Remembering Those Happy Days
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Everybody knows America used to be great — greater than it is now, that is, but I wonder when that was and whether everyone would pick the same time of maximum greatness if asked. Nobody seems to be asking. I suspect we’d get a bunch of different answers though and I suspect many would refuse to answer, again for a variety of reasons.
For me, of course it would by the years that were greatest for me and that means when I had few worries and everything was new and exciting and simple. That would be around 1955 when I got a new Three Speed bike for Christmas and never had to watch that boring evening news with boring people like Walter Cronkite. All was right with this best of all possible worlds.
Yes, of course my dad had been bitching about the Army-McCarthy hearings he watched on our 10″ big screen Admiral TV in Black and White. But really, who cared if Communists had taken over the government and all the movies and half the TV was secretly infused with Communist propaganda when the new Mickey Mouse Club was on the air, Annette’s new bosoms and all. If she was trying to induce us all to unite and cast off our chains, I didn’t notice. Things were great and the future was sure to be amazing with spaceships and all.
It has to be one of Donald’s favorite times too, since he’s only a year younger than I am, My dad didn’t complain about the 90 something percent top tax bracket, at least not then. Did old man Trump? Somehow both dads prospered anyway as did the nation as a whole. In fact GDP has been almost independent of that number since the end of WWII when America was pretty much great by anyone’s standards except for the Japanese and Germans.
The war was pretty much successful and we pulled it off without the help of a massive, recession building tax cut for the wealthy like W did. Long about the time I turned 18 or so, the greatness was a lot harder to see, and outside of the moon missions, I think we were rather mediocre in fact. Face it, most of the world thought we were assholes during our glorious behavior in Vietnam.
I do remember that the fathers of many of my friends as a kid thought the peak of greatness was a lot earlier at about 1900 or so, and I used to agree until I learned about the Panic of October 1907 and of course WWI and the world flu pandemic and the huge, deadly race riots and lynchings and the horrible conditions of immigrants bringing disease and crime and those women who insisted on voting. It certainly wasn’t great during Prohibition when just like today, you got shot when you went out on the street as Donald says. I’m tempted to think it’s pretty much a personal thing – greatness.
No matter what you’re time of greatness was, it’s in the past, isn’t it, and that means we have to look backwards to find it again, particularly if we don’t have more mansions than Henry VIII or a series of inappropriately young trophy wives and jet planes like someone I won’t mention. The future is always scary and the past has a known outcome, so as soon as I have that time machine perfected, I’m going to go back to Greatness and buy me a knucklehead Harley and maybe a ’56 Chevy Bel-Air sport Coupe or what the hell, a ’57 ‘Vette and wouldn’t worry about the Bomb because I would know it wouldn’t happen. Nobody even had to worry about making a living back then did they?
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I remember those newsreels and John Cameron Swayze for the Camel News Caravan. But yes, the kind of obsessive news coverage we now have was inconceivable and we weren’t terrified to go outside because somebody in Neponset Illinois was murdered last night. We can no longer be sure whether things are better or worse and we think that one or two or even 50 out of 325 million is terrible odds.
OK, you had me with picture of Annette, the girl that gave a lot of young boys their first boner although Darlene had better boobs. I think that many people saw the world and the country as a better place because there was very limited news coverage of everything. In fact, you usually got better news on the Korean Conflict at the movies with those infamous News World Reports. Most people did not know how good or bad they had it because they had nothing to compare it to which is a bit different today. I remember when I joined the Marines I had heard very little about it. Of course it was just an advisory role for us then and who knew that our version of advising people in other countries was to go join their civil war. Anyway, I thought that the most important thing in the late fifties was getting into the pants of as many girls as I could. To me, at age 15 (1958), to not get laid a couple a times a week was the equivalent of a national disaster.
I think most people remember what they want to remember and a lot of people remember things in a very distorted fashion or at least a very selective way. But you can’t pin down just when it was that we were so great or what great means. Is it just another feel-good phrase that means nothing?
For someone who campaigns on the idea that he isn’t a politician, Trump seems to be nothing but a politician who can play people like Nero fiddling while Rome burned.
No president is going to create an industrial economy any more than any grocery store is going to bring back 18th century agriculture. The US is a long way from being independent of the world of commerce and that world has a smaller place for highly paid working class jobs. It’s easier of course to look for a hero and to be nostalgic for conditions that are not only never coming back, but weren’t anything like we remember them anyway. Trump uses that self-serving habit of ours like a bit in a horse’s mouth to lead us around for his own benefit.
I remember those days well, including Annette Funicello and the Mouseketeers. I also remember getting appendicitis, and my dad going off to sea every year for 6 months. I remember a lot of things about those days, and some of those memories I prefer not to “remember.”