He has become what is commonly referred to as a man of a certain age, born in the 1950’s and nearing retirement in a nation that bares little resemblance to the one he was born into. In some respects this has been true of every age since America’s founding, change being the one reliable, inalterable fact of our national life. But he can’t shake the feeling that there is something distinctly different in the air now, and he thinks he knows when it all started. It was his first political memory.
The America that he inherited in the 1950’s stood astride the world as the one unchallenged colossus. After World War II, America seemed on the march everywhere. The economy was booming, patriotism seemed like the least we could do to show our appreciation for having been born in such a place. We were the land of Ozzie and Harriet, Leave it to Beaver and Mayberry, or at least we wanted to believe we were. It was never that easy or clean, of course. Hollywood’s ability to distort reality was just as strong then as it is now. Still, America was the land of heroes, at least to him it was. He grew up idolizing John Glenn and Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays. Politics was contentious but always seemed to end at the water’s edge of conflict. We had one uniting adversary, Communism. He remembers the duck and cover drills in elementary school. Everyone knew which side of the Iron Curtain they wanted to live on. America was the answer to Khrushchev and Mao, an emphatic, winning answer. All you had to do was look at them, old men dressed like clowns grinning like feral cats. Our President, on the other hand, was young and handsome with a beautiful wife. He was funny, clever and possessed a winning smile. Then he got shot.
He was still a little boy but remembers the day. It was his introduction to politics. The President had been murdered and his parents were distraught. One minute he was smiling and waving at the folks in his convertible and the next minute his brain was splattered all over his wife’s dress, and Walter Cronkite took off his thick black glasses and said, “The President is dead.”
The next year he remembers the day he saw a President with his own eyes for the first and only time. Lyndon Johnson was giving a speech in town and his father thought the family should go to get a glimpse of him, not because he revered him as some sort of God, but because he needed support…because the President had just been shot and LBJ had the weight of the world on his shoulders. So, there they were standing inside a rope with hundreds of others. A line of limousines pulled up and men with sunglasses stepped out, then the President excited the building and walked ten yards to the biggest car in the line, stopping to wave at them for a few seconds. He was as far away as second base is from home plate. He seemed to look right at the 6 year old boy. It was his second political memory.
After that everything seemed to change. The killing of a President seemed to unleash a fury of unrest in his country. There was a war in Asia and it divided the country in profound ways. Soon an explosion of protests spread over the country like mushrooms after heavy rain. Civil Rights. Get Out of Vietnam. Suddenly, the bloom seemed off the American rose. His father’s generation seemed to be the problem to some. To others it was the fault of the hippies. The divide seemed to get deeper with each riot.
One of the sharpest divides that he noticed, even as a young man, was the divide between the kind of people who attended Harvard and those who didn’t. It was the Ivy Leaguers who tended to believe that Ethyl and Julius Rosenberg were innocent. It was the Ivy Leaguers who were most likely to make excuses for even Communisms worst atrocities. People who didn’t attend college or if they did went to state schools seemed more likely to take America’s side. People like Richard Nixon. But then, he ended up being a corrupt crook, despite his protests to the contrary, so all bets were off. Nothing that has happened since has been able to change this dynamic. Even when the Berlin Wall fell and the newly released Rosenberg files proved their guilt, the Ivy Leaguers contextualized. Even when our own intelligence agency’s sins were revealed the kinds of people who loved Richard Nixon made excuses. The divide was permanent.
Years later Ronald Reagan came along calling America a shining city on a hill. It sparked something in the young man who had grown disillusioned. He so desperately wanted America to be just that, a place of hope and goodness, a country that stood for something. There were others who attempted to call the country back to unity and goodness with phrases like a thousand points of light, and building a bridge to the 21st century, or the optimistic yes, we can. But they all fell flat on his middle aged ears. Something had changed. Politics now seemed like warfare. Suddenly campaign slogans started sounding like battle cries…Courage to Fight for America, Fighting for us.
Then came…Make America Great Again. It was clever. It called upon our best memories from back when the post World War II America rebuilt Europe, when America was admired around the world for its enthusiasm, positivity, and ingenuity. Whenever anything is ever great it’s natural for people to want it to always be. Some mocked the slogan, not even trying to hide their contempt for their own country…We were never great! This attitude helped Donald Trump win. The experiences of most Americans cause them to be grateful for their country, flaws and all. The Ivy Leaguers never seem to grasp this simple fact. And so, a poorly educated, boorish carnival barking idiot became President and the older man found himself adrift, and keenly aware of the dangers of political nostalgia. He finds himself in disagreement with people near and dear to him. He hates that politics has such power.
With the election of Joe Biden, half the country followed the lead of their deluded hero and refused to accept the verdict. Now, when the FBI executes a search warrant of the ex-President’s home, radicals start calling for armed resistance. Now, his biggest fear for his country isn’t who will win the next election, but whether the result will bring violence and a further rupturing of the country that has been the only home he has ever had.
He opens his laptop and pulls up the news for the first time in a while. He reads about Mar-a-Lago, armed groups gathering around FBI offices, and the knife attack on Salman Rushdi. He is overcome with anxiety for the country of his birth.
So much so, that he writes this blog post.
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