Nixon has imposed a curfew as black protests continue, militarized "police" prowl the streets, and the Black Panthers call for resistance ?and, no, we haven't traveled in a time machine back to the turbulent Sixties. The Nixon in question is Jay Nixon, the liberal Democrat Governor of Missouri, where the black majority town of Ferguson is embroiled in a racially explosive conflict over the police murder of an 18-year-old African-American by a white police officer. And, no, it's not those Black Panthers ? who were long ago neutralized and destroyed by the FBI's infamous Cointelpro program ? it's the New Black Panther Party, whose role is somewhat more ambiguous.

And yet if history never repeats itself exactly, it often comes pretty close. If we look at where we are today, the parallels with the 1960s, modern America's time of troubles, are too numerous to be missed: