be thrown on its ear, we can talk about the weeds which feed upon hate, there are a lot of valid framings. I get all of that.

What I also get is this: I have an 11 year old to whom I had to try and explain why what happened this week is so terrible, while also emphasizing that it’s not because half the country are terrible people; and you can’t confront all this and simply choose to hate people and not in the process become core to the problem.

The last thing I want to be here is trite. I’m sorry if it comes across that way. I’m searching. We’re all searching, aren’t we?

There are a lot of things I could say about Phil’s catalog, and one of those things is that there was often an incongruity between what he sung about and how he presented it. Sometimes this was consciously ironic, and sometimes I think it’s because he was an artist strangely out of step with his time.

In the context of Rehearsals for Retirement, which I think can be broadly understood as both an attempt to regain footing and to acknowledge that such an attempt could not possibly work - bipolar indeed - one song which has always stood out is “Another Age”. It’s not hard to imagine this arranged as a weird Tom Petty song; and in his 1968 concert in Vancouver, he introduced it as a song for political revolution; but what is this? A pop song about ambiguity?

I feel like it’s especially relevant for the moment. He sings:

and they’ll coach you in the classroom that it cannot happen here

but it has happened here

“Another Age” is an update on a persistent theme of his, that of the cyclical nature of history, perhaps most directly expressed by “Crucifixion” from a couple years earlier. But it’s also wedged right before the title track. We pray for the aged, and inexplicably, at only 28, that included him.

And yet it’s - especially by Phil’s standards - something of an upbeat pop song.

I do think it’s the dawn of another age. I think it will be difficult, not just politically, but in a lot of other ways. We’re only just beginning to experience the reality of climate change. And as Americans, we’re only just beginning to experience the decline of the empire.

But as humans we perservere. We continue to make art and spread joy. We will forever be wreaked by ambiguity, but that’s simply the human condition, and it doesn’t mean we have to settle.

Many of us are struggling right now, but my god, let’s at least struggle together.