Something Happening

The voice of Stephen Stills still echoes in my memory as I remember, back in the day—1968, I think it was. . . his words sung in a song on the radio, “There’s somethin’ happening here; what it is ain’t exactly clear.”

That assessment—or maybe it was just a feeling, a hunch—was a thought that seemed to hang like a storm cloud over my generation. From the Cuban missile crisis, to the Bay of Pigs fiasco, to the November 22, 1963 shock wave of President Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas. . . and on and on. . . why the hell did Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald? There’s somethin’. . . it ain’t exactly clear . . . clouded in a mist of Agent Orange. . . then the Pentagon papers. . . Ellsberg said “I hope I’m never in a job where I have to lie like that’’, referring to the public comments of a defence secretary. Then there’s Kissinger playing the craps game with the press and the jungle people of Vietnam.

Then there’s Nixon drawing fire from the press over his suppression of a nocturnal burglary in Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in the Watergate hotel, Then so much public questioning, criticism about tricky dick’s “dirty tricks” that decides to just leave the oval office before the American people and their lawyers impeach him. So Nixon waves goodbye. A hand-picked VP turned President for a few days, or weeks before Jimmy Carter left his peanut farm in Georgia, defeated Ford in ’76. He had to deal with Benachem Begin and Anwar Sadat trying to make peace in the Middle East (sounds oddly familiar) But then all hell broke loose when the Iranians ejected their Shah. Iranians raided the American embassy in Tehran. The 1980 election was bearing down on Carter. . . a gubernatorial cowboy from California rode into Washington to put an end to the shootout at the Iran corral. It really was like an old western. . . when Ronald Reagan rode into Washington, just like in the old cowboy movies like my dad used to watch, back in the ’50’s. Looking back on it all, now at age 75, I’m still thinking, as Stephen had sung back in the day. . . “There’s something happenin’ here; what it is ain’t exactly clear”. . . Something happening in 2026. . . something wrong that needs a fix. . . it’s just a. . . weird magamania that won’t settle back into the American way of Law and Order.

King of Soul