BROKAW ESSAY FINISHED

The Pacific Theater

 At 3:08 am I arose, sleepless from my bed on the 16th of February to finish, finally, the first draft, of the long essay, "Tom Brokaw's Identity Crisis". I took quite awhile getting it into a form I appreciate. I'll let it rest for now and continue on to another piece of writing, the third one, about the fictitious and precocious young girl in 1940 Iowa who I call Marta. Following are another two paragraphs from the "Brokaw" essay.

Brokaw’s impulse to glorify the American GI, their parents, their wives and mothers initially brought Boomers, and many alienated Silents like me, right along with him back to the warm feelings about the generation which fathered me and about which I had so many questions and toward which I harbored so many ambivalent feelings. Inspired by Brokaw’s book, The Greatest Generation, and by the swoon of feeling that it created in America’s patriotic breast, I was impelled to go see Saving Private Ryan which came out in 1998. I devoured Band of Brothers based on a book by Stephen Ambrose (a Silent born in 1936) when it became available on non-premium cable channels. I quickly found and reread Ernie Pile’s War, Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day, James Bradley’s Flyboys, and Hersey’s Hiroshima. For good measure, I reread Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath to put me in touch again with the Depression Era and leafed through a collection of Studs Terkel’s essays for good measure.

For several years, I couldn’t get enough of WWII. Brokaw’s impulse to glorify those fighting men and their women and the men and women who grew up during the Depression fed directly into my own love for them that my childhood years had aroused in me and which the Sixties, I thought, had forever terminated. Carried along by Brokaw’s feelings and America’s societal genuflection to it, I returned to my comfortable childhood infatuation with the Depression Era, with WWII and the men and women who lived through those perilous struggles. I was a child again, wearing rose-colored glasses.

WRITING IN YOUR SEVENTIES AND BEYOND

Ken Kesey

Ken Kesey (One Flew Over The Coo Coo's Nest) quit writing, he said, because he couldn't "keep all the balls in the air" anymore. Some of his problem, no doubt, can be attributed to his love of acid and marijuana, but some of it might have to do with age.

Today, and for the past week, I've been struggling to polish off an essay I call "Tom Brokaw's Identity Crisis". The problem I'm having feels like the ordinary problem of any any writer...that is to organize my material in an effective and interesting way, but it's a problem complicated by advancing years. 

I clearly recall all the years when the entire sense and flow of a very long piece of writing stayed in my head while I slept and came back to me as soon as I sat at my typewriter (i.e. computer). This was a result of the faculty for "concentration" that puts a writer into an intense mental state that allows his subconscious to guide and inform his writing.

Well...the concentration is gone. Every day whatever I'm writing might just as well be a new piece of work for all my subconsciousness is concerned. I'm a stranger to it when I awake, and I struggle to arrange the paragraphs into an effective display. 

I guess what I write these days might be a little less organized than in the past, but I hope the words strike closer to the truth than in those days when I got more caught up in arranging the paragraphs.