The Inside Agitator
“More than a few commentators have drawn sometimes shaky comparisons between the current moment and 1968, the year when, in April, Dr. King was gunned down on a motel balcony in Memphis. In June, Robert Kennedy was murdered at the Ambassador Hotel, in Los Angeles, after winning the California primary. In Vietnam, it was the year of the Tet offensive and the My Lai massacre. At the Democratic Convention that summer, in Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley cracked down brutally on antiwar protesters in Grant Park. Richard Nixon won the Presidency. And, as few remember, there was also a flu pandemic; the H3N2 virus killed at least a million people, including a hundred thousand Americans. Perhaps the deepest frustration of thinking about 1968 and 2020 is the time elapsed, the opportunities squandered, the lip service paid.” The New Yorker’s David Remnick: An American Uprising: Who, really, is the agitator here?