You know you know you wish you’d gone to Harvard or your kids did. Don’t lie. It’s important.

Nobody can sing like this. Unless they go to Harvard.

It’s all gone. At this point Harvard and Yale are only competing to see who can be the more ignorant, arrogant, certain, uneducated, intolerant, laughable, totalitarian, and mediocre. Here’s my contribution to the Class of 2016 at my own alma mater. Long may you rot in hell. I know there are Yalies who feel the same way about Old Eli.

Lyrics to “Faux Harvard”

Faux Harvard! we join in thy PC throng,
And with CURSES surrender our powers
By these idiot poses, aimed at killing the past,
To the Age that will finish all that was ours.
O Relic and Crime of our ancestors’ earth
That hast long kept your memories warm
First flow’r of their sickness, scourge of the serfs!
Dumb rising thro’ change and minds stillborn.

Farewell! Be thy destinies backward and blight!
To OUR children the will not to live,
With freedom to rage, and and to sob and to spite,
And to Ignorance and Certainty shrive.
Let not moss-covered mentors yet abide,
As the world gone psychotic makes the Yard a sty.
Be the herald of Night, and the grim suicide
Of the dullards who know nothing except how to die.

Who owns this place? WE own this place.

She thought it was all funny until the perp walk in Harvard Square.

They frog-marched the sorry-ass president through the Porcellian Gate to the foot of John Harvard at University Hall and cut off her head. Here endeth the lesson.

Do you think some feminist old biddy will be able to defeat hundreds of years of Harvard tradition? We’ll see.

This pic is of the Porcellian Gate at Harvard Yard. The Porcellian Club has an ancient history, a huge endowment of its own, and members worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The President of Harvard is this person:

Excuse me. President Faust. Only at Harvard would Lucifer confront Veritas directly.

I read Goethe’s Faust and Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus. At Harvard btw. As an English major. When they had those. Both creatures who sold their souls to the devil and were snatched away to eternal damnation.

I can’t stop laughing. Final clubs will take losses. When I called my own I got a female on voicemail. So be it. But there are a few clubs who have the legal and financial muscle to make Faust wish he hadn’t started this fight.

For example, the Porcellian has already registered its first ever female member. Dr. Piggy Faust.

She made it through initiation in high style. Knock and ye shall enter. If you have the breeding.

Still to be heard from, the financial and legal powerhouses behind the AD, the Delphic (founded by J.P. Morgan himself), and, well, some others. Anybody at Holyoke Center hear a fly buzz? I hear demons don’t like flies.

Get used to it. The clubs have power beyond power in the alumni realm. They will see to it that this president goes away.

She chose poorly.

Hell has a hundred fathers.

No college or university has been depicted in the movies as much as Harvard. Here’s a staggering link. I was just looking to see how many more actors came from Harvard than Oxford. Lots more. Harvard is a 747 with Oxford and Cambridge under its wings like two antique Lockheed tri-stars. Yale is a sorry also-ran. Princeton is just a postcard. The reality of it all.

Most of the movie depictions make it seem like Harvard is fun, or romantic, gorgeously gorgeous, or anything but the reality. It is fun, and romantic, and amazingly other, but it’s also a very very dangerous place. It can make you and it can break you. You don’t win unless you let it do both.

For people who’ve been raised with a belief in accomplishment, it’s a brush with heaven. The first place you’ve ever been where everybody automatically belongs. Everybody gets the benefit of the doubt. They’re all at Harvard. Not everybody is brilliant. Forget that. Some are there because their fathers and grandfathers and great grandfathers were. But they have their own magisterial authority. Others are there because whatever you believe, they can assail it, puncture it, twist it, pervert it. If you let them. Are you as smart as you think you are? Or are you one more of innumerable fakes, of which Harvard is also full.

People’s appraisal of you is not linked to grades. That’s the democratic side of the place. On the other hand, you’re supposed to be not ordinary. Which is hard to do in a place with so many who excel and whose sons and daughters proclaim ambitions they actually achieve. You’re continually breathless. It’s a motor started in your head and gut that never goes out.

It can kill you. There are suicides nobody wants to count. There are also stories of persistence.

Kind of like life, ultimately distilled, when you think about it.

Why did I write about it today? A movie called Prozac Nation. Nobody writes about the darkness. It’s not the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It’s a crucible. You survive or you die.

Harvard is full of dangerous people. I am one of them. Go Crimson.

Pretty funny Yale propaganda film. I also went to Cornell for grad school. So that part’s funny too. Shame they had to film in cheesy New Haven locations.

It’s no big deal but today is The Game. Harvard versus Yale. The only thing I like about Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League anymore. Football. It’s still a game, not a business. No athletic scholarships. No spring practice. Sure there are dumb jocks but they have to be able to do the classwork. There are no challenge flags. What the refs call is the law. Games move smartly along. Pun intended.

Overall, Yale’s way ahead in the series. They always had more dumb jocks. Recently, though, Harvard’s been kicking Yale’s ass. Some number of years worth in a row. If you know what I mean. (Okay, it’s not Alabama-Auburn. I don’t know exactly.) But I’m worried this year. Yale keeps beating everybody worse than Harvard does. That’s a sign, right? And sooner or later, Yale’s going to rise up and beat Harvard, because every dog has his day. Even if it’s a drooling, half-witted bulldog. Right?

Harvard rarely goes undefeated. (Only 19 times now that I’ve done the research.) They like to think it’s a noblesse oblige thing. Truthfully, it’s a not quite good enough at football thing. But right now Harvard is 9-0. About where they were in 1968. Yale was undefeated that year too. When they had Calvin Hill, who became a huge star with the Dallas Cowboys. Figures. Dallas Cowboys and Yale go together. Lots of stars, lots of sex scandals, not much in the way of solid accomplishments for a long long time if you know what I mean.

Not that Yale isn’t old. It is. Like Bill and Hillary are old.

Anyway. Back in 1968 there was a unique confrontation. Both Harvard and Yale were undefeated. (Not this year. Yale lost to Dartmouth early in the season.) That year, maybe for the last time, The Game meant something. Yale was ranked somewhere in the the top 25 nationally. Harvard was, well, Harvard. So with 42 seconds left on the clock, Harvard was losing 29-13. When a miracle happened. The next day, the headline of the Harvard Crimson read, “Harvard Beats Yale 29-29.” They even made a documentary about it. Because when a bunch of people go to Yale and Harvard and something unusual happens, you can bet a movie will be made about it eventually.

Not feeling good about this one. This year, The Game is at Harvard, but there’s no real home field advantage in this contest. It’s not like Lambeau, where everybody stops breathing when Aaron Rodgers has the ball. Everybody’s drunk and not paying attention. And the two schools are so close geographically that it’s pretty much 50-50 Harvard and Yale regardless of where they’re playing.

Worse, Marist grad and self-nominated Harvard man Bill O’Reilly is attending The Game. Yuk.

Nobody has to root one way or the other. We’re focused on The Game because we’re still getting over pet deaths. The deerhound Raebert runs away from Philadelphia Eagles games because my wife cheers too loudly. She’s much more restrained about Ivy League games. As am I.

Why? Because it’s just a game. Saving grace.

The 50th Anniversary to Worry About Now

Not 1968, awful as that was, but 1969, when with few notable exceptions the body of American life so scarred by recent events proceeded to shed much of its skin and begin creating a new identity with little or no regard for or allegiance to the past.

—It ‘s a time of many beginnings: Wendy’s, Long John Silver’s, Arthur Treacher’s, Walmart, Scooby Doo, the Brady Bunch, Sesame Street, Monty Python, Led Zeppelin, the supersonic Concorde, the jumbo jet 747, the first X rated film to win an Oscar, new movie superstars like Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, and Jon Voight, the election of Golda Meir as Israel’s first female premier, the attainment of power by Yassir Arafat and Muhammar Khaddafi, early chain rattlings inside Iran…

—As well as endings galore: The Beatles breakup, the death of President and WWII Supreme Allied Commander Eisenhower, the death of Ho ChinMinh, the death of Mary Jo Kopechnemand Kennedy dreams of another presidency, the death of Brian Jones, founding member of The Rolling Stones, Jack Kerouac, Judy Garland, Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, the LaBiancas, Mies van der Rohe, Jeffrey Hunter, John L. Lewis, Rocky Marciano, Robert Taylor, Max Eastman, Eric Portman, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr., and many more…

—And most signicantly, perhaps, ominous hints of the new life-changing American world awaiting us in every sphere: the mud and libertinism of Woodstock, the Hell’s Angels killing a fan at Altamont (“the end of the sixties” it was called), the beginning of the draft lottery system, the National Guard arresting student protesters in North Dakota, the first U.S. case and death in the AIDS crisis, the beginning of the gay rights movement, the birth of rights groups for Native Americans and their seizure and occupation of Alcatraz Island, the first senate refusal to confirm a SCOTUS nominee since 1930, the arrest for indecent exposure onstage by Doors frontman Jim Morrison, the trial, conviction and public anguish over Lt.. Calley and the My Lai Massacre, the unprecedented murder spree of Charles Manson’s hippie-girl murder cult, the trials and convictions of James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan, the nationwide Vietnam War Moratorium by ordinary citizens, black players protesting their head coach by wearing black armbands to his office, on the heels of an oil spill the birth of an extreme ecology movement as a political force that spawned Earth Day, the violent occupation of university buildings by students at Harvard, the Weathermen bombings, the controversial shootings of Black Panthers in Chicago, the arrival of Gloria Steinem as a feminist force standing on the shoulders of the Black Power Movement, the specification of the Unix Operating System, the baby steps of Internet precursor ARPA, invention of the digital camera chip that will lead all the way to smartphones, and more of course…

It’s all here, the elevation of youth over experience, the blossoming of victim-oriented rights groups, recurrence of the age old curse of deadly physical violence in American politics, the many byproducts of drugs and untrammeled promiscuity, and the media celebration of a runaway counterculture that in a trice becomes THE Culture. The most surprising thing today might be realizing how hard it is to remember a time when all this wasn’t so. It just is that way now.

This nation and much of the rest of the world would never be the same after 1969. This is the furniture of life many of our children don’t know never existed before. More than any other year, this is the one that did the most to shape how they live now and what they still have to face in their own lives. What do you tell them about the past? There is a bit of the good old American sporting life in here if you orvthey care anymore. Willie Mays hitting his 600th career home run. The Amazing Mets winning the World Series. The Jets shocking the Colts in Super Bowl III. Amid the reliable punctuation of Ohio State winning another national collegiate football championship. And, obviously, Apollo 11 landing on the moon. If your kids still believe in the Apollo triumph. Or in the moon.

Here’s the 1969 timeline. In Part 4, we’ll talk about the year that started this line of thought. Next year. 2019. Think about it till then. Think in particular of the speed of the changes represented here. From Woodstock Nation to murder at the Stones Gimme Shelter concert at Altamont in less than six months. How fast big bad breakthroughs in behavior can come.

Click graphic for source.

THE 1969 TIMELINE, JANUARY THROUGH DECEMBER

Read it at your leisure, but please read it.

JANUARY

January 1 – Ohio State defeats USC in the Rose Bowl to win the national college football championship for the 1968 season.
January 5 –
Ariana Afghan Airlines Flight 701 crashes into a house on its approach to London’s Gatwick Airport, killing 50 of the 62 people on board and two of the home’s occupants.
January 12 —
Led Zeppelin, the first Led Zeppelin album, is released in the United States.
Martial law is declared in Madrid, as the University is closed and over 300 students are arrested.
American football: The New York Jets upset the Baltimore Colts in Super Bowl III, 16-7. Joe Namath is the MVP of the game.
January 14 —
An explosion aboard the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise near Hawaii kills 27 and injures 314.
The Soviet Union launches Soyuz 4.
January 15 – The Soviet Union launches Soyuz 5, which docks with Soyuz 4 for a transfer of crew.
January 16 –
Two cosmonauts transfer from Soyuz 5 to Soyuz 4 via a spacewalk while the two craft are docked together, the first time such a transfer takes place. The two spacecraft undock and return to Earth two days later.
Student Jan Palach sets himself on fire in Prague’s Wenceslas Square to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia; 3 days later he dies.
January 20 – Richard Nixon is sworn in as the 37th President of the United States.
January 22 – An assassination attempt is carried out on Leonid Brezhnev by deserter Viktor Ilyin. One person is killed, several are injured. Brezhnev escaped unharmed.
January 26 – Elvis Presley steps into American Studios in Memphis, Tennessee… beginning the recording of… landmark comeback sessions for [albums including the songs] “Suspicious Minds”, “In the Ghetto”, and “Kentucky Rain”.
January 28 – 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill: A blowout on Union Oil’s Platform A spills 80,000 to 100,000 barrels of crude oil into a channel and onto the beaches of Santa Barbara County in Southern California; on February 5 the oil spill closes Santa Barbara’s harbor. The incident will inspire Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson [and Ira Einhorn] to organize the first Earth Day in 1970.
January 31 – The Beatles give their last public performance, of several tracks on the roof of Apple Records, London (featured in Let It Be (1970 film)).

FEBRUARY

February 4 – In Cairo, Yasser Arafat is elected Palestine Liberation Organization leader at the Palestinian National Congress.
February 5 – The controversial television show Turn-On premieres on the ABC network in the United States and is canceled after one episode following protests by viewers and ABC affiliate stations.
February 8 — After 147 years, the last weekly issue of The Saturday Evening Post is published. The magazine is later resurrected, briefly, as a monthly magazine.
February 9 – The Boeing 747 “jumbo jet” is flown for the first time, taking off from the Boeing airfield at Everett, Washington.
February 13 – Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) terrorists bomb the Montreal Stock Exchange.
February 14 – Pope Paul VI issues Mysterii Paschalis, a motu proprio, deleting many names from the Roman calendar of saints (including Valentine, who was celebrated on this day).
February 17 – Aquanaut Berry L. Cannon dies of carbon dioxide poisoning while attempting to repair the SEALAB III habitat off San Clemente Island, California.
February 24
The Mariner 6 Mars probe is launched from the United States.
Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District: The Supreme Court of the United States rules that the First Amendment to the United States Constitution applies to public schools.

MARCH

March 2 — In Toulouse, France the first Concorde test flight is conducted.
Soviet and Chinese forces clash at a border outpost on the Ussuri River.
March 3 —
Apollo program: NASA launches Apollo 9 (James McDivitt, David Scott, Rusty Schweickart) to test the lunar module.
In a Los Angeles court, Sirhan Sirhan admits that he killed presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy.
The United States Navy establishes the Navy Fighter Weapons School (also known as Top Gun) at Naval Air Station Miramar.
March 4 – Arrest warrants are issued by a Florida court for Jim Morrison on charges of indecent exposure during a Doors concert three days earlier.
March 10 —
In Memphis, Tennessee, James Earl Ray pleads guilty to assassinating Martin Luther King Jr. (he later retracts his guilty plea).
The novel The Godfather by Mario Puzo is first distributed to booksellers by the publisher G. P. Putnam’s Sons.
March 13 – Apollo program: Apollo 9 returns safely to Earth after testing the Lunar Module.
March 17 —
Golda Meir becomes the first female prime minister of Israel.
March 18 – Operation Breakfast, the covert bombing of Cambodia by U.S. planes, begins.
March 19 —
John Lennon and Yoko Ono are married at Gibraltar, and proceed to their honeymoon “Bed-In” for peace in Amsterdam.
March 28 – Pope Paul VI increases the number of Roman Catholic cardinals by one-third, from 101 to 134.
March 30 – The body of former United States General and President Dwight D. Eisenhower is brought by caisson to the United States Capitol to lie in state in the Capitol Rotunda; Eisenhower had died two days earlier, after a long illness, in the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Washington, D.C.

APRIL

April 1 – The Hawker Siddeley Harrier [vertical takeoff and landing] enters service with the Royal Air Force.
April 4 – Dr. Denton Cooley implants the first temporary artificial heart.
April 8 – The Montreal Expos debut as Major League Baseball’s first team outside the United States.
April 9 —
The Harvard University Administration Building is seized by close to 300 students, mostly members of the Students for a Democratic Society. Before the takeover ends, 45 will be injured and 184 arrested.
April 15 – The EC-121 shootdown incident: North Korea shoots down the aircraft over the Sea of Japan, killing all 31 on board.
April 20 —
British troops arrive in Northern Ireland to reinforce the Royal Ulster Constabulary.
A grassroots movement of Berkeley community members seizes an empty lot owned by the University of California, to begin the formation of “People’s Park”.
April 28 – Charles de Gaulle steps down as president of France after suffering defeat in a referendum the day before.

MAY

May 10 — Zip to Zap, a gathering of more than 2,000 people students and young adults at the remote town of at Zap, North Dakota, ends with the dispersal and eviction of the revelers by the North Dakota National Guard.
The Battle of Dong Ap Bia, also known as Hamburger Hill, begins during the Vietnam War.
May 15 – An American teenager known as ‘Robert R.’ dies in St. Louis, Missouri, of a baffling medical condition. In 1984 it will be identified as the earliest confirmed case of HIV/AIDS in North America.
May 16 – Venera program: Venera 5, a Soviet spaceprobe, lands on Venus.
May 17 – Venera program: Soviet probe Venera 6 begins to descend into Venus’s atmosphere, sending back atmospheric data before being crushed by pressure.
May 18 – Apollo program: Apollo 10 (Tom Stafford, Gene Cernan, John Young) is launched as a full rehearsal for the Moon landing, but stops 15 kilometers short of actually reaching the lunar surface.
May 20 – United States National Guard helicopters spray skin-stinging powder on anti-war protesters in California.
May 22 – Apollo program: Apollo 10’s lunar module flies to within 15,400 m of the Moon’s surface.
May 25 – Midnight Cowboy, an X-rated, Oscar-winning John Schlesinger film, is released.
May 26 — Apollo program: Apollo 10 returns to Earth, after a successful 8-day test of all the components needed for the upcoming first manned Moon landing.
May 26–June 2 – John Lennon and Yoko Ono conduct their second Bed-In. The follow-up to the Amsterdam event is held at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, Quebec. Lennon composes and records the song Give Peace a Chance during the Bed-In.

JUNE

June 3 – While operating at sea on SEATO maneuvers, the Australian aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne accidentally rams and slices into the American destroyer USS Frank E. Evans in the South China Sea, killing 74 American seamen.
June 5 – An international communist conference begins in Moscow.
June 7 – The rock group Blind Faith plays its first gig in front of 100,000 people in London’s Hyde Park.
June 8 – Francisco Franco orders the closing of the Gibraltar–Spain border and communications between Gibraltar and Spain in response to the 1967 Gibraltar sovereignty referendum.
June 8 – U.S. President Richard Nixon and South Vietnamese President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu meet at Midway Island. Nixon announces that 25,000 U.S. troops will be withdrawn by September.
June 15 – Georges Pompidou is elected President of France.
June 18–22 – The National Convention of the Students for a Democratic Society, held in Chicago, collapses, and the Weatherman faction seizes control of the SDS National Office. Thereafter, any activity run from the National Office or bearing the name of SDS is Weatherman-controlled.
June 22 —The Cuyahoga River fire helps spur an avalanche of water pollution control activities resulting in the Clean Water Act, Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement and the creation of the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
Judy Garland dies of a drug overdose in her London home.
June 23 – Warren E. Burger is sworn in as Chief Justice of the United States by retiring Chief Justice Earl Warren.
June 24 – The United Kingdom and Rhodesia sever diplomatic ties, after Rhodesian constitutional referendum.
June 28 – The Stonewall riots in New York City mark the start of the modern gay rights movement in the U.S.

JULY

July 1 – Charles, Prince of Wales, is invested with his title at Caernarfon.
July 3 – Brian Jones, musician and founder of The Rolling Stones, drowns in his swimming pool at his home in Sussex, England.
July 7 – French is made equal to English throughout the Canadian national government.
July 8 – Vietnam War: The very first U.S. troop withdrawals are made.
July 14 — The Act of Free Choice commences in Merauke, West Iran.
The United States’ $500, $1,000, $5,000 and $10,000 bills are officially withdrawn from circulation.
July 16 – Apollo program: Apollo 11 (Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins) lifts off toward the first landing on the Moon.
July 18 – Chappaquiddick incident – Edward M. Kennedy drives off a bridge on his way home from a party on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts. Mary Jo Kopechne, a former campaign aide to his brother, dies in the early morning hours of July 19 in the submerged car.
July 20 – Apollo program: The lunar module Eagle/Apollo 11 lands on the lunar surface. An estimated 500 million people worldwide watch in awe as Neil Armstrong takes his historic first steps on the Moon at 10:56 pm ET (02:56 UTC July 21), the largest television audience for a live broadcast at that time.[8][9]
July 22 – Spanish dictator and head of state Francisco Franco appoints Prince Juan Carlos his successor.
July 24 — The Apollo 11 astronauts return from the first successful Moon landing, and are placed in biological isolation for several days, on the chance they may have brought back lunar germs. The airless lunar environment is later determined to preclude microscopic life.
July 25 – Vietnam War: U.S. President Richard Nixon declares the Nixon Doctrine, stating that the United States now expects its Asian allies to take care of their own military defense. This starts the “Vietnamization” of the war.
July 26 – The New York Chapter of the Young Lords is founded.
July 30 – Vietnam War: U.S. President Richard Nixon makes an unscheduled visit to South Vietnam, meeting with President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu and U.S. military commanders.

AUGUST

August 4 – Vietnam War: At the apartment of French intermediary Jean Sainteny in Paris, U.S. representative Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese representative Xuan Thuy begin secret peace negotiations. They eventually fail since both sides cannot agree to any terms.
August 8 — The Beatles at 11:30 have photographer Iain Macmillan take their photo on a zebra crossing on Abbey Road.
August 9 — Members of the Manson Family invade the home of actress Sharon Tate and her husband Roman Polanski in Los Angeles. The followers kill Tate (who was 8 months pregnant), and her friends: Folgers coffee heiress Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, and Hollywood hairstylist Jay Sebring. Also killed is Steven Parent, leaving from a visit to the Polanski’s caretaker. More than 100 stab wounds are found on the victims, except for Parent, who had been shot almost as soon as the Manson Family entered the property.
August 10 – The Manson Family kills Leno and Rosemary LaBianca, wealthy Los Angeles businessman and his wife.
August 13 – Serious border clashes occur between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China.
August 14 – British troops are deployed in Northern Ireland following the three-day Battle of the Bogside.
August 15–18 – The Woodstock Festival is held in upstate New York, featuring some of the top rock musicians of the era. [Event came to be known as Woodstock Nation]
August 17 – Category 5 Hurricane Camille, the most powerful tropical cyclonic system at landfall in history, hits the Mississippi coast, killing 248 people and causing US$1.5 billion in damage (1969 dollars).
August 21 — Strong violence on demonstration in Prague and Brno, Czechoslovakia. Military force contra citizens. ‘Prague Spring’ finally beaten.
August 29 – A Trans World Airlines flight from Rome to Tel Aviv is hijacked and diverted to Syria.

SEPTEMBER

September 1 – 1969 Libyan coup d’état: A bloodless coup in Libya ousts King Idris, and brings Colonel Muammar Gaddafi to power.
September 2 — The first automatic teller machine in the United States is installed in Rockville Centre, New York.
Ho Chi Minh, former president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, dies.
September 5 – Lieutenant William Calley is charged with six counts of premeditated murder, for the 1968 My Lai Massacre deaths of 109 Vietnamese civilians in My Lai, Vietnam.
September 9 – Allegheny Airlines Flight 853 DC-9 collides in flight with a Piper PA-28, and crashes near Fairland, Indiana, killing all 83 persons in both aircraft.
September 13 – Scooby-Doo airs its first episode on the CBS network in the United States.
September 14 – The US Selective Service selects September 14 as the First Draft Lottery date.
September 20 — At a meeting between The Beatles (minus George Harrison) and business manager Allen Klein, John Lennon announces his intention to quit the group.
The very last theatrical Warner Bros. cartoon is released: the Merrie Melodies short Injun Trouble.
September 22 – San Francisco Giant Willie Mays becomes the first player since Babe Ruth to hit 600 career home runs.
September 22–25 – An Islamic conference in Rabat, Morocco, following the al-Aqsa Mosque fire (August 21), condemns the Israeli claim of ownership of Jerusalem.
September 23 — China carries out an underground nuclear bomb test.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (directed by George Roy Hill and starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford) opens to limited release in the United States.
September 24 – The Chicago Eight trial begins in Chicago, Illinois.
September 25 – The Organisation of the Islamic Conference is founded.
September 26 —‘The Beatles release their Abbey Road album which is an enormous commercial success and, although receiving mixed reviews at this time, comes to be viewed by many as the group’s best.
The Brady Bunch is broadcast for the first time on ABC.

OCTOBER

October 1 —‘In Sweden, Olof Palme is elected Leader of the Social Democratic Worker’s Party, replacing Tage Erlander as Prime Minister on October 14.
The Beijing Subway begins operation.
October 2 – A 1.2 megaton thermonuclear device is tested at Amchitka Island, Alaska. This test is code-named Project Milrow, the 11th test of the Operation Mandrel 1969–1970 underground nuclear test series. This test is known as a “calibration shot” to test if the island is fit for larger underground nuclear detonations.
October 5 — Monty Python’s Flying Circus first airs on BBC One.
October 9–12 – ‘Days of Rage’: In Chicago, the United States National Guard is called in to control demonstrations involving the radical Weathermen, in connection with the “Chicago Eight” Trial.
October 11–16 – The New York Mets defeat the Baltimore Orioles four games to one in one of the greatest World Series upsets in baseball history.
October 15 — Vietnam War: Hundreds of thousands of people take part in Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam demonstrations across the United States.
October 17 — Willard S. Boyle and George Smith invent the CCD at Bell Laboratories (30 years later, this technology is widely used in digital cameras).
Fourteen black athletes are kicked off the University of Wyoming football team for wearing black armbands into their coach’s office.
October 22 – Led Zeppelin release Led Zeppelin II to critical acclaim and commercial success.
October 29 – The first message is sent over ARPANET, the forerunner of the internet.
October 31 — Wal-Mart incorporates as Wal-Mart Stores, Inc.

NOVEMBER

November 3 — Vietnam War: U.S. President Richard Nixon addresses the nation on television and radio, asking the “silent majority” to join him in solidarity with the Vietnam War effort, and to support his policies. Vice President Spiro Agnew denounces the President’s critics as ‘an effete corps of impudent snobs’ and ‘nattering nabobs of negativism’.
November 7 – Pink Floyd release their Ummagumma album.
November 9 – A group of American Indians, led by Richard Oakes, seizes Alcatraz Island for 19 months, inspiring a wave of renewed Indian pride and government reform.
November 10 – Sesame Street aired its first episode on the NET network.
November 12 – Vietnam War – My Lai Massacre: Independent investigative journalist Seymour Hersh breaks the My Lai story.
November 14 — Apollo program: NASA launches Apollo 12 (Pete Conrad, Richard Gordon, Alan Bean), the second manned mission to the Moon.
The SS United States, the last active United States Lines passenger ship, is withdrawn from service.
November 15 — Cold War: The Soviet submarine K-19 collides with the American submarine USS Gato in the Barents Sea.
Vietnam War: In Washington, D.C., 250,000–500,000 protesters stage a peaceful demonstration against the war, including a symbolic “March Against Death”.
Dave Thomas opens his first restaurant in a former steakhouse in downtown Columbus, Ohio. He names the chain Wendy’s after his 8-year-old daughter, Melinda Lou (nicknamed “Wendy” by her siblings).
November 17 – Cold War: Negotiators from the Soviet Union and the United States meet in Helsinki, to begin the SALT I negotiations aimed at limiting the number of strategic weapons on both sides.
November 19 — Apollo program: Apollo 12 astronauts Charles Conrad and Alan Bean land at Oceanus Procellarum (“Ocean of Storms”), becoming the third and fourth humans to walk on the Moon.
Soccer great Pelé scores his 1,000th goal.
November 20 — Vietnam War: The Plain Dealer publishes explicit photographs of dead villagers from the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam.
Richard Oakes returns with 90 followers and offers to buy Alcatraz for $24 (he leaves the island January 1970).
November 21 — U.S. President Richard Nixon and Japanese Premier Eisaku Satō agree in Washington, D.C. to the return of Okinawa to Japanese control in 1972. Under the terms of the agreement, the U.S. retains rights to military bases on the island, but they must be nuclear-free.
The first ARPANET link is established (the progenitor of the global Internet).
The United States Senate votes down the Supreme Court nomination of Clement Haynsworth, the first such rejection since 1930.
November 22 – College Football: Michigan ends Ohio State’s 22-game winning streak with a 24-12 upset at Ann Arbor, denying the Buckeyes their second consecutive national championship.
November 24 – Apollo program: The Apollo 12 spacecraft splashes down safely in the Pacific Ocean, ending the second manned mission to the Moon.
November 25 – John Lennon returns his MBE medal to protest the British government’s involvement in the Nigerian Civil War.

DECEMBER

December 1 – Vietnam War: The first draft lottery in the United States is held since World War II (on January 4, 1970, The New York Times will run a long article, “Statisticians Charge Draft Lottery Was Not Random”).
December 2 – The Boeing 747 jumbo jet makes its first passenger flight. It carries 191 people, most of them reporters and photographers, from Seattle, to New York City.
December 4 – Black Panther Party members Fred Hampton and Mark Clark are shot dead in their sleep during a raid by 14 Chicago police officers.
December 5 – The Rolling Stones album Let It Bleed is released.
December 6 — The Altamont Free Concert is held at the Altamont Speedway in northern California. Hosted by The Rolling Stones, it is an attempt at a “Woodstock West” and is best known for the uproar of violence that occurred. It is viewed by many as the “end of the sixties.”
December 7 — The animated Rankin Bass Christmas special Frosty the Snowman premiers on CBS.
December 24 — Charles Manson is allowed to defend himself at the Tate-LaBianca murder trial.
The oil company Phillips Petroleum made the first oil discovery in the Norwegian sector of North Sea.
December 27 – The Liberal Democratic Party wins 47.6% of the votes in the Japanese general election, 1969. Future prime ministers Yoshirō Mori and Tsutomu Hata and future kingmaker Ichirō Ozawa are elected for the first time.
December 28 – The Young Lords take over the First Spanish Methodist Church in East Harlem.

DATE UNKNOWN

Summer – Invention of Unix under the potential name “Unics” (after Multics).[11]
Fall – International Convention on Civil Liability for Oil Pollution Damage, a maritime treaty, is adopted.
The first strain of the AIDS virus (HIV) migrates to the United States via Haiti.[12]
Women are allowed membership in the Future Farmers of America (the later National FFA Organization).
Long John Silver’s restaurant chain opens its first store in Lexington, Kentucky.
Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips is founded by S. Robert Davis and Dave Thomas and its first location in Columbus, Ohio opens for business.
Gloria Steinem publishes first major article on Women’s Rights, “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation.”

PART 1: 1968

PART 2: AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY

PART 4: EPILOGUE

According to some, the greatest film director of all time.

Call it noblesse oblige. From time to time those of us who have had the privilege of attending the nation’s finest schools have a responsibility to prove that we did not snore through the obligatory marathon of art history and the subsequent ordeal of “film” history. Now it’s my turn to show all you proles what half a million dollars at Harvard buys you.

I have to admit, I did snooze through Fritz Lang’s “N” and “The Cool Bidet of Dr. Evan Cooligarry” by David Marmot. But that was the old-fashioned stuff. We were led to believe that the fireworks would start to go off with Felloni (La Dolly Goombah”) and then the master of masters, the great Swedishist director Ingemar Johansson.

It was reading period. For those of you who don’t know how higher education sort of happens in Cambridge, Harvard has a full three weeks of classes and a scant four weeks of drinking and cramming period. A tough, rigorous regime. I did my part. I succeeded in tearing down the rotted hundred year old drapes at Locke-Obers and awoke in a final club halfway house. It was then that I finally subjected myself to the greatest of all modern films, “The Seventh Enswell.”

Which, to be honest, I had resisted somewhat. To the point of telling my roommate that if he ever caught me watching an Ingemar film, he had leave to blow my brains out on the spot. When I awoke I accused him. “J’accuse,” I said “Je very pissez off avec vous.” Like most close friends at Harvard he didn’t care. “I aimed carefully,” he said. “Your brain proved a tiny and elusive target.”

So. Finally. Trapped. At the very end of Drinking and Study period, I watched the Great Movie.

It’s about chess. Big bruisers who think they can bully life playing chess.

You train. You think you win by punching hard. When you get knocked down you rely on the mythological “Enswell,” what you think of as God’s gift to the injured and in need.

The Enswell. Man’s brass knuckles against the heavyweights of Fate. Well, it reduces swelling between rounds. Not bad, considering the overall level of punishment. Right?

But all the Enswell does is reduce the swelling. On the board, God and his bishops and his merciless cloying queen just knock the crap out of you.

In movies I am simple. I throw under the bus every person I knew. They tried to me throw under the bus first. — Ingemar Johansson.

Life teaches you, two hours and forty minutes in, that the Enswell works pretty well. For six times anyway. Enough to give you that I can survive anything and what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger skitsnack.

What they don’t teach you, and only Ingemar can, is that you do finally get knocked on your ass and can’t get up.

The seventh Enswell is a death knell.

The Great Bitch will always get you. After all, she’s always in color. Unlike Ingemar.

I think her name is Liv Ullman. What they taught us at Harvard anyway.

Whatever her name is (or names are) she’ll get you.

Why we Swedishers have a nearly operatic view of life and the Enswells. We even have our own sweet sounding Erinyes.

Oh those Swedskis. Cooler than life itself. Thank you Ingemar. And thank you, $1/2 million worth of Harvard. I must be the Man.

*******************************

Oops. My wife just told me that the films I’m supposed to be showing off about are by Ingmar Bergman, not Ingemar Johansson.

P.S. My Harvard education cost nowhere near a half million. More like $25-30k, including my final club bar tabs. Consider mine the Target of Harvard degrees. And you can see I got my money’s worth.

Howard Roark of The Fountainead spoke eloquently about ego and the creative impulse. Roark was an architect. He refused to compromise and destroyed his own greatest work.

Roark was right and he was wrong. When he talks about the uniqueness and importance of individual creative vision, he is right. When he is prepared to cut off his nose to spite his face in the name of selfishness, he is wrong. It took many compromises for the much maligned, arrogant, and egocentric Trump to create this architectural legacy.

To my knowledge, none of the combatants on either side of the Trump War have ever posted anything like the picture above. No, they talk about how he could have invested his inheritance and made more money. They don’t want you to see what his visionary investments created. Whole fields of more valuable real estate than existed before a Trump building went up. What trust fund kid can claim credit for the thousands and thousands of jobs huge construction projects and the businesses they house engender? Steel and concrete trades, plumbers, electricians, interior designers, desk clerks, blackjack dealers, parking lot attendants, waitresses, chefs, not to mention hotels, casinos, and the architects, structural engineers, and city planners and union workers who derive income from same.

Not to mention what appears to be a unifying esthetic. Sleek, aspirational, glittering. You can hate it if you like, but personally I compare it favorably to the brutalist architecture of Le Corbusier — the Boston City Hall, FBI Headquarters, and mysterious MI-6 enclaves in London.

Boston City Hall

FBI Headquarters

Office block in concrete near High Holborn in London. MI-6? You tell me.

Ah, but if you write a couple of snide columns a week for National Review, you absolutely must be superior to Trump’s architectural and economic record. You incline to the Brutalists. They’re your bread and butter. No bare tits. Just the stacks of stacks of money the establishment controls, along with the force to command obedience. What your wife the lobbyist can bring home. That’s the concrete of your foundation.

Except that Trump is not Howard Roark. He built all this stuff along the way. He does not drink. He does not smoke. He loves women, and regardless of our envy they seem to love him. Alpha male.

Now, when he could be degenerating like Hugh Hefner or Roger Ailes or Bill Clinton into a grasping senile grabber of asses, he puts his life very considerably at risk to be president of the United States. If I were Kevin, I would never have thought about this. The man would have to take a reduction in his standard of living to be president. He already has his own version of Air Force One. Is it possible he loves the country he tried to decorate with his buildings and other largesse? Is it possible a lifetime of experience with the rich and powerful has made him a new age Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. That with old age sometimes comes a character and wisdom we never saw in the youth? That it’s actually his intention to serve?

No, no, no, no, no, no. He’s vulgar. He went to Wharton but not Harvard or Princeton. His wife is beautiful. He talks like a drunken sailor, no mind how many Annapolis grad admirals also talk like drunken sailors. Strikes One, Two, and Three. He is not one of us.

Therefore, we are prepared to hurl the United States into a simulacrum of the fifties Soviet Union.

You know what? Fuck you.

There was always a time when a revolution was required. It’s only the stuffed shirts of every persuasion who ever disagreed.

Little Zuck boy told me to delete my nude posts. Like I care what a worthless Harvard boy thinks about my taste in nudes.

He got all pissy about this. Meaning he pissed himself.

Far as they got. I pointed out that the in the case of the English, the carpet NEVER matches the drapes. Shocking stuff. Nobody’s ever seen pubic hair on a mature female, eh?

Now I’ve been ordered to remove all nudity from my site or face being shut down.

How can I put this politely, Zuckerberg. I went to Harvard when it was still Harvard and not a billionaire boy’s club. Go fuck yourself. I don’t need you or Facebook. Not now. Not ever.

He whipped Liston. It begins.

So many have hated him. Especially conservatives. Traitor, coward, black Muslim trash. I was there for him from the very beginning. And I am here for him now.

He had two careers. In his early years you couldn’t hit him. He just danced, out of reach of your gloves. Then he came in and struck like a cobra, a flurry of left and rights no one could withstand. Why he stayed so pretty. Here’s the last fight he fought before they stripped his title. Against a fearsome puncher named Cleveland Williams. Who never landed a single punch.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7zRPLJbqRM8

Then the three year suspension. When I saw him speak at Harvard. He was right. He was pretty. Not a bad angle. Beautiful suit. He was not intimidated by the venue. This guy who graduated last in his class at a Louisville high school. He charmed us with a speech he’d written by hand delivered from memory. You could see the twinkle in his eye from the back row, where I was sitting. Then he rushed back into the fray, two no-name fights and then Madison Square Garden against Joe Frazier. He lost. We were crushed. Too soon, too quick we rationalized. What nobody realized at the time was the signal of Ali’s second career. Frazier knocked Ali out in the 15th round of that fight. Knocked him out. Ali admitted as much. Lights out. Then he jumped up and finished the round. The second phase had begun.

If you look at the Cleveland Williams fight, Ali the boxer never ever gets hit. What no one had ever figured was that Ali could endure more punishment in the ring than any heavyweight ever.

How can anyone be Sugar Ray Robinson and Rocky Marciano AT THE SAME TIME? But he was exactly that.

The popular narrative we all subscribed to at the time was that Ali spontaneously adopted the rope-a-dope strategy when he realized just how devastating Foreman’s body punches were. Norman Mailer wrote a book about this fight, describing the terrible sound of those punches.

Norman Mailer: The Fight.

New evidence suggests Ali planned the rope-a-dope strategy from the beginning. He ordered his sparring partners to beat and beat and beat his body on the ropes. Coward? Champion.

Then came Ali’s second career. Heavier, a bit slower, he was living on borrowed time, as we now know. The rubber match of the Ali-Frazier contest was in Manila. Ali by all accounts was a beaten fighter at the end of the 13th, after three rounds of Frazier’s body shots, slumped on his stool and out of gas. Then this happened.

From nowhere, the Ali of old. Afterwards, Frazier in his darkened hotel room said “Lawdy, Lawdy, what a great champion he is.”

The Ali I remember and revere. And always always will.

Talking serious writers here. You know. SERIOUS. Women can leave the room while men smoke the cigars and sip brandy.

A few days ago, I wrote a deliberately provocative post about Jane Austen, whom I detest, and said bad things about women writers generally. I was expecting (and hoping for) a backlash. Wanted to see who women thought were great female writers. What I got was confirmation that writing at the “great” level is definitely a man’s game, at least as women see it. It’s like baseball. Women can’t throw and can’t hit either the fastball or the curveball.

Thought somebody would mention Gone With the Wind, which might have been the most popular book/movie combination of the twentieth century, but it’s no longer politically correct and even the women who love love love it will no longer say so in public. Instead we get My Antonia by the drab Willa Cather and To Kill a Mockingbird, a sudsy southern sidebar to the career of Truman Capote. the Brontes are all swept away by the tsunami of the Victorian Shakespeare, Charles Dickens. And, of course, the wannabes. George Eliot, George Sand, A. M. Bernard, all three Brontes, and who(?) Virginia Woolf.

I wrote my senior English thesis at Harvard about F. Scott Fitzgerald and Virginia Woolf. She was as gifted a writer as he was. In some ways she was better than he was. He wrote beautiful sentences and paragraphs. She wrote beautiful tides of words. He wrote beautiful novels. She wrote beautiful plunges into the minutia of life. Different critters. Tried to say so in my thesis. My feminist critics thought I misunderstood everything. Women are exactly like men, only they have periods and need abortions. (The men who designed wall sockets are smarter than God, they don’t need four days of downtime a month.) Perhaps they were right. In which case there is a performance gap in need of explanations. Where is the female Blake, Milton, Shakespeare, Shelley (Plath? Please.), Eliot, anybody you studied in school (like Willa Cather up top), and William Tindale, the genius and contemporary of Shakespeare who wrote the King James Bible, the most quoted source in western letters, even more than Shakespeare. What do women have to put up against that?

So. I am here today to declare that there is a category of greatness almost always overlooked. Children’s Literature. I intend to speak of three Great Women Writers who deserve to stand beside the greatest men in the business of writing.

You see. There are women who write great books for children. Not just for little girls. For all children. They don’t need critiques or interpreting. They have have no buried agendas. They were the first multimedia giants. The three I’m highlighting today wrote their own stories and did their own illustrations.

Marguerite de Angeli

First because she’s closest to home. De Angeli. Had her book “Copper Toed Boots” when I was a kid. Read it a thousand times. At least. She did the illustrations too. Wanted those boots. Nobody understood. She did. You could say I’ve spent a lifetime trying to get those copper toed boots. And you’d be right.

Boys want boots. She knew that.

She also knew about girls. Read Henner’s Lydia too. A Pennsylvania Dutch thing. No politics, gender or otherwise. She wrote for children. About what matters and is necessary to children. No preaching. Just beautiful images in words and paint.

And then. The book I read more than any other probably in my lifetime. The Door in the Wall.

The Door in the Wall. A message sent directly into the brains of kids. I still remember lines of text.

Had no idea this was Marguerite de Angeli. Done for today. I was going to talk also about Tasha Tudor and Beatrix Potter. And the male gimcracks who thought they were writing for children but really for the critics instead. Except for Kenneth Graham. So.

Tomorrow.

Harvard Final Clubs. Not this crap.

Not fraternities.

Rather, cathedrals of pretension and escape from current events. Scotch and Champagne also involved.

Fly Club. Situated on the abundant front lawn of Lowell House. Site of the annual Fly Club garden party. Also, the club of FDR, who revisited while president and caused the mayor of Boston to get clocked by the Fly steward as he was trying to follow FDR in.

The Delphic. Also known as The Gas. Because J. P. Morgan built it after he couldn’t get into a final club and sat there all alone, with gaslights burning, to make it seem that people were having a great time inside. Subsequently, generations did. A block away from Mt. Auburn Street.

Spee Club on Mt. Auburn. Where a garrulous steward reported he frequently found Jack and Bobby dressed to the nines in tuxedoes from the waist up and nothing from the waist down.

Phoenix SK Club. You don’t belong if you don’t know what SK stands for. Half a block from the Fly. A world away from Zuckerberg, who couldn’t get in and made it up out of whole cloth for his silly movie.

Owl Club. Home of Grottlesex jocks and the best turkey sandwiches ever. Also Teddy. Who had to abjure his membership.

Fox Club. All done. Some sort of sex scandal. Never actually knew a member. But I did break in, as I did most of the others.

The AD Club. Invisible on Commonwealth Ave. many millions of dollars behind them. Harvard doesn’t want a fight with them. Or the even larger financial interests they command.

Porcellian Club. Opposite the Porcellian Gate of Harvard Yard. So rich and powerful they can bring the university to its knees if they choose. Let’s see how they choose. And they will remain invisible throughout. Broke into their fifth floor on an Easter Sunday. They’ve been shadowing me ever since. Just saying.

Hope?

Final clubs do lunch. The Hasty Pudding does dinner. Been Co-Ed for 40 years. Also transgender. Male rockettes have been a staple for a hundred years. I have seen there Gloria Steinem, Jack Lemmon, Julia Child, Jimmy Stewart, and WTF. They will survive.

Into the barracks at 13. New York Military Academy.

Trump is an ignorant, know nothing, unqualified, undisciplined, vulgar, pampered rich boy idiot?

That’s the story isn’t it? Isn’t it?

Pass this post on to your NeverTrump know-it-all friends.

I know something about Wharton. They and my Cornell Business School, maybe alone in the Ivies, departed from the Harvard Business School model of bullshitting about case studies to learn the math and the formal disciplines of economics, statistical methods, accounting (I, II, III, and IV), and operations methods (Oh yeah. Real math.)

Here’s a list of notable Wharton Alumni. Note who’s pictured as an outstanding member of that unique Ivy League crew.

Wharton Alumni

Before that he attended Fordham Prep/Fordham University, from which he transferred to Wharton. Here’s the background on an incredibly prestigious and historic Jesuit institution.

Fordham Prep/University.

And here are their famous alumni.

Geraldine Ferraro, the first female Vice Presidential candidate of a major political party in the United States, attended Fordham, as did three current members of the United States House of Representatives and numerous past members of Congress, including at least two United States Senators. Current New York State Governor, Andrew Cuomo, is an alumnus. A number of Fordham graduates have served at the highest levels of the U.S. Executive Branch, including John E. Potter, former Postmaster General of the United States; William J. Casey, Director of U.S. Central Intelligence from 1981 to 1987; John N. Mitchell, former U.S. Attorney General; and Bernard M. Shanley, Deputy Chief of Staff and White House Counsel to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and John O. Brennan, current Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Fordham claims a number of distinguished military honorees, including three Medal of Honor recipients and a number of notable generals, including General John “Jack” Keane, retired four-star general and former Vice Chief of Staff for the United States Army, and Major General Martin Thomas McMahon, decorated American Civil War officer. Fordham has produced college and university presidents for at least 10 institutions around the United States, including two for Georgetown University and one each for Columbia University and New York University. Francis Cardinal Spellman, the late Archbishop of the Metropolitan See of New York, was also a Fordham graduate. Fordham alumnus James B. Donovan, who defended Rudolph Abel in his spy trial and later negotiated the release of Francis Gary Powers is the subject of Steven Spielberg’s, Oscar-nominated film, “Bridge of Spies.”[124]

Business and finance magnates that have attended Fordham include Anne M. Mulcahy, retired Chairman and CEO of Xerox and named one of the “50 Most Powerful Women in Business” in 2006 by Fortune Magazine; Rose Marie Bravo, Vice Chairman and former CEO of Burberry and named one of the “50 Most Powerful Women in Business Outside the United States” in 2004 and 2005 by Fortune Magazine; E. Gerald Corrigan, former President of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York; Maria Elena Lagomasino, CEO of JP Morgan Private Bank from 2001 to 2005 and currently on the board of directors of Coca-Cola; Joe Moglia, Chairman and former CEO of TD Ameritrade; John Leahy, Chief Operating Officer of Airbus; Stephen J. Hemsley, CEO of UnitedHealth Group; Wellington Mara, former owner of the New York Giants; John D. Finnegan, Chairman, President, and CEO of Chubb Corporation; Mario Gabelli, billionaire and founder and CEO of GAMCO Investors; Lorenzo Mendoza, billionaire and CEO of Empresas Polar; Eugene Shvidler, billionaire and international oil tycoon; and billionaire Donald Trump, who attended the university, but left with no degree. (Because he transferred to Wharton.)

Before Fordham was New York Military Academy, where Trump’s oh so indulgent father sent him when he was 13. I know something about this. I went away to school when I was 13, too, and my school played multiple military academies in sports. The difference between their quality of life and ours was night and day. We had white tablecloths, commercial silver utensils, cloth napkins and napkin rings, and masters who tolerated ties at half mast and routine hijinks. The military school kids had linoleum tables in their dining room with diner paper napkin dispensers. Their food was awful. They were indeed living a military life with marching drills and discipline none of you Grotties and Choaties have ever experienced unless you joined the armed forces. We had discipline too, but ours was marching around chairs in a parking lot on Saturday afternoons for two hours if we’d gotten into a fight. Theirs was daily drill and abuse from student drill sergeants who never countenanced a fight.

Hitlerian, right? Mussolini at least. Ask Stephen Sondheim and Francis Ford Coppola how they felt sitting there.

Here’s their history, now completed. Since discipline at an early age is no longer tolerable.

New York Military Academy.

And here are their illustrious alumni.

NYMA. Alumni.

Including this one, the guy who isn’t fit to be in the same room with Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, Lindsey Graham, Paul Ryan or the Dark Lord Kevin Williamson. In short, anyone Jennifer Rubin would be willing to have sex with. After all, the only piddling school she ever went to was Berkeley.

What a mediocrity, eh?

As I said, pass it on to all your elite Ivy and prep school friends. And then wait for their usual howls of vulgarity, lowness, and meanness. And mediocrity. Which for them is an uncomfortable glance in the mirror.

Thing is. There’s a certain combination that strikes out on its own. It marches, not off to war, but to a new sense of things.

Shammadamma.

Zachary Shipley. He was black Irish and handsome as hell. Leverett House at Harvard. First time I heard Hendrix’s All Along the Watchtower. Now he’s old.

And then there’s me.

I still live. Do you?

Nobody knows.

I saw Ali at Harvard. He was impressive. We loved him.

I’m so pretty. Didn’t say that in his speech, you haters. He said “Study. Make yourself great.”

Then he did this. For the benefit of all of you who consistently declared him a coward.

The guy who was the guy in the 14th round when they still went 15 rounds.

Life ain’t what it used to be.

The Harvard Glee Club. Saw them blow away the Princeton Diversity Chorus a few years ago. Some things men do better.