There had never been anything like it in history . . . until it happened:
America, in victorious optimism after that “Second” world war.
I mean, the “First” world war was just a warmup apocalypse for what came in 1939-45.
It seemed, in the ’40’s, that the krauts had not learned their lesson, which they should have learned in 1918. Two decades later, the Beast spirit took a hold of a lunatic corporal who dragged the world, for the second time, into hell-on-earth for half a decade.
Then our guys, under the leadership of Eisenhower, Patton, McArthur and thousands of other brave soldier who went over to the Continent of our cultural heritage and ran them third-reich nazis back into their holes, in the ground or into the judgements of History in a Nuremberg trial and, and . . .
And then, there we were sittin’ on top of the world, "one nation, under God, with Liberty and Justice for All!, victorious from Normandy to Potsdam to the Philippines, all the way over to Pearl Harbor, where, for us, it had all started on that fateful day of infamy. . . back in '41 it was. And then four years of hell on (European and Pacific) earth.
And then it happened happened: The Golden Age. California! Hollywood, Broadway, batons twirling in the air on Main Street from sea to shining sea. . . Ike, TV, Davy Crockett, Micky and Minnie, Ozzie and Harriet, Superman, Elvis, Nat King Cole, Louie Armstrong, Motown, Kennedy: “Let them come to Berlin”. . . to see the difference between the way WE do things and the way THEY do things! Later, Reagan challenged Gorbachev: “Tear down this wall. And then they tore down their damn wall.
With a little help from the Brits we discovered a new strain of English poetry, set to the thumpin’ beat of this new thing called Rock ’n Roll, which the Fab Four had borrowed from our good ole boys . . .
Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, reflecting ancient African strains of laboring black fingers a-pluckin’ the future of popular music out of a six-stringed, woman-shaped box with a hole and a neck on it, vibrating blue notes sung and plucked by the field-worn magic hands of many a long-gone Miss’ippi sharecropper somewhere down in the delta.
And then, and then, after the big war . . . as brother Don sang it. . . “there we were, all in one place, a generation lost in space. . .
Space! Imagine that! John Glenn . . . Neil Armstrong,Yeah! I remember!
America! We hardly knew ye! Oh, wait! You’re still here. Let’s celebrate, American style! Wanna dance?! Get started with kingofkungfu!
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