Alone At School

Today is the twenty third anniversary of my graduation from the City University of New York's Baccalaureate Program. At least, this is the date printed on my diploma, which in 1991 fell on a Sunday.  My actual Commencement Day ceremonies were held on a pleasant late weekday morning in early June on the quadrangle of Brooklyn College's campus in the Midwood section of the borough of Brooklyn. This school had been my "home" college for the entire period that I studied the core curiculum as well as my major area of focus: Theatre Arts. The day of graduation, that is, the experience for me, was unmistakably a bittersweet one.  After years of being painfully aware of what I had convinced myself was the societal dictum of securing a college degree, I had at last, achieved that goal at the age of forty one. This occurred nineteen years after most of my fellow classmates had attained theirs. It was not my age or any twinges about lost youth that disturbed me.  Rather, it was the realization that the actualization of this success did not match the imagined degree of satisfaction or certainly the elation that a 1972 Graduation Day would seem to have produced. I was like a middle aged man who had run a race, perhaps not a marathon, but a challenging, competitive run nonetheless that found him, not quite in the middle of the pack of runners, but with workman like skills and a plodding determination that had resulted in my crossing of the finish line with the afternoon waning and few souls on the sidelines along the route encouraging me or other such also-rans. In point of fact, there were no relatives or friends in attendance on that day as I donned blue robes and mortarboard with golden tassle and my sheepskin firmly grasped in one of my still then arthritic-free hands. The issuance of the class yearbook had been pleasantly awaited and it was distributed joyously that day by a Brooklyn College employee to each one of us who had ordered a copy. My surname adjacent to my headshot had been misspelled and I foolishly brought it to the attention of the employee who could of course, do nothing about it except to apologize profusely and abjectly. It called to mind Jason Robards in the film "A Thousand Clowns" when his character mused about what one could realistically expect from life. To his way of thinking "a sincere apology is the best one could hope for…for all the things in life that one will never get."  The breezy, whimsical way of this philosopher and idler was touching and serio-comical in a style that comforted and blotted away the tears of the overly sensitive and childishly expectant.

To the present time I occasionally continue to dream about my college days, both as a twenty something undergraduate on Rose Hill and in my much later period in Brooklyn. There is always, in each reverie, a longing and a searching, a wandering (often at night) on campus grounds and with doors sometimes bolted and pressing business causing me to strain or worry. Am reminded of the young Ebenezer Scrooge who in "A Christmas Carol" remains at his school, far from home during the Christmas holidays, in order to work ostensibly on, and to catch up with his studies. Unlike Dickens' character though, school was not a poor refuge from a broken home, but rather it proved to be a poor haven for growth and maturing as I failed to "click", not so much academically as socially and not without a strange stunting of what usually comes naturally: the "Coming of Age" phenomena and all the blossoming that entails. Another image comes into the view of my mind's eye. It's the painting by Anna Lea Merritt titled "Love Locked Out." The death of the artist's husband, only a few months after their wedding is represented by the naked form of a pre-pubescent boy uselessly seeking to enter the mausoleum of a loved one. "Oh, untimely death" said Oswald in Shakespeare's "King Lear." Some of that sorrow and despair touches all of us, no doubt.  A new door though, one that we are assured opens for us, and especially one that is not clearly ajar, depends on our readiness to see it and to turn its knob.

The Unpleasant

Tomorrow will mark the seventieth anniversary of The Longest Day.  Starting at 0530 hours on Tuesday, 6 June 1944, Anglo-American and Canadian forces invaded the beaches of Normandy, France to begin the achingly slow and sorrowfully sanguinary quest to expel and crush the demonic thuggery of Nazism from and on the continent of Europe.  It was accomplished with a cost measured in the deaths of tens of millions of humans, civilians and military personnel alike.  No mindless boast about a "war to end all wars" was heard at the conclusion of this particular global mayhem. Germany's surrender on 7 May1945 that was followed nearly four months later by the remaining member of the Axis, Japan's, brought relief and genuinely joyful celebrations.  But the dawn of the Atomic Age, the fragmentation of colonialism and the commencement of sullen bellicosity between Western democracies and the Soviet Union's Communist empire, together with so many other elements of social flux throughout the world, meant an undiminished pace of change, uncertainty and opportunities aplenty for new dark forces that adroitly picked up the baton of the newly fallen totalitarian giants. In short, peace was something that coiuld not be leisurely savored.  The struggles continued, kaleidoscopically and unrelentingly as the world lurched from one drama to another: the nuclear arms race, the triumph of Communism in China, the Korean conflict, the many upheavals in the British, Dutch and French empires, the ancient enmities in Palestine, the Indochinese civil wars and on and on.

The conflict with Communism, commonly known as the Cold War, proved finite but only after more than forty years of anxiety of a special kind: one that disturbed the waking as well as the dream lives of so many, with the menace of the mushroom cloud and the contemplation of mass annihilation both routine causes of psychic suffering for those whose threshold of pain for dealing with such possibilities was too low to focus healthily on life affirming endeavors.                                                                

However, the economic colossus that was the United States under a strong and great leader, Ronald Wilson Reagan, began to grind down the corrupt and inefficient Soviet system. First, detente in the 1970s led to the gradual wearing away of the Russian political structure. An arms race that the Soviets could not sustain and a restive populace, exhausted with the dearth of creature comforts and the consistently meager availability of all kinds of products and services capable of raising one's standard of living, all contributed to the relatively peaceful end of Marxism as developed by the Kremlin's bureaucrats and politicians. This "breather", briefly seen as true hope for world peace, was not just short lived. It had been overlapped at least ten years earlier by the Iranian revolution and other forces of Muslim fundamentalism that made it clear that a profound animus was being directed toward the West as well as toward what had been the Second World or the Soviet Empire.

Now, nearly thirteen years after the recognition that we were truly in a war with Islamo-Fascism, …T.B.C.