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.

SILENT BOOMER IN THE VANCOUVER VECTOR

I'll soon have an article published in The Vancouver Vector, a new paper on the Vancouver, Washington scene. It bills itself as a paradigm shift, and I expect lots of modernity within its pages if February 2013 is any example. http://www.vancouvervector.com/

By now, this hopeful entry may be made of lies, hopes and misunderstandings....

WILL A BOOMER NEVER BE DONE

I'm within a few paragraphs of finishing the first rough draft of "Tom Brokaw's Identity Crisis", but today was tired again and couldn't close on the last transition paragraphs, leading to climactic paragraphs. Am not sleeping from excitement of heading over to PIFF at odd times. My schedule is thrown to the four winds. 

Also am currently writing an article for The Vancouver Vector about art house theaters in general with a nod to the Kiggins Theatre in Vancouver. As they describe themselves: 

"Vancouver's historic cinema
completely renovated.
Community focused
independently minded."


The final two paragraphs of my essay on Brokaw and identity crisis as they now stand are as follows:

"From where I sit on the Moon, I now know and accept that few of those old timers will ever leave the comforting campfire. They sat around it as children and sit around it still. It’s never too late to change—I know that. Maybe one or two will see the light before they pass into final darkness, but, for the greater number of them, it’s too late. For my pal of college days…that really makes me sad.  

"When my sadness about my friend grows to much to bear, I can also escape. All members of the human family need safe havens and escape routes. What I do is circle the little Moon planet where I’m situated in my imagination. I go to the far side away from Earth, to the dark side of the Moon. Once there, I lift my gaze to the Cosmic distances. My gaze is filled with stars and my heart is tugged by their gravity!"

A SILENT BOOMER IN THE NIGHT

Bought 6 tickets to the 36th Annual Portland International Film Festival. Tonight the film was at 8:45 pm and drove into the city by myself at an odd hour for me to be driving in but hardly any traffic at that time. Slightly misty and all the small bars I walked past after parking at a Smart Park looked so comfy and inviting that I didn't go in. The film, Shun Li & The Poet, was shown at the World Trade Center Theater so everything was new for me and the World Trade Center is a sprawling open, steel and glass structure that covers two blocks near the Willamette River. The movie was beautifully filmed and I was entertained. Tao Zhao won the Best Actress Award from the Italian Academy and I thought she earned it. Not for a minute did I remember that she was an actress. It thrilled me to be sitting on a Saturday evening, surrounded by people who enjoy good film making, and the excitement for this 75 year old Silent to be walking the streets of a major city all by my lonesome on a misty Saturday night was entertaining in itself. A delicious separateness set in that was not at all like loneliness. The film was about separateness too, being about two immigrants who meet and become friends in Italy...one a Chinese woman and the other a Yugoslavian. The globe is getting to be full of immigrants who have left home for a variety of reasons, isn't it?

The day has been full. My own writing crept along another few paragraphs today when I accompanied Mertie to a Buddhist meeting in Oswego. I waited for her at a nearby Starbucks and worked some more on "Tom Brokaw's Identity Crisis" which follows this paragraph. It's a transitional paragraph, setting up the conclusion. I'm very near finishing the first draft. After that I let it sit and move on to another chapter in the precocious fictional life of a 13 year old girl in 1940 Iowa. Then back for another essay about the life of a Silent Boomer.

"Brokaw’s impulse to glorify the American GI and their wives and mothers initially brought me, 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 after the Sixties smashed my rose colored glasses in one of the many street scuffles of that time. I’d worn them right up until that decade, only slightly cracked by my four years in the Navy. 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. For good measure, I reread Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath to put me back in touch with the Depression Era and leafed through Studs Terkel’s oral histories for good measure."

TOM BROKAW, THE BOOMER TURNED SILENT

       The piece on Brokaw's identity crisis is still in the air. Last night I did not sleep and my intention to polish off the first roughly  completed article seems in peril today. It's hard to focus with two hours of sleep fogging the pre-frontal cortex behind my eyeballs. In the following two paragraphs, I introduce my half-brother who was a full on Boomer as was Tom Brokaw...almost.

Tom Brokaw's tight Boomer smile

"Brokaw’s grinning demeanor, for certain, reminds me of my pot smoking, long haired, Boomer half-brother who was born in 1948 when I was eleven. He died at age 36 of accumulating drug complications created by his mixing Black Beauties with all the medications he took to fight the pain and symptoms of the rheumatoid arthritis that was slowly crippling him. At age 19, he underwent a hip replacement. His philosophical answer to all that came his way with pain, illness and “the times” was, “fuck it,” delivered with a tight smile very much like Tom Brokaw’s public smile. My brother, of course, held most of the views of his generation, but he was not likely to be demonstrative. I went on the protest marches. He did not. The fact that he sold nickel bags and a little powdered cocaine for a time is probably why he kept a lower profile than I did. Brokaw, like my brother and also for business reasons, chose not to reveal his personal political views. 

"Our relationship was not as close as it might have been, but my brother told me that a bit of advice I gave him had helped him as his face was being slammed into the desk top by an interrogating police officer. He says I told him, 'No matter what, they can't take your mind from you.' I don't know who 'they' were when I offered the advice, but my brother said he held that in mind as he was being face-smashed."

A SILENT TRAVELING BETWEEN THE POLES

The following is another paragraph from my essay, "Tom Brokaw's Identity Crisis", about the psychic distance people of the Silent Generation had to travel if they wanted to remain relevant in the Boomer times:

Al Capp from the site FanPix.net

When I summon John Lennon and Jack Kerouac into my imagination, the generational differences that I was attempting to assimilate as a representative Mr. Silent who got on the Boomer bus becomes jarringly obvious. Put Jack Kerouac (born 1922) instead of John Lennon in a public bed with Yoko Ono and imagination grows bizarre. Add in Al Capp’s (born 1909) appearance at John and Yoko's bedside in Room 902 of the Amsterdam Hilton Hotel during the couple’s March 25 through 31, 1969 “love in” and my task of assimilation becomes surreal. Capp’s attack on the couple and his insult to Yoko could just have easily come from the lips of Jack Kerouac or me if I had remained with Wayne’s Conestoga wagons. I have a lot of Al Capp in me. Conflicted impulses to cry about something lost and to laugh with joy about things gained are equally compelling. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZkRdPxQENU&noredirect=1]

THE SILENTS I LEFT BEHIND

The following paragraphs at this time serve as a conclusion to an essay, "Tom Brokaw's Identity Crisis", which I continue to labor over:

Sometimes I have a vision of my friend and his circles of friends and acquaintances that troubles me greatly because, even to myself, I sound arrogant when I share the vision. Still, I continually experience the vision. It’s as if I see across a Cosmic distance from the Moon where I’m perched to the Earth where they sit. Those Silents who remained behind with John Wayne are still seated at the campfire from which I departed three-quarters of a century ago. They’ve not moved an inch in that time. They remain stationary, farting and belching, swapping tall tales, contentedly circled around a bone fire with Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles cowboys. From my position on the Moon’s surface, my eyes easily encompass the warm and comforting fire and the circle of those who stayed behind.

Van Gogh's Starry Night, of course.

From my distance above their campfire, my vision also encompasses the vast darkness that surrounds them, against which they have turned their backs. They appear so vulnerable to me and unprepared to face the Cosmic darkness that surrounds them that I’m saddened. These are not ignorant people, I tell myself. They just weren’t curious enough—or courageousness enough? I don’t know which label to assign. Or they understandably placed their priorities elsewhere than in the pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake. I can easily understand and sympathize with my college buddy with many children who put his nose to the grindstone and uncomplainingly made a living and supported his large family, rising financially to become a six-figure man. Of all my mixed feelings about my compatriots from the Twentieth Century, I’m happy that I know that man. He’s the model for the American Dream.

Because of my love for many of them—my fellow Silents and many Boomers too—I sympathize with those decent men and women circled in the darkness, staring at the flickering tongues of fire. They’re human after all, just like me, with their fears and hopes and their love stories and tales of struggle and survival, but as I look upon them, I become aware of their ignorance of the details of the Cosmic reality the human species inhabits. Their ignorance of the bare facts is unbelievably dense and imprisoning and, suddenly, before my eyes, they shrink into the misty past. It becomes very clear to me that they might as well be living in First Century Jerusalem or Eleventh Century Italy or pre-Darwinian England as living in 21^st Century America.

From where I sit on the Moon, I now know and accept that few of those old timers will ever leave the comforting campfire. They sat around it as children and sit around it still. It’s never too late to change—I know that. Maybe one or two will see the light before they pass into final darkness, but, for the greater number of them, it’s too late. For my pal of college days…that really makes me sad.