My first memory of civic life was in the small TV room at my grandparents. I still don’t exactly recall the year, I could look it up, but the black-and-white TV, a small room filled with four adults, and one child (me), is riveted by a funeral carriage pulled by six? eight? horses walking somberly along a wide street lined with so many, so quiet. I could see something was important, but I couldn’t know, but I could feel my parents, my grandparents. And that is my first civic memory.
The next was in the same room. The TV was color. The first I knew of. I was told that the President of the United Sates was talking. This time the room was six. My brother had been born, but then he was more interested in playing and eating, and the TV meant nothing to him. President Johnson was announcing he wasn’t going to run again. Again, I had no idea what I was watching, but understood that something important was happening.
My Grandmother was a life time Democrat. When we talked politics many years after her initial registration she mentioned that she hadn’t voted Democrat in years. I asked how many, she said, “I think since Truman, but I may be wrong.” I base her ambivalence on the simple fact that my Grandfather was less than not a fan of FDR. He used to talk about how FDR led us down the road to socialism. I remember at the time that I thought that was an odd sentiment, as everything I had heard was that FDR had saved us from the dreaded Depression, and the even more dreaded peril of Imperial Japan, and worse yet, Nazi Germany. My grandfather liked Hoover.
They were both salt of the earth. They were Hoosiers. Protestant, God loving, America loving souls, and this they gave to their children, and this they gave to me. Did they have faults? of course. But I can say this, I only once spoke consciously, insolently to my Grandfather, and it took all of an instant to regret forever that one moment. What was it about? Cleaning the windshield on my van. I said, “I could see with the dirt on it, no problem.” He said, “clean it, because you need to see clearly where you are going.” He had another saying I liked, still like. He said, “when you feel like you’re going too fast take your foot off the gas, let yourself fall back into the flow of traffic, let that flow carry you along for awhile, long enough until you feel like you’ve regained your bearings.”
And here we are in a culture that lionizes the young, begs to be young for ever, which seems to me like begging to be naive, ignorant, and bereft of any sense of wisdom. And why is this? Because FDR ripped our extended families apart. We were given social security. We encouraged a dislocation of our families, encouraged our different generations to look out for number one, spend your money on yourselves, don’t cultivate love, don’t cultivate loyalty, indulge your selfish inclination.
That is, fear not the Government will meet the needs of your progeny and your progeny’s progeny. Don’t worry, we are omnipotent, we know what’s best for you, for your children, for your children’s children.
“Don’t we tax you and all just to make these omnipotent decisions. Your wisdom is not. Your children’s wisdom is not. We promise to keep your children naive, ignorant, and puerile. We promise to extol nothing but the meaninglessness of life. To extol the most base, un-virtuous, vulgar understanding of life as engaged in indulgent flesh, that least denominator is the best that can be expressed. We shall do away with the nobility of soul that engages the virtuous and devout. All their truths will be drowned in the cacophony of kitsch, vulgar culture, all their attempts to arise will not be allowed to inspire any mass of any one.”
So, I cannot imagine being 3 or 4-years old in a small room with four adults watching a black-and-white TV, watching the solemn funeral walk of a fallen President. But that’s their truth, these mavens of culture, because the truth is I can imagine it. Because the truth is that all over this great land there are millions of us that would replicate that same ritual in a second, or didn’t you see that phenomenon of the American people when our American President passed away, President Reagan.
So the reality is not that the American soul has dissolved into some deconstructed post-modernist scam of human nature’s asserted miasma, bur rather that the whole of collectivist thought, deconstructionist thought, and all the isms meant to disjunction and dislocate the human experience has failed.