American Love

We were loved. The Great Depression was over. The greatest war in human history was over. The craving for normalcy was a hunger that now could be, if not sated, then regularly fed. Abundant were our hopes, majestic were our industries, marvelous were our collective and personal industries and indeed fecund was our "fruited plain", as were our people, both in mind and body. These all were realities and yet dreams too, wondrous phenomena that we could now see and were about to touch. As promised, in the words of that pop tune beloved of Anglo-American audiences, a paean to a beautifully imagined peace to come (released just days before the assault on Pearl Harbor), "The White Cliffs of Dover": "Jimmy" did "go to sleep in his own little room again." Soon many other Jimmys and Johnnys and Joanies and Marys would enter this deeply scarred, yet phoenix-like world and, in turn, sleep in their respective own little rooms, the vast, vast majority of them truly loved and wanted.

Bogeymen, there were: real ones. To the East was the Other, or the aggrieved mobocracy of Slavic bolshevism (surviving twin of, and blind to its relatedness to its hated brother, the Teutonic Beast of fascism) along with its newborn sibling, just before mid-century, a murderous oriental Marxism that throttled, and still does, the noble people of old Cathay. Then too, The Bomb: annihilation of one and all through atomic energy was now more than just a bad dream. Still, we were loved. Life affirming ways and means were our tools (lurking tyrants and the hovering specter of non-existence notwithstanding and, perhaps especially, because of them) as we bumped, shoved and struggled to breathe and to dance to the songs of earth and sun and yes, to honor the covenant of our forefathers' deeds and prayers for prosperity and liberty. Like blades of bright green grass up through cinders, rusting junk and cracked chunks of concrete of an empty lot (like the ones in my little corner of the world of a working class neighborhood in a n.w. section of New York City's borough of Queens), we, embracing the old verities, as most others elsewhere in the land, could and did resume our American way with full vigor. Hope and growth, amity and trust: these were the soils that we, the little ones then, germinated and flourished in. We stood, sometimes literally as toddlers, on the shoulders of giants, careworn shoulders (but not slumped or stooped...and never shrugging ones) of fathers still young, but forever changed, even if not visibly so, by war and the immutability of its thievery. These men were aware that the sun had not yet begun to set on "The Best Years of Our Lives." But like the ambiguous meaning of that iconic film's title, there remained the questions: WHICH were the best years and in fact, were they yet to come or were they the ones that might have been? Women, still young, freed from, (or in many cases liberated by) defense plant jobs, as well as U.S.O. duties, letter writing... to not only sweethearts but to lonely brothers, cousins, neighbors, friends or friends of friends and countless other acts of love on the home front, now were sighing in relief for the divine assent to peace and for the prospective continuance of our race that victory had achieved and that He had permitted.

The term "Baby Boomers" always has had, for me, an unpleasant sound to its almost flippant alliteration. Were we just another interesting commodity that would now soon be in very plentiful supply as indicated on some merchant's tote sheet? Many a cynic or greedy entrepeneur no doubt thought and acted with such a mindset, but I think that the greater truth was that a remarkable biological event, or rather the marvel of the number of repetitions of a particular blessed event, was the occasion for so much "flesh" to enable a certain spirit to advance mightily while the latter could and did enoble the former.

Yes, we were loved. And this was so before we entered, as it was the reason why we entered, this "vale of tears."

Korea: the first wakeup call from Hell, after rainbows had been imagined unfadable. We knew how to once again "imitate the action of the tiger", but war was too recent and for the first time a certain different kind of weariness began to assert itself as we puffed out our cheeks in pained awareness that all serpents had not yet been crushed. St. Michael's other-worldly stamina for this new fight was what we would need. "The Bridges at Toko-Ri" was a period film that seemed to foreshadow a diminution of optimism and a black "zeitgeist." The insistence by its star, William Holden, of an ending true to the book: the death of his character and his would-be rescuer in combat, at the hands of the North Koreans, heralded a realism that started almost an embracing of the ugly and the gloomy. Stalemate and the sullen truce that followed this war assured the abortion of a "happily ever after" and led to, almost a dozen years later, the beginning of the perhaps inevitable psychic exhaustion for the new struggle in Indochina. Now we, the former "little ones" of mid-century were to take our father's places in this next test of our civilization's fortitude.

Self-loathing, mind altering drugs and an intellectual cretinism that confused license with liberty, aided and abetted by, of course, libertines as well as plain old Marxists and fellow travelers helped to rip apart our unity and our purpose. We never lost a single major battle or firefight to the communists throughout the years of the conflict. Yet the American congress and a crippled presidency allowed the destruction of democracy in Vietnam and neighboring countries as we abandoned our friends for perhaps the first time in our history. Rationalizations galore there were, including the now epidemic and corrosive habit of excusing bad behavior by pointing to other bad behavior (corrupt South Vietnamese leaders, war profiteers, etc.). Pol Pot's madness and the other atrocities of the Viet Cong were, incredibly, always ignored while the blood shed for a noble cause by many of the "little ones" of mid-century, was of sublime indifference to the likes of Jane Fonda and far too many others, not nearly as blatant in their perfidy. Through it all, nevertheless, we were loved. The only new subject for reflection: were we loved too much? While barbecues, vacations, sprawling new suburbs, shiny new automobiles (for many, nearly annually), and more and more of material wealth came our way and was pursued or coveted sometimes shamelessly, were we starving our souls in the process? No, this was too simplistic and again, too similar to the self-flagellation that condemned our leaders, our policies and most hurtfully, our soldiers. We were and remain a generous people, but a hard working and traditionally, a thrifty nation, entitled to our hard earned treasure and the fruits of this labor, both the tangible and the intangible.

Where do we stand today? That's a subject for another essay for another day. However, since the fall of Soviet communism, thanks in no small measure to a renaissance of our republic's self-esteem after the malaise and psychic nausea of the late 1960s and all of the 1970's, a brief Pax Americana was enjoyed. This was followed by an almost unnoticed uptick of a long simmering Islamo-fascism, its first phase culminating, of course, in the abominations of Sept. 11, 2001. Our response to this new challenge continues to unfold and the jury is certainly still out on whether or not we truly understand that (I risk repeating myself and the message of many a bumper sticker, but novelty is usually inferior to, even if more attention-arresting than truth) "Freedom Is Not Free."