The Arc of It All

History has always been that endless narrative which helps make life coherent for me even as I know it is somewhat of an illusion. It locates me in the montage. Ever since names like Vasco de Gama and Crispus Attucks entered my cauldron of a brain, I have wanted to know my antecedents. What landed me here? Have I seen this movie before? Is this where I came in? More recently I ask myself where did we go wrong?  Sometimes history is a thrill-a-minute adventure in the demi-monde and other times a story of reverence and the power of love. History is that ultimate, once upon-a-time yet there is no ever-after. It just keeps rolling.                                                                                                                                                    

I suspect it is not unnatural to try aligning one’s own history with the greater chronicle. As I see the debacle of today’s socio-political landscape, I want to say it was not ever thus.

My first trespass into the adult world was in 1940. I was seven. I didn’t know a socialite from a socialist but I did know Franklin Roosevelt was spoken of kindly in my household. And I also knew his voice, those patrician intonations I regarded as coming from on high. I collected FDR buttons. My beanie hat was festooned with  dozens of them. Buttons were much smaller then.

At that age I had no sense of nuance. My color wheel, like movies, was black and white. If President Roosevelt was good then his opponent must be bad. It was some years later before I realized the two men and the two parties would never again be so close. In fact, a case could be made that Wendell Willkie saved the day. At that time seventy-five percent of Americans wanted us to stay out of the war in Europe. Mainstream Republicans were Isolationists.

Thomas Dewey and Robert Taft, the two leading GOP candidates were staunchly opposed to our entry yet neither could manage a majority at the Republican convention. Willkie was a compromise choice on the sixth ballot. During the campaign FDR came to realize his opponent was a good guy. So good that Willkie was named by Roosevelt to become an ambassador-at-large as he traveled the globe and later wrote a best-seller, One World. All this is a compressed version of how England was saved at the last minute along with Democracy and Western Civilization.

It was a balm to grow up knowing my country was the beacon for freedom. As a man-child this construct became more than a bit flawed. In a parallel way I also came to know my own flaws. The bipartisan marriage of parties slipped away after the war. Did I become split with inner conflicts? Probably, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing though attempts at reconciliation would be even better.  I suspect we all carry unsolved mysteries for a lifetime.

The usurpation by Trump of the Republican Party has its roots in the post war McCarthyism and the John Birch Society as a minority voice in the conservative ranks. In fact, it goes back to the Southern racism lingering since the Civil War. Before that to slavery itself and before that to the coexistence of Puritanical rectitude versus the more freedom-loving settlers along with Enlightenment thinkers.  Of course, it didn’t begin there either. History has no chapter one; we are always in the middle of the scroll reflecting human nature itself.

I take comfort in knowing even a smattering of the past. It deposits the stain of Trumpism on a far larger tapestry. Where I fit in is still a work-in-progress. November’s election will determine whether the arc has landed us in the abyss or if this period is merely a blip in the grand ledger.