When I was a kid in the 1970s, I would often hear my older brothers talking with each other and with my parents about Vietnam and Watergate. I would ask them to explain what those words meant, which presented them with quite a challenge when I was three or four years old. I never gave up, though, and by the time I’d figured them out I was not only hooked on those topics but on history in general, including the political history of the USA in the decades following the Second World War. I grew up to become a classical scholar, but when I’m not professionally engaged with ancient Greek and Latin literature my mind still wanders to those matters.

I’ve been spending a bit of my free time talking about such things on Twitter lately, especially in threads growing out of posts made by commentator Richard Brookhiser. The other day, for example, Mr Brookhiser brought up an interlocutor of his who speculated that right-wing Congressman John Ashbrook’s 1972 primary challenge to Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign was an attempt to clear the field for Ronald Reagan to replace Nixon as the Republican nominee. In response, I pointed out that Reagan already faced a formidable rival for conservative support in Vice President Spiro Agnew, and that if Ashbrook had somehow knocked Nixon out of the race he would have established himself as a substantial figure in his own right, another obstacle to any attempt Reagan might have made to launch a bid of his own.

The national attention given to yesterday’s election for mayor of New York reminded me of another 1960s-1970s figure who captured my attention when I was a child, John V. Lindsay. When I was about nine years old, I was watching the old Batman show when the character of Mayor Linseed appeared. My mother was with me, and she laughed out loud. She said that the actual mayor of New York in those days was named Lindsay. “Linseed” didn’t strike me as clever enough wordplay to account for her laughter, and she said that indeed it was not why she was laughing. What struck her as funny was that while the actual Mayor Lindsay was a ridiculously handsome man, whose good looks sometimes got in the way of his political career, the makers of Batman had cast a plain-faced character actor as his fictional counterpart. Evidently they were afraid that even in their fictional universe, it would be too much to ask people to believe that the mayor of such a big city could look like a movie star. I’ve also mentioned John Lindsay on Twitter quite a few times in recent months.

What has really kept Mayor Lindsay front of mind for me lately is not so much the comparisons I’ve seen between him and Mayor-elect Mamdani, but another item I’m checking off the list of things I was curious about when I was a kid. In those days, people ten or twenty years older than me would occasionally mention the TV show Dark Shadows, a daytime soap opera that added a vampire to its cast and became a big hit. I couldn’t imagine that- to me, soaps were the dullest things imaginable, windows into the lowest cavern of Hell, the circle of ice where absolutely nothing happens. I wasn’t a great horror fan, but I knew that vampires got people moving and couldn’t imagine how one would fit into a genre that seemed to cultivate tedium for its own sake.

I stumbled on Dark Shadows when the Sci Fi Channel was running it in the 90s, and was intrigued. I didn’t have the time to keep up with it for very long, though. So when during the COVID-19 lockdowns my wife and I found that the entire series was available for free to watch on demand, I suggested we take a look. We wound up watching the whole thing in a little more than a year. In the 2022, I realized that the calendar was the same as it was in 1966. I decided to watch each episode on the 56th anniversary of its original broadcast. So I watched episode #1 on Monday, 27 June 2022. My plan was to post any thoughts I might have in the comment sections of blogs about the show, as I had done in 2020 and 2021.

I quickly found that, while some blogs were still keeping their comboxes open, no community like the one I had participated in at Danny Horn’s Dark Shadows Every Day could be found in any of them. So if I were going to write up my thoughts about the show in the way I wanted to do, I would have to post them on a blog of my own. I decided to stick with my idea about the calendar, and have each post go live on the anniversary of the episode it reviews. At first I assumed no one would read the site, and gave it a name no one would be likely to find. But people did start reading and responding to it, so I changed its name to Dark Shadows Commentary. That’s where the bulk of my online writing as “Acilius” has been since then, which is one of the reasons this site has been so quiet. Since John Lindsay was Mayor of New York the entire time Dark Shadows was being produced in that city, it’s no wonder he keeps popping into my head.