Back When

I remember when this was a much different country than what it is now. It wasn't perfect, but for most Americans it was better. Of course, you have to keep in mind that the great majority of us back then were white, and things were considerably worse for people of color.

I'm talking about the decade roughly 1948-58. People argued about politics as they do now, but they didn't hate each other. My dad and most of his friends were WWII vets. Their attitude toward the war was that they had done an unpleasant job that had to be done. It was their duty, nothing more.

Mostly, they were kind of cynical about it, like Bill Mauldin's WWII cartoon dogfaces, Joe and Willie. They weren't flag wavers, and although they were basically patriotic, they didn't engage in this feverish, over the top, red-white-and-blueism you see so much of today. Those who worked for the government would always say, "The eagle shits on Friday," when payday was coming around.

They didn't subscribe to the cult of the military that characterizes our proto-fascist government today, and didn't glorify or romanticize combat. Dad kept the bronze star he'd won in Germany in a cigar box. He didn't consider himself a hero. "I'm proud to say I was a draftee," he would always announce, left-handedly implying that a person would have to be comparatively duller than the more useful tools in the shed to volunteer.

Our benign and mild president was the Republican Eisenhower, a fully convinced moderate if there ever was one. When Republican right-wingers demanded that he honor the party's traditional pledge to dismantle Social Security, Ike told them in so many words that anybody who thought Social Security was going to go away any time soon was delusional (not his exact words, but that was the message). Here was the former five-star general, supreme commander of the allied forces in Europe at the end of World War II, warning the country in his farewell address in 1960 about the growing and ominous power of the "military-industrial complex." Inevitably, no one listened.

And of course, there were frightening signs of trouble ahead. We're not talking "Happy Days" here. An embryonic fascism was growing in the bosom of the republic. Senator Joe McCarthy was grabbing the spotlight with his lists of communists who had supposedly infiltrated the State Department. The John Birch Society called for Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren's impeachment and accused Eisenhower of treason.

And Americans were largely unaware that the U.S. was continuing the odious terrorist practice of making war on civilian populations, something all the combatants had done during WWII. The Nazis' opening Holland's dikes had been correctly considered a war crime. However, when the U.S. Air Force began bombing dams in North Korea a few years later, ruining the rice harvest and causing mass starvation, we were mostly unaware of it, and those who were aware didn't raise an eyebrow. It was the beginning of the pernicious type of warfare, aimed at entire populations, that has made this country the number one terrorist nation on earth over the last 40 years, and the most hated country since Nazi Germany.

But ignorance is bliss, and only an infintesimal number of us even worried about such things, especially after Eisenhower took office and quickly ended the Korean War. Peace returned to the golden land, and with it peace of mind.

My parents and their friends used to have parties on the weekends. I remember a lot of the women were drop-dead beautiful, which is what you'd expect since these were young people. They'd get a little oiled up, then the women would gather in the kitchen and talk about women stuff while the men were in the living room or out on the patio, talking politics or office politics, mostly. My dad was a newsman and so were most of his friends, along with a couple musicians and one actor I remember.

As for the ominous clouds on the horizon mentioned before, My parents and their friends hated that drunken lunatic Joe McCarthy and his communist witch hunt, but they'd talk about him in whispers, like they were afraid of him.

What they were afraid of was losing their jobs. Among those men, the thing they were proudest of was being able to hold decent jobs and support their families. Their outlook was formed by the great depression.

As those parties wound down and people began getting their coats to go home, I'd go around and drink what was left in the glasses. Then I'd go climb the apple tree in the back yard. It made me feel so good.

Even with the bomb hanging over our heads, we were better off in those days.