Dirty Dishes	Dirty Dishes Archive

Dawn was intrigued to watch the History Channel's recently broadcast special "1968," a documentary about that turbulent year of American history. The inherently absorbing material more than compensated for narration by the inane Tom Brokaw.

The show seemed eerily timely; then, as now, the country was politically riven, mired in an unpopular imperial war halfway around the world. But what Mayor Daley's police goons accomplished with tear gas and truncheons (suppression of dissent) is now done with "security" measures (remember the 2000 Republican Convention in Philadelphia?) and warrantless spying (whereby Big Brother reads all your email, listens to your phonecalls, and has your book-buying habits forwarded by Amazon).

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ne note of humor was unintentionally introduced by Dolores Huerta, the co-founder of the United Farm Workers. Dolores, recounting the Robert Kennedy assassination in the kitchen of Los Angeles's Ambassador Hotel the night of California's Democratic primary, tells the camera that the Senator was not supposed to exit through the hotel kitchen: "He was supposed to come through another room where a group of mariachi players was waiting to greet him."

Dawn has read a fair amount of American history, but Dolores's comments were a revelation evidently unexamined by RFK assassination scholars: how did assassin Sirhan Sirhan know that Bobby would try to dodge a mariachi serenade by sneaking out the kitchen?