Aftermath

Wars have a way of upsetting the narrative…as if there really ever was one. Looking backward some of us try to connect the dots and trace a shift in the way things were...and then weren’t anymore.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, which was particularly uncivil, our history was marked by betrayal of the cause along with the rise of monopoly capitalism and the American version of Dickensian poverty. On another level, sensibilities shifted. Calvinism, with its rigidity and literal interpretation of biblical fables gave way grudgingly to a looser code; at least among academics, poets, writers and journalists. For the Blacks not enough was gone by the wind but immigrants ultimately provided diversity and then there was Charles Darwin even if many hadn’t yet evolved.

The First World War yielded the Jazz Age and Lost Generation…..lost to fertilize the fields of Europe, lost to the flu pandemic and lost in bewilderment. The notion of never-ending progress was snapped by the colossal stupidity of ignorant armies clashing in the night, as Matthew Arnold’s poem, Dover Beach put it. For a decade we let loose, drinking in Speakeasys and living on margin with Dow & Jones until the bubble burst into a dust bowl of apples.

World War II was so disrupting it resulted in a decade of conformity with millions of new homeowners in tract homes with scrupulous lawns and  2 ½ children. Under God was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954. It was a decade of Pax Americana. Eisenhower presided and everyone knew his place, still with separate drinking fountains and swimming pools. Under the Doris Day / Rock Hudson immaculate conception a controversy of birds was stirring on those metal trees on the roof and in the devil grass among dichondra. In came the Beats, the hair, the hemp, the flower-girls, freedom-riders, soldiers marching, sit-ins and love-ins.

Trump has been President for almost 1000 days. History may well regard this period as a wartime. We have been under siege with his pernicious mindlessness, the moral violence he adds to our daily discourse, his barbed mendacity, bellicose rallies which reek of Nuremberg and his frontal assaults on our democracy. I may be getting ahead of the arc but I see the decline and fall of his quasi monarchy close at hand. I can smell it. We are nearing the point when even the unconscionable Senators are bending under the weight of his wanton disregard of our Constitution. The White House is blanching, aghast with his reckless, indefensible behavior.

When he is gone there will be an epochal change. Gradually we will return to civility just in time for the Thanksgiving table. No more food fights. The word Truth will reenter our vocabulary. Hypocrisy and loathing will lose their currency. Make room for common sense as applied to gun laws, the degradation of our planet and immigration.

The common-weal will replace pseudo-Populism. We contain multitudes, always have and are richer for it. In the words of e.e. Cummings, We who have died are alive again today. When the monarch is removed along with his con-men, hit-men and Yes-men we will enter into first a period of repair and then a recognition of necessities. We may even put to rest those festering issues over which the Civil War was fought as well as checking the rise of fascism before a swastika replaces our stars and stripes.