User:Mikado282/Remembering 68

“

Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes. — Captain Kirk - taking 1968 off

”

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 that were in schools then later built the Internet and Team Fortress (and resurgent Communist states). 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.

“

Look at 1968. — Joe Scarborough — professional DNC(CDR) memo reader, in an unusually honest assement of today's situations (Dec. 8, 2021)

”

1968

Take yer stink'n paws off'n mah Sentry, ya dang dirty crêpe!

“

Dereko just realized that this page is a list of movie recomendations. — Dereko

”

“

Mikado282 just realized that his movie page is a list recomendations for playing Team Fortress 2. — Mikado282

”

Mostly movies and literature

• "Cart will not push self!" University City Studios purchased the film rights to the book The Pushcart War in 1968. Mikado282 read the book around 1969.

• Planet of the Apes was released, an influential science fiction movie that launched a franchise before there ever was such a thing as Star Wars.
  • One of the famous scenes is the three brass monkeys. (Watch the scene here.)

Nine Badlands criminals turned mercenaries.
(The Wild Bunch)

• In production from 1967 to 1969, The Wild Bunch is a story of 9 Badlands criminals turned mercenaries.
  • Fans of Team Fortress 2 should compare the walk before the final firefight and the Mann vs. Machine video
  • The most violent Western to date, the director insisted that every gunfire sound was accurate to the weapon being fired.

• BRAAAINS! George A. Romero updated the horror industry by creating an entire new movie genre with little more than latex, mastic, and grease paint.
  • "It's only ham." Well, Romero also used bone-in ham covered with chocolate syrup for the undead to eat.

I only ride them, I don't know what makes them work. (Kelly's Heroes)

• "Sure'n I hope you're considerin' the future, Mr. Eastwood." The '60s made Clint Eastwood's future!
  • After the Sergio Leone Trilogy, Eastwood starred in the 1968 Hang Em High and Where Eagles Dare.
  • ​Hugo Montenegro's cover of Ennio Morricone's main theme for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly was on Billboard charts for the whole of 1968.
  • In 1968, Troy Kennedy Martin began to write the script for the tanker movie, Kelly's Heroes (1970).
  • Written in 1967, casting for began in 1968 for the 1970's Two Mules for Sister Sara, Eastwood's favorite of his westerns. (Warning: The trailer is a complete spoiler!)
    • Two Mules for Sister Sara is the total reason Mikado282 holds the punk in his mouth for lighting Fourth of July firecrackers (Any day can be the Fourth of July if you just believe.)
    • Mikado282 has a brief cameo in Two Mules for Sister Sara.

• The Mafia thought it could outsmart Bullitt.

• Michael Crichton wrote The Andromeda Strain in a three year stretch over 1967-1969. It is about microbial monsters that escaped into the Badlands. The 1971 movie version is a bit dry; a military procedural in the vein of Dr. Strangelove (1964), Fail Safe (1964), and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), so yeah, flat out Mikado282's favorite hard Science Fiction for some time.
  • Some years later, Crichton also wrote something about much larger monsters that also escaped somewhere else.

• Shakespearicles: The Lion in Winter, one of the wife's favorites, often quoted in the Society for Creative Anachonism as follows:

​Scout: A knife! Spy's got a knife!

Sniper: Of course Spy has a knoif, Spy always has a knoif, we all have knoifs! It's 1968 and we're all ​bloody mercenaries.

(watch to clip)

• 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, played by Anthony Quinn.
  • Not much of a movie as such, but it does preserve what real old Badlands Indian reservations and modern downtown Teufort actually looked like in 1968.
    • It is pl_/cp_, but can Flapping Eagle cap Final?

• At least Flap was supposed to be set in Badlands; Hellfighters tried to pass off arid High Plains Wyoming as tropical jungle Venezuela.
  • It is not a particularly great movie, either, but the Dallas office and home interiors as well as the equipment at the oil fires are nostalgic to the height of 1960s kitch decor and engineering.

• A much better role for Anthony Quinn was The Shoes of the Fisherman, a 1968 film based on the 1963 novel that predicted Mao's 1968 Chinese famine and near shooting war with the Soviets.
  • Quinn's character was imprisoned in a Gulag for 20 years after receiving an implied Room 101 treatment.
  • After being elected Pope, he receives a gift from his previous torturer; specifically, a small box of Ukrainian earth with Ukrainian sunflower seeds.
    • "The earth is sacred because it is all we have to stand on. The seeds are sacred...because there is life locked inside them."
    • In 2022, a Ukrainian woman gave sunflower seeds to the Russian occupiers; "Put them in your pockets,” she says, “so at least sunflowers will grow when you all lie down here.”

Mostly Vietnam War

• The Tet Offensive scuttled any hope of reelection for then-President Johnson.

• The movie The Green Berets was released.

• David Eisenhower, the grandson of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, married Julie Nixon, daughter of then Senator Richard Nixon, making David a "Senator's son" and thereby fortunately avoiding combat draft for the Vietnam War.
  • Song writer John Fogerty, who himself managed to avoid the combat draft through a privledged backdated enlistment as a supply clerk, was so incensed by David's privledge that he wrote the protest song Fortunate Son.

• "Now hear this!" MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors was published, which in good old 1972 inspired the television comedy M*A*S*H, featuring a nice pair of hooters.

• It was not uncommon for some war-protesting Hippies to falsely pose as veteran Soldiers, but generally by wearing dilapidated uniform shirts and jackets.

• The iconic tropical detective drama that started it all, Hawaii Five-O debuted this year and made Aloha a household word.
  • What city kid with a television in '68 didn't know that show’s theme?
  • It ran until 1980, when it was replaced by iconic tropical Vietnam War veteran detective drama Magnum, P.I..
    • The popularity of Magnum, P.I. spawned similar Vietnam veteran detective shows, like Riptide.

"Book 'em, Danno!"

Unclassified

• Mars Needs Women; but, they are confused that they can't find any in the TF2 Spawn Rooms.

• Gary Gygax, founder of TSR, rented the Lake Geneva Horticultural Hall for the "Gen Con 0".

Mostly race and civil rights

• Civil Rights Act of 1964 required racial integration. Seriously, you kids have no idea how historically recent segregation was to us back in 1968! New Mexico schools remained segregated until 1968.

• Arthur Ashe became the first African American to win the U.S. Open singles title

• 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.
  • In 2022, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives ordered the U.S. Olympic Team to not make any such signs of protest against any other country's racism at the Winter Olympics.

• 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.

• Reverend King Jr. was murdered in 1968, triggering nation-wide riots, exceeding the riots of the "long, hot summer of 1967", prompting 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.

• It was in 1968 that Norma McCorvey became pregnant with her third child. Because she was a Texan seeking an abortion at that time, she was recruited to be the anonymous Jane Doe of the Roe v. Wade case.
  • She never actually had the abortion; she raised the child and became a Pro-Life advocate.

Mostly music

• Hippy Riots occur in Chicago, 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.

• Broadway debut of the Hair. From the title song's lyrics:
  • "She asked me, "Why?"" "I'm a hairy guy." — The Heavy
  • "Oh, say, can you see, my eyes?" — The Soldier

• Bless my soul! Two years before being cast in Hair, Shakespearian performer and rock star Meat Loaf ("who didn't love his teddy") had his first professional music gig this year.

• "You procured the poppy flowers required for the medicines that gave me succor from the pains of my many warring ailments." Involved in millions of overdose deaths today, the synthetic opioid Fentanyl was invented in 1968. Hippies and their politics are noted for their particular promotion of opiods (see Hair).

• Honestly, how hard is it to portray self-important, self-entittled, druggies tearing down the system of liberties that created all of their privileges in the first place? As if to counterpoint Hair, the Broadway musical 1776 was produced in the late 1960s to portray the debates on declaring independence.

• The early Muppets were popular on the Ed Sulivan Show, but honestly, it was a show for grownups and the monsters really scared 7-year old Mikado282.
  • The Mah Nà Mah Nà song was released in 1968 and immediately became a staple for the Muppets. Watch the Muppet's first live performance on the Ed Sulivan Show.
  • Monster Trash Can Dance Skit performed live on the Ed Sulivan show.
  • "Nom nom nom, om nom." The Children's Television Workshop was founded, leading next year to the premier of the long-running children's television show Sesame Street, featuring several Muppet characters, including a grouchy green monster living in a trash can.

• History shows again and again how the band Soft White Underbellies 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.

• 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.

• The prefabricated pop band The Monkees died this year.
  • Part of their death throes was the horrendous 1968 movie Head.

• The UK Pop Psyc group Focal Point publish First Byte of the Apple, featuring the song Hassle Castle (Listen).

• 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.

Better Scout Moms prefer better chemicals!

Mostly Malthusian

• The 1960s beheld rising awareness of environmental contamination within Europe and the United States. In 1968, Hungary was the first country to ban DDT, with the U.S. following in 1971. This was a easier call for Hungary as 1) they didn't manufacture DDT, 2) they didn't particularly have a malaria problem, and 3) their main application was for BedBug Protection, but their bedbugs had become immune to DDT several years earlier.

• Paul Ehrlich's book The Population Bomb published this year predicted world-wide famine and disease and global economic collapse by 1980, or thereabouts.
  • As if to demonstrate his global calamities to come, the Asian Flu was first detected in 1968 in Hong Kong, which went on to kill 1 to 4 million people.

• The movie Soylent Green was a little more optimistic. Based on the 1966 novel Make Room! Make Room!, the movie proposed that we would run completely out of oil and our oceans would die in 2022.
  • Spoiler: In 2022, The New York Times Style column reported that cannibalism is the new green chic for privileged young adult progressive elites.

• George Lucas won his first movie award in 1968 for a dystopic population-controlled future.

"And that's why you'll never see a Balloonicorn, to this very day."

• The Unicorn song was recorded by the Irish Rovers this year.

• Published in 1966 but read by Mikado282 in early 1969, Pauline Palmer Meek's book Just-Alike Princes invented the Team Fortress 2 storyline.

• 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 have been retired somewhat earlier were it not for the underground nuclear testing that was conducted in that area.)

• This year, at age 20, Arnold Schwarzenegger moved to the United States and won his first Mr. Universe Championship at Venice Beach, making famous the Front Single Bicep Arm Extended pose.

Mikado282 Thought

“

Not everyone thinks Stalin is the bad guy here. — Mikado282 Thought — "Little Blue Book of Locomotives"

”

• 1968 was a year of global protests. In short, people in Socialist countries protested against the Soviets, while people in non-Socialist countries praised the Soviets.

• 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.
  • Soviet Showoff Bernie Sanders moved to Vermont in 1968 to begin evolutionary infiltration of the U.S. Congress.
  • After some past failed attempts, Sanders finally got elected into the White House in 2020.

• 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.
  • Mao was furious with the Ukrainian-born Nikita Khrushchev for De-Stalinization and for backing down from nuclear war with the United States over the Cuban Missile Crisis, resulting in the Sino-Soviet split.
    • Alexander Dubček became First Secretary of Czechoslovakia with a program of "Communism with human characteristics" in early 1968. This liberalization rapidly spiraled into open criticism of the Soviets, and the Russians then invaded Czechoslovakia under the pretext that the Soviets had the right to overthrow any Communist government that diverged from the authority of the Kremlin.
    • So, in 1968, the Soviets also massed 375,000 soldiers with 1,200 aircraft and 120 medium-range nuclear missiles on the border of the Xinjiang province, incidentally threatening to liberate the Uyghurs from China.
  • This year, Mao also arrested Xi Zhongxun, imprisoning him as a traitor to the Revolution. This arrest reduced his children to a period of depredation. But they turned out alright, especially his oldest boy, Xi Jinpin, who was 15 in 1968.
    • Today, Xi Jinpin thinks that the Soviet Union collapsed because they De-Stalinised.
    • The CCP also keeps the Uyghurs busy today making Nike Air Jordans.

• A 1968 Soviet Show Trial sentenced four self-publishers to reeducation though labor (Gulag) for criticizing Soviet Show Trials.
  • In 2022, the US Congress has reenacted Soviet Show Trials as pseudo-courts on primetime television networks, literally "show" trials of people who criticized the then sitting US Congress.

——————

• ​Mikado282 saw but didn't follow the monthly chess column that Grandmaster and phenom, Bobby Fisher, wrote for Boys' Life in the years of 1967-1969.
  • The 1972 World Chess Championship was a publicly-followed one-man campaign by American Bobby Fisher against the team of state-sponsored Soviet chess champions.

• The Society for Creative Anachronism registered as a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation in California this year; later, sucking Mikado282 in for 18 years, but sourcing his Steam name.
  • SCA wooden swords are required to have contrasting colored tape to make the "cutting edges". A knight that tutored Mikado282 always made his front edge BLU and the trailing edge RED, because he was a "relatively fast" swordsman.

• 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". The high and worsening inflation was an intention of Keynesian Demand-Side deficit-spending by the Kennedy and Johnson governments. It got worse: Nixon increased social spending and Carter accepted high inflation as inescapable. Reagan ended the inflation. Biden's administration brought it roaring back!

• Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was released, starring Dick van Dyke.

• The publication of Chariots of the Gods? popularized alien theories, before Area 51 became such a trope.

• Gabe Newell had his 6^th birthday this year. Mikado282 was a bit older than that.

• The Rolling Stones recorded You Can't Always Get What You Want for their Let It Bleed album released the next year. It later became Donald Trump's favorite rally closing song.

• Union Pacific Railroad built the Omaha Zoo Train in 1968.

• Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. briefly stood as a candidate for U. S. President in 1967.
  • His Vice-Presidential runningmate was Dr. Benjamin Spock. (Yes, Gene Roddenberry named Star Trek's Spock after him.)
  • 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 advice were Progressive and so were not particularly well-founded in science; for example, 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 generations of Americans raised as "Spock Babies" were known for their Entitlement.

• Grand Unification of the United Methodist Church
  • "The most segregated day of the week." One Sunday in '68, the Sunday School teacher told us that separater Methodist Churches were uniting and had us write down our choices for the new church name. 
    • Joining the (British Immigrant) Methodist Church was the German Immigrant Brethren Church who had not been permitted to join in 1768.
    • Also joining were the Black Methodist congregations, thereby ending racial segregation in the Methodist Church.
  • Hillary's bunch out of the urban northeast (characterized as white elete liberals by Malcom X) began imposing "baptized Marxist intersectionalism" on the church.
    • Most of the UMC in Africa as well as majority black UMC congregations in the US are largely opposed to this movement and with many other rural U.S. congregations formed Global Methodist Church, so the ironic effect is re-segregation of the Methodist Church in large cities.

• The Chicago 8 were tried and convicted of (outrageous) contempt of court and clear violation of Title X.
  • The eighth defender, Seale, attempted to represent himself, requested a change of lawyer, and was bound and gagged.
  • Convictions were (partially) overturned on appeal.

• The Prisoner ran one season 67-68; Mikado282 was indelibly fascinated, but didn't understand any of it. (Did anybody?)

• The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons was signed. Good luck with that ....
  • In 2022, China is building hundreds of new nuclear missile silos (no, the real kind, with real MIRVS in armored holes in the ground)!

• Kansas Gas & Electric donated the grounds of their abandoned Powerhouse to the Kansas Raccoon Sanctuary.

• Mason Williams released Classical Gas.
  • Williams was the head writer for the television show The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (1967-1968) and performed the instrumental several times on the show.(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 armed forces recruitment video that got Mikado282 to enlist.
  • The cancelled Smothers Brothers show was replaced in 1968 by Hee Haw. The fans of Hee Haw generally perceived Roy Clark as the show's clown. However, he was a master of the Spanish guitar, performing Malaguena live on the show.

• Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band won 4 Grammy Awards.

• Folk signer "Tiny Tim" recorded Tiptoe Through the Tulips (Play a 1968 performance.)

Mostly "Oh, my God."

(Listen!) (Listen!)

• Frank Kameny originated the slogan "Gay is Good".
  • The Stonewall Riots occurred the following year (named for the Stonewall Inn, which operated between 1967 and 1969.

• 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."

“

If you've been mod-o-fi-eyed. It's an illusion, and you're in betwe-en. — A Token of My Extreme (1979) by Frank Zappa, Mothers of Invention (1966-1968) (Cameoed in Head in 1968.)

”

“

That all seems very, very strange. I never craved a toaster or a color T.V.. — Mikado282

”

Mostly "He's our man!"

• Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In began this year, featuring a guest clip of then Presidential candidate Richard Nixon saying "Sock it to me?".

• 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.
  • Before she used those tapes to impeach Nixon, Hillary Clinton left the Republican Party to join Donald Trump then in the Democrat Party, because, to HER, the segregationist Jim Crow Dixiecrats were somehow maybe less racist than Nixon?!?!?!?!?

• The Nixon campaign made "cutting redtape" a kitchen table phrase.
  

  Know Your Red Tape Rights!
  • However, the Nixon administration oversaw the creation of two red-tape industries, the likes of which we had never seen before, OSHA and the ​EPA.

• 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 RED wheat!
  • 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.

Mostly greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission

• Mikado282 enjoyed the movie Blackbeard's Ghost.

• 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.

• 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 the boy's 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 correctly program the solution).
  • 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.
  • MSYN, his educational and professional start was assembly code on 68-hundred series microcontrollers.
  • 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 lied that dispersing one pound of Plutonium into the atmosphere would kill every 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 all fine.)
  • Later, Nader would be kicked out of the Revolution, being blamed for splitting Marxist votes and costing Al Gore the US Presidency.

Graduations

• Vladimir Putin, age 15, graduated from primary school.
• Xi Jinpin, age 15, also would have graduated from primary school this year were it not for his father's arrest.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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).
  • 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.
• 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.
  • Trump had 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.
• Hillary Clinton would have graduated from Yale this year, but hung out at the DNC Presidential Convention Riot instead, delaying her graduation.
  • Her senior thesis concluded that the Alinsky Method of radical organizing with Italian characteristics was great and all that, but she didn't believe that it could be scaled nationally
    • 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.
  • 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 at the time - 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. (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-runmonitored bureaus.

• Al Gore would have graduated from Harvard this year, but hung out at the DNC Presidential Convention Riot instead, delaying his graduation.
• 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.

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.