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Rowan and Martin's TV Laugh-In domesticated chaos into snippets. It flashed absurdities, like vaudeville on amphetamines -- Goldie Hawn dancing in body paint, Tiny Tim tiptoeing through the tulips. Laugh-In gave the nation "You bet your sweet bippy!" and "Sock it to me!" a line that Republican Candidate Richard Nixon, among other celebrities, recited in three seconds of network time in September. (In deference to his dignity, Nixon was spared the customary dousing with a bucket of water.) The Rolling Stones snarled about the Street Fighting Man. Never before had an annus mirabilis transpired before the television cameras in Marshall McLuhan's global village: the drama played to a capacity house, the audience of mankind.
Those over the age of 30 carry much of 1968 in the memory, an indelible collage of photographs, television footage, private scenes of where-I-was- when-I-heard-the-news. A year as graphic as an afternoon dream:
-- During the Tet offensive in Saigon, the police chief's arm in profile that draws a straight line through his trigger finger and by the leap of the bullet into the fear-rigid Viet Cong's brain: a crisp extinction. The weird surprise of death, the pop into non-being. In the TV version, the man falls like a short tree and his head pours neat but urgent blood upon the street, as from a vial.
-- Sad-jowled Lyndon Johnson at the end of March, peering out at America, through the close-up on a grainy black-and-white television screen: "Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your Presi . . ." The nation stunned, astonished, and millions of the young performing backflips.
-- A Memphis motel balcony, blacks standing over a fallen black man, their faces abruptly up and their fingers stabbing the air, indicting the air, along the line the shot had taken, as if the trajectory of their fingers' aim could bore back through the air to the assassin.
-- The dark smoke of riots hanging over the Washington skyline -- smoke giddy with looting and circus, but at last completely rational: a sort of clarity of bitterness.
-- The sudden sense of vacancy, of eternity, in Robert Kennedy's eyes as he lay on the floor of the Los Angeles hotel pantry. That vacancy, almost exactly halfway through the year, seemed to break the year's back. Nothing good, one thought, could happen after that.
-- Chicago policemen as big as beer trucks thundering through tear-gas- poisoned air and clubbing with nightsticks. The answering, taunting obscenities and rage, and after that the McLuhan-wise chorus from those being clubbed: "The whole world is watching!" Then, through the death stench of the Chicago stockyards, inside the Democratic Convention, Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff on the podium denouncing the "gestapo tactics" of the police, and down on the floor, in the Illinois delegation, Mayor Richard Daley, face contorted, screaming at Ribicoff. TV's nation of lip-readers & thought they saw Daley emit the words: "F--- you, you Jew son of a bitch . . . Go home!" Daley later said he never used language like that. In any case, a century of backroom politics died at that instant.