20th Century Man in the 21st Century, part 1, 8-7-2010

 I do not expect to hear The Kinks and here there is a song of theirs on the television. I am one of those who place Ray Davies up there with Lennon/McCartney and Dylan and Pete Townsend and Jagger/Richards as a songwriter. He may even top Dylan as rock's best satirist. I dedicate this piece to him.

"I am a Twetnieth Century man/but I don't want to die here."

How many of us thought and feared the same thing? Plenty, but we did not say it quite so well. What other rocker (such a small word for encompassing Mr. Davies) would then do so by chucking all our smart modern writers for William Shakespeare? 

I wrote that I was not a conservative. I certainly do not fit into the Coulter/Limbaugh/Palin mold of political conservatism. I do fret over no one reading Vonnegut or Steinbeck or Faulkner or Fitzgerald or, even, Hemingway. In that sense I am a conservative and might even qualify as a Horatio on the bridge.

I read in the New York Times of 135,000 jobs lost, which the Indianapolis Star did not report. I wonder what this country will be like in 10 years. This leaves me worrying over this century like Ray Davies worried over the last.

I sense the air leaking out of the tire, the whimper without the bang. I know our demise has been reported as wrongly as was Mark Twain's. Here I would find immense gratification for being proven wrong.

I think the United States stands as the best example of all that is good about European thought. We have tried to live up to our ideals and live down enslaving Africans, and generally mistreating anyone else not white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant. Are we perfectly conforming to the ideals in our Declaration of Independence? No. Show me a country whose conscience gets pricked easier than ours. 

Or who used to have attacks of conscience. Gays marrying one another frighten us. Was it the same, when my parents heard Martin Luther King, Jr. speak from the Lincoln Memorial? I cannot call myself a conservative because for me, conservatism makes America seem small.

I see America as large. Whitman's poetry rings in my head. I cannot think of America as shabby. Not after reading Lincoln, that is. I know we have been venal and corrupt and even cowardly. We have disappointed our better angels many times. I will assert we were never cut out as an imperial power, and our foreign relations would often seem farcical, if so many lives had not been lost. Still, Americans envisaged a world government that would replace the old realpolitik.

We once had deeper pockets. We had more leeway for errors. Those days are long gone.

But it is the future that worries me most. Here I try straining my depression, and my personal future, from the nation's future. I am glad you people will have some sort of national health care, but that is something long overdue. Tell me where you see yourself, the country, in ten years? Will we have new grandeur, or will have  old ones decayed further?

sch

[I agree with the bones of what I argue here. We have done better, and we have done worse since I wrote the above. And since I have the internet while I type this:

But this was how I thought in 2010. I hope I am a bit more cogent now. Continued in 20th Century Man in the 21st Century,  part 2, 8-7-2010. sch 3/11/23