May 31, 2025

May 30, 2025: MacArthur Park is Melting, Intent on Intimidation, Reactionary Conclusion

 

MacArthur' Park is melting in the dark

All the sweet green icing flowing down

Someone left the cake out in the rain

I don't think that I can take it

'cause it took so long to bake it

And I'll never have that recipe again

Oh, No!”


----”MacArthur Park” by Jimmy Webb


Spring was never waiting for us, girl/it ran one step ahead/as we followed in the dance”. So the song began.


It was the spring of 1968, around March as I recall, that the song hit the airwaves. It languished in the ratings until April 4, when Martin was murdered. It then assumed a meaning wholly unintended by the author for it did indeed take a long time to bake the cake that was the civil rights movement and, as we feared we would never have that recipe again.

The song quickly shot up in the charts and gained significant airtime fading, as all songs eventually do, as the spring wore on. By late may it had fallen significantly only to be revived by the assassination of Robert Kennedy in early June. MacArthur Park would become a signature song of one of t he most significant political years in our nation's history; a year that began with so much promise only to end with the elevation of Richard Shithouse Nixon.


It is telling that this maladministration would choose MacArthur Park as the place through which they would send a phalanx of armed police equipped with armored vehicles and on horseback through a peaceful park; a park which stands astride Wilshire Blvd and through which Robert Kennedy would be taken by ambulance from the Ambassador Hotel to the hospital on his way to his death.


Kennedy was the tribune of Latino's, especially the farm workers laboring in the fields of California, and MacArthur Park is adjacent to a growing Latino neighborhood. For this reason, one supposes, Kristi Noem (or is it Gnome?) and the Reich Dorkshiner Steven Miller chose to make this show of force at precisely this location. It was the theater of the absurd. Children running for home, fearing the safety of their parents, as the new American Gestapo, in the form of masked and unidentifiable ICE agents swarm the neighborhood rounding up whomever they can lay their hands on. The forces of fascism have arrested not only undocumented migrants but immigrants with papers and the occasional U.S. Citizen, spirited them off in unmarked vehicles and sent to camps and gulags sometimes in foreign lands like El Salvidore without access to any legal proceedings and without benefit of counsel. Here, it was merely a demonstration intent on intimidation. To Terrorize, that is the point. ICE is the greatest terrorist threat in the United States today.


Facing opposition, Caesar Disgustus has called out the national guard and, a few days later, the United States Marines. With 'rioting' at a level much less than the last time the Los Angeles Lakers won the NBA championship, Disgustus declared an 'national emergency' with Gnome openly declaring that she was in town to take over the city and remove the 'socialists' from power. Clearly, she has no idea what the term 'socialist' means.


It is clear that “spring was never waiting for us, girl”. It was always one step ahead. The truth is that we didn't have a free and fair election in this country until 1968. We had slavery and Jim Crow. As late as 1964 only 5 percent of eligible blacks were registered in Mississippi, and fewer than 5 percent voted. It was much the same throughout the South and even in some Northern jurisdictions. It was only after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed that this country moved toward open and free elections making the presidential election of 1968 the first such quadrennial contest an fair and free election. It was also when the ReSCUMlican Party began it's war on the electoral process.


A lot went down in '68; and a lot is going down now as the damage done by the conservative movement in this country is reaching it's reactionary conclusion.


I don't think that I can take it

'Cause it took so long to bake it

And I'll never have that recipe again”


Impeach and Imprison













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