The shrapnel-packed bomb that destroyed an East Village townhouse in 1970, leaving three dead; the researcher killed in the bombing of the University of Wisconsin’s Math Research Center; the botched robbery of a Brink’s armored truck that left two police officers and a Brink’s guard dead—as well as the police shootouts that killed Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, Bobby Hutton, and other Black Panthers—these are the memories that I conjure up whenever I hear Archie and Edith Bunker sing “Those Were the Days, the theme song from “All in the Family.” Not phrases like “the way Glenn Miller played” or “fifty dollars paid the rent/freaks were in the circus tent.”
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