I confess that I don’t always pay attention to federal holidays and the people or historical events they usually honor. I don’t stop much and look much at statues either. There’s a Paul Revere statue in the North End of Boston, depicting the hero with a lantern on horseback. I used to pass it on the way to the Michelangelo School, which I attended around 1968, when I was residing with my mother and brother at Chardon Street Home, a family shelter. I didn’t think much about the statue or about Paul Revere, the Founding Father and newspaper publisher, or of the lanterns as beacons lit to proclaim America’s resistance to the tyranny of taxation without representation. I was just an Anglo-Irish kid, learning Italian for a while (“Dov’è la biblioteca?” I still remember after 57 years), and was more concerned with poverty and homelessness than Liberty.

Many decades later, I connect Revere in my mind with the depiction of him in the Marx Brothers Movie, Duck Soup, wherein he is seen sleeping with his horse, while Revere’s wife sleeps in the same room in an adjacent single bed. Also, Revere’s lanterns are associated in my mind with the ancient philosopher Diogenes, who would walk through town in broad daylight carrying a lantern, sarcastically looking for an honest man. In some representations of his reality, he is seen living out of a barrel with attractive women lined up to chat him up. That seemed to me an enviable life for a while. Until feminism hit me like a freight train and I reformed. And treated the rest of my life like a 12-step program. Unfortunately, this approach often meant I hooked up with 12-step women. Ouch.

MLK was murdered in April 1968. By whom is still in dispute to this day. Given what I’ve seen and read, I’d go with: The FBI did it or allowed it. They followed him everywhere. Everywhere he went you could see eyes peering out from behind curtains that seemed to belong to Leonardo DiCaprio; it was like some kind of dream world whipped up by David Lynch. The FBI back then wasn’t exactly that one depicted on TV by Efrem Zimbalist Jr., after all, which I watched religiously at the shelter. They were protecting America from career recidivists; today the corporations would qualify.

MLK can get lost in the remembrance of that tumultuous year of violence. RFK Jr.’s dad, Robert, was murdered in June after winning the California primary, giving him high prospects for success in the November election. 1968 saw the disruptions in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention, with riots and police beatings leading the beleaguered Walter Cronkite, who had practically sobbed on air five years earlier when announcing JFK’s death, to now announce Chicago had fallen into “a police state.” The riots, which featured the Yippies running a pig named Pigasus for president, led to the Chicago 7 trial (it had been the Chicago 8, until they moved the bound and gagged Bobby Seale to a separate, but equal trial). Abbie Hoffman and the others........

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