Originally written September 7TH, 2005
BY EDWIN COONEY
One day in late August 2001, I was sitting in a local restaurant with my youngest lad. During our conversation, which probably was about the fortunes of the Oakland Athletics vs. the New York Yankees, Elvis Presley’s “You Ain’t Nothin’ but a Hounddog” came over the restaurant sound system.
As I sat there, half absorbing the reasons why the young, “hungry” Oakland A’s were going to embarrass my overpaid, over-confident Yankees, Elvis sang away in the background, “…when they said you was high classed/ well, that was just a lie./ You ain’t never caught a rabbit and you ain’t no friend of mine.”
“Good God,” I thought to myself, “how many times have I heard that song or extended shout or whatever it is? Goodness! 1956 was 45 years ago.”
Blown away by my own thoughts of time and distance and the rest, I decided my youngest needed a little history lesson. “You know,” I said, “that song is forty-five years old?” — he knew the song since I have it at home — “Do you realize that if you and I were sitting here back in 1956 I could not have found a song that old on any juke box?
A song that was forty-five years old in 1956 would have come out in 1911. Certainly you remember Harry Lauder and Edward M. Favor, don’t you, son?”
“I think both Hudson and Zito can easily shut the Yankees down,” my persistent lad went on. Of course, he wasn’t impressed, partly because he was just nineteen and I, his boring dad, was changing the subject from sports to history again, but mostly because few young minds can possibly grasp the concept of a forty-five year continuum. Hell! My mind was doing flips as it literally goggled at its own thoughts. “Things sure have changed the last ninety years!”
While I don’t recall the exact date of this non-exchange between my nineteen-year-old and me, I know it took place in late August 2001.
Thoughts of my son’s youth and non-appreciation for forty-five-year-old Elvis Presley hits forced my mind back a mere forty years to the first year of another presidency.
Two-thousand-one was the first year in office for President Bush whose election, though official, was still in dispute. Exactly forty years before, John Kennedy’s election to the presidency was also in dispute. In 2001, Barry Bonds was to break the single season home run record in baseball just as Roger Maris had in 1961. However, there was a fundamental cultural difference somehow between 2001 and 1961. What exactly it was I couldn’t quite grasp at the time.
Was it youth perhaps? Nineteen-sixty-one was a really youthful year it seemed. Not only was President Kennedy young—he was just 43, Elvis was 26, Bob Dylan was 23, and Peter, Paul, and Mary who were also just getting their start were very young. The New York Yankees had fired old Casey Stengel and hired young Ralph Houk as their manager. Twenty-six-year-old Roger Maris was going after Babe Ruth’s old 1927 single season home run record. I was just 15, four years younger than my 19-year-old son of 2001 vintage.
The force of so many different realities hit me that day as I was lunching with my son. Although he could have voted in the 2000 presidential election, he did not. Had he done so, though, he’d have voted very differently from me. No one of his generation remembered Jimmy Carter, let alone John F. Kennedy. My son, unlike his father, had no expectation of how the government might assist him in getting an education or in making a living.
Because my son and his generation were so young, they were free of so many things that clog my mind when I think about our national values and priorities. Unlike his dad, my boy wasn’t raised with the Depression or World War II era horror stories. His generation didn’t experience the terror of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis or the frustrating years of the struggle for civil rights. Nor was he shattered by the assassination of one president or by the personal defects of the two men who followed President Kennedy—Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon. As for Bill Clinton’s maladies, they weren’t as presidential as much as they were personal ones—like those of Warren G. Harding.
What came so starkly to me that day was the realization that we had clearly entered a political if not an entirely conservative social era. Exactly when we had passed irrevocably out of the old liberal era wasn’t clear to me, but obviously we had. Then it finally dawned on me.
It wasn’t a question of youth as it had been in 1961. There were as many old conservatives as there were young ones. It was a matter of the conservative’s favorite watch word—it was FREEDOM. No longer were we as a people collectively responsible for one another’s well-being. We had passed from an era of social obligation to an era of individual choice.
Political liberals had, after all, simply run out of ideas. Conservatives, on the other hand, had the right and, in fact, the only really good idea. They’d take this government monster apart and give you your money back even if there were a few debts to be paid. After all, they’d just been kidding all of those years when they complained so bitterly about deficit financing.
A few days after that lunch, it was September 11th 2001. President Bush’s mission was clear. He would provide the only service that political conservatives believe he is constitutionally responsible for providing: he, as Commander-in-Chief of our armed forces, would protect us from a foreign foe.
First came the fighting in Afghanistan, then in Iraq. Next, we began borrowing from -- of all people -- the Chinese Communists. Wow! “The times, they [were] a’ changin’”! Whoever heard of a capitalist borrowing from a Communist?
Next came the merging: government must be streamlined. We’ve merged the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) with the Department of Homeland Security. After all, our only legitimate mission is to help people if they’ve been victimized by international terrorism.
Finally came hurricane Katrina. The president is surely baffled by all that has gone wrong. The future of a great American city hangs in the balance. Too many people are dead or in some other way hurting. This tragedy is no one’s fault and yet, in a way, it’s everyone’s fault.
We’re all too often too smug for our own good. We get an idea or develop a political concept and expect it to be applicable at all times and on all occasions -- and then we wonder why bad things happen to us.
Things do change, you know! The Oakland Athletics do win, and politicians are affected by events outside of Washington. Oh yes, you’ll never believe it but I swear it’s true—Elvis’s hound dog just caught a rabbit!
RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,
EDWIN COONEY