I was listening to one of my trivia podcasts – Useless Information, to be exact– when the host said his students have trouble naming the president who assumed office after Kennedy…I’m still finding teeth that rolled under the counter after I heard him say that.
I started chanting “Hey Hey LBJ, How many kids did you kill today” – a little more punchy than other catch phrases from my past like “groovy”, “Dave’s not here, man” and “Carthagio delenda est” .
credit: art for a change blog
Then I remembered an obscure play, MacBird!, a satire with a little conspiracy theory thrown in. The author does say she didn’t seriously believe Johnson was involved in any assasination plots, that was just the framework imposed by her choice of plays.
Of course if those puppies don’t remember LBJ it’s hardly likely they will get the joke of the title based on Lyndon’s lovely wife’s nickname, “Ladybird”.
But history is supposed to be a subject you take in school, not something that happens 
while you’re there. That’s a difficult concept to get my, sigh, aging brain around but then I look at a picture of LBJ being sworn in on Air Force One as it sat on the ground in Texas, the obviously still in shock widow, Jackie, standing beside him.
Yeah, okay, I lived in a time that is now history. I even remember watching this on tv. Live, in black and white. And I wasn’t in school because school was cancelled for the day. Yes, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. It really did reach far beyond U.S. borders.
Here is some trivia for you, kiddies: LBJ was the first president ever sworn in a)on Texas soil and b) by a woman. That is not a bible his hand is resting upon, it is a Roman Catholic Missal, found in the on board desk recently vacated by JFK. Now run along and see if you can win a few free beers from your little friends on a contrived bet.
Then there was that phone call from one of my daughter’s friends. She was writing a paper for a university course and wanted to ask me a few questions about the Vietnam War. I thought she might prefer to speak to her own parents, seeing as it was still going on where they grew up while they were growing up… but she wanted the perspective from this side of the ocean.
All I could come up with was as the war progressed the public stopped trusting its elected officials. We stopped believing them when they said, “this is for your own good.” We still don’t and they still say it.
I guess that’s a history lesson in how much things can change but still stay the same.
