Way Back
I’m going backwards a bit. As I mentioned earlier, my initial conditions were family, church, and World War II. But the latter inevitably led to the First World War. Why? Because my grandfather served in the 32nd Field Artillery and went to France. And then in my freshman year of high school I started reading Hemingway and Fitzgerald and TS Elliot. The first big war had a sizeable impact on them. Given my family’s involvement, it became clear to me that to understand the second war I might need to know something about the first. So, I started reading, and this is what I discovered.
There’s a good argument to be made that we fought the first world war right through the entirety of the 20th century. After all, it only ended in an armistice in 1918. It heated up again in 1939 (WWII), 1950 (Korea), 1955 (Vietnam—France, US). And then there’s every conflict in the Middle East, most of which can be traced to the dissolution of old empires (Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, British, French, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, and German). And let’s not forget the Cold War which lasted from 1947 to 1989. There’s been a lot of fighting around the world.
But I’ll stop. If you want to make people’s eyes glaze over, start talking about the First World War, one hundred years in the past. Heck, most people today think Vietnam, which ended in 1975, is ancient history, and if I’m honest with myself, I think most people’s idea of history is what happened on season one of The Bachelor. That saddens me a bit but there’s nothing I can do about it. I just have to realize, I’m old. I’ve lived. And this is what I saw. And this is why I think the way I think about politics and the world. I’m living in a really interesting story, and I like studying it.
Part 5: Living in America, an old man’s journey into his past