My Sandbox

My beloved wife stumped me the other day.  I have no idea how to get rid of crabgrass.  In fact, I say, live and let live.  After all, the crabgrass was here first.

She also stumped me with an historical* question.  When was the best time to be alive in American history?

I immediately lumped off a huge swath of everything before the 1964 Civil Rights Act, on the grounds that, y’know, slavery and Jim Crow.  Otherwise, I’d have said the time between V-J Day and August 1949, the date of the first Soviet atomic bomb test.  America was unchallenged, triumphant, and limitlessly optimistic.

After that…well, daily worries about nuclear annihilation pretty much informed everything about American life, to some degree.  Historians will sigh with relief that we survived years with Joseph Stalin, Richard Nixon, Leonid Brezhnev, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush armed with nuclear weapons.

It’s a little depressing to think of the Clinton era as the peak of American history, though.  The political atmosphere was pretty much what it is today – in my opinion, completely poisoned by the adoption of paranoid ultraconservatism by the Republican Party.

Let me give you an extremely silly example.  In 1965, two former members of Danny and the Juniors (“At the Hop,” “Rock and Roll Is Here To Stay”) formed a group called “The Spokesmen” and wrote a hilarious answer to the catchy but tediously preachy “Eve of Destruction” called “Dawn of Correction.” “Dawn of Correction” was objectively a better song, by the way – better constructed, better written, better produced and infinitely better sung.

The point is, the answer song, in glorifying Middle American conservatism and the status quo, included the lyrics “What about the Peace Corps Organization?  Don’t forget the work of the United Nations!”

By the Reagan era, both of these would be anathema.  Nowadays, the idea of any conservative saying something positive about the United Nations, short of as a useful way of bringing about the Rapture, is unthinkable.

Also, the Clinton prosperity really was built on underemployment, the Internet bubble, and the fact that NAFTA’s deleterious effects trailed its short-term consumer benefits.  Cheap goods at the cost of a manufacturing base was no gain at all in the long run.

And, let’s face it, music in the 90′s was godawful.

So the best time in American history might really be ahead of us.

It’s not NOW, of course.  Barack Obama has to hit the “Undo” button a LOT to get this country back to freaking zero.  Iraq is, at best, what you get when you try to have a Vietnam with an all-volunteer army.  Constitutional and civil rights and liberties precedents have been pulverized.  And the music is, if anything, worse than it was in the 1990′s.

Barack’s second term, now… that might be something to tell your kids about.  I’m cautiously optimistic.

Yes, I’m aware that Obama has had difficulties this past couple of weeks putting up with Republican obstructionism.  So did FDR.  He’s on a freaking coin now.

Oh, so anyway.  The question that arises after the one my wife asked is, of course, when and where would have been the best time to be alive in history?

It’s late.  I’ll get back to you.  Hopefully a little sooner – I like this little vanity blog, I should water it more than once a month.

*I know, I know.  Look, when I say it to myself, without thinking, I put in the “n” in “an historical.”  It looks horrible, but that’s the way my voice sounds.  On the other hand, I usually bungle the word “particularly” when spoken, but I love writing it, so maybe I should just pretend my diction is better on the page.