Every once in a while, amid the cacophonic news that pours in through the various speakers here and there in the house, I detect a bit of the America I used to know. It’s not necessarily an explicit image, but more of a remembered aroma; as Eliot has it, “…as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen.” It could be a video taken on the IRT, calling up the memory of rocking downtown every evening to West Fourth and my tiny sleeping cubicle. It could be the smell of sweat-soaked jeans, the tangle of chaff on a glistening arm, and the almost lethal heat of the haymow as the elevator kept chucking bales out onto the floor. Or it could be cycling along old Route 20 in New York, that boulevard of faded dreams, with its great, rolling drumlins, overgrown tourist cabins and gift shops, and crack-walled concrete block gas stations with creaking old gas signs swinging in the breeze.
This sounds like nostalgia, but it’s not. It’s just what was, once upon a time: the clop of delivery horses’ (Freihofer’s, Normans Kill Dairy) hooves on city pavement; the morning chorus of pigeons on apartment house roofs; the clang and rumble of the old steel-wheeled wooden trolley cars. They’re gone, long gone, and I’m just happy that I’m old enough to be able to remember them.
Part of that remembering those days is being able to compare them to current events and attitudes. We live in very dynamic times – have been, actuajjy, for as long as we’ve lived in groups – and our language reflects that fact. The meaning of words in English is constantly shifting (unlike as in France till recent years, and Iceland, whose language is jealously guarded).
Sometimes the language changes (cheapens, in my opinion) for political purposes. Our recent attacks on Iran, for example, were assiduously not called a war, in order to avoid starting the 60-day timetable for conducting hostilities before Congress is obliged to step in. Inter-office communications, however, have called it a war, probably for the word’s brevity.
But to someone who remembers a real war and experienced the anxiety of having a family member (in my case, my Uncle Alvin) involved in the European campaign, the use of the word, “war,” to describe the pushbutton remote attacks on targets limned from space is just a bit much.
The fighting in Europe was so deadly and uncertain that GIs (as they were called) were forbidden to tell their families, in their frequent V-Mails home, where they were or what they were up to. Censors read every word. Alvin being Alvin (my favorite uncle, even if he hadn’t been my only one), wrote that he’d happened to meet the Whiteflake kid, whose family lived up on Emburgh Street. The Langes being the Langes, scratched their heads only briefly (we knew no Whiteflakes) before we figured out he was in Luxembourg.
The famous photo of the sailor kissing the girl on a New York street hardly begins to capture how we felt when Alvin finally turned up safe in Albany. He’d signed up the morning after Pearl Harbor, so he had plenty of “points” for a billet on a troop ship coming home. And no more U-boats!
A few couple of months after the German surrender, the American air force dropped something called an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and then Nagasaki, and the Japanese Empire surrendered. We weren’t quite sure what had happened, but the joy at the end was, if anything, even greater. We were in Niagara Falls that day and watched the colored lights play on the falls for the first time in five years. The Rainbow Bridge across the river just downstream from the falls, was jammed with cheering pedestrians from shore to shore.
As demands for military equipment and supplies tailed off, rationing was lifted. We still couldn’t get tires or sugar or meat, but that was only because they were slowly coming back to the markets. We kids no longer collected newspapers, scrap metal, or milkweed pods. Those families that got their men and women back rejoiced in their return, dealt as best they knew with the changes, and tried to put it behind them.
Between 79 and 85 million civilians and military personnel died in that last great war. You can easily see why I might bridle a bit at the debate over what to call the current hostilities with Iran. Compared to World War II, it feels like a board game.
