My daughter recently asked me if I'm a conservative.

And she didn't mean conservative with the little sea,

you know, the sort of dude that grows old, doesn't like company,

and worries about settling his accounts with the Almighty.

Now, she meant Big Sea Conservative,

the sort of geezer who pines for the good old days

that were never really very good,

the sort of guy who worries more about his bank accounts than his account with God.

Mildly surprised, I asked my daughter if she had ever seen footage from the 1968 Democratic

National Convention. It was an extraordinary year in America in

1968. The Ted Offensive was in full deadly bloom. The assassination of Dr. Martin

Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy brought on the simultaneous arson

of more than 100 American cities. Unpopular with his own party,

President Linden Johnson declared that he would not run for re-election.

So inside the Chicago International Amphitheatre, Democratic Party superdelegates, you remember them, decided on the pro-war Vice President

Hubert Humphrey, even though Humphrey had not run in a single primary, not one ordinary citizen had even voted for him.

Outside on the streets of Chicago, tens of thousands of demonstrators convened in a mass protest.

As the silk suits and the fat cats puppeteered the course of American politics,

police attacked the protesters with trunches and tear gas beating and arresting hippies,

chicanos, black panthers, priests, nuns, even the elderly.

It was and remains a national stain and I have no idea why they don't teach it. You see the political bosses in the convention hall, I asked my daughter

as we stared into the grainy images.

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