My philosophy professor at Alabama, whom I will call Bill McMinn, once compared bubbles rising in a glass of beer to the process of coming into and then going out of material existence.
“Think of each bubble as having a name,” he said following a couple of tankards, “It seems to come out of nowhere at the bottom and then pop back into nowhere when it gets to the top. It was starting to disappear as soon as it formed.” He thought this profundity mirrored the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus who famously said “a man can not step into the same river twice.” It is a flow. It moves. “It’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”
When you think about it, all life is in the process of dying from the moment it begins. I know that sounds gloomy but it’s really not. The trajectory of all life is a straight line continuing non-stop toward its end. Each instant that you experience is not a discrete stop along the way but a dynamic, fluid sensation which is vanishing at the same instant that it is being experienced. It can’t be otherwise. We’re all going to pop back into nowhere when we get to the top.
That having been properly observed by Professor Bill and dutifully acknowledged by me, we got another beer to elevate the nonsense with another layer of profundity and have a pickled egg.
Now that I have become an aged and impatient grouch, I grope with the reality that my bubble is pretty close to the top. In that circumstance it is compelling and pleasant to have enough remaining memory to dredge pictures from the bottom of my glass.
Here’s one.
That photograph was taken in the spring of 1950. The army of North Korea had crossed the 38th Parallel into South Korea to start the Korean War. “Goodnight Irene” by the Weavers was the number one song that year, Disney’s animated classic film, “Cinderella” was released, The New York Yankees defeated the Philadelphia Phillies 4 games to 0 to win the World Series and Patti Page recorded “Tennessee Waltz”. To us in those days, time seemed to be hovering almost motionlessly in a soft mellow light. How fleetingly it all went by.
The Fifties were years with enough trouble to go around, certainly. They were the end of childhood and the start of adolescence for that 4th grade class but they also were years of belief in the goodness of our country and years of enjoying a sense that we would always be secure. Things were simpler without cell phones and surveillance cameras and security searches at airports and violent riots across the country and random terrorists attacks and carjackings at gunpoint.
The music we listened to, the newspapers we read and the movies we saw seemed to have a beneficial effect on the culture at large. We felt fortunate to be alive, that while even though evil existed there was still good in the world and we were the beneficiaries of it. They were peaceful years despite the horrors of recent and ongoing wars. You could walk the streets of most big cities without the fear of being robbed or killed. Nobody had ever heard of hijacking an airplane or a car and Republicans and Democrats were apparently competing to see who could do the most good for America.
A lot of the kids in that 4th-grade picture walked home after school every day and sat before a radio to hear episodes of “The Lone Ranger” or “Sky King” or “The Shadow”, all of them broadcasting a cultural belief that good prevails over evil. Nobody mocked our innocence back then because nobody was aware of it in the first place. “Ozzie and Harriet” didn’t prod cultural Marxists to make snide, catty remarks about our culture because the cultural Marxists, having escaped Hitler, were mostly still at Columbia University, plotting the death of America.
Amazingly, there were only about a dozen of those awful people but their effect was more effective than our mild patriotism by several orders of magnitude. They saw weakness in our cherished institutions and struck at them with a vengence and a well thought out plan of attack to take down America’s education, art, religion, the family, entertainment, law, music, the military, the intelligence agencies and the board rooms of big corporations. They called it “The long march through the institutions.” Sadly, while virtually no one was paying the slightest attention, they succeeded and are marching even more effectively today. It all happened so very quickly. *** (Check out “Frankfurt School” on Wikipedia).
Which is why I think a lot of us 1950’s fourth-graders left our hearts back there with Gene Autry and Roy Rogers and Andy Devine and Gabby Hayes and Hopalong Cassidy, where the time between sunrise and sunset could feel like a week sometimes and you went to sleep with the windows open and didn’t have to lock your door or have a password for anything.
One day you’re in the fourth grade, passing a little note to a sweetheart and learning the version of history approved by the school board and waiting for the bell to ring and then it rings and suddenly you’re a thousand miles away and eighty years old and sitting in your recliner and feeling the old chronic pain in your right hip and chatting with your grown children on the cellphone and being viciously derided by smug newscasters on the so-called evening news.
What happened?
I guess one answer might be that your bubble left the bottom of the glass a while ago and you just now noticed.
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