living off the fat of the land

I think after WW II the US was at its peak. We had just beat those awful Krauts, who really were horrible, so there needed to be no guilt about that. We had pretty much pulled the chestnuts of England and France from the fire. Of course the Russkies had borne the brunt of the war, and they had done it with the ropa dopa that they used on Napoleon, but still when they had to they had stood and fought, and fought well, but then they were fighting the Krauts who didn’t so much want to conquer them, but to kill them all and take their land, that puts some starch in your spine.

When the smoke cleared it was us and them facing each other. You know you wonder how they became so powerful. They were just a big backward backyard of bearded oafs in a frozen land at the time of WW I, and they were blasted out of that war early and taken over by crazy commies who ruled it with their crackpot ideas until the Germans came ramrodding through their country, but then when it was over there they were facing us across Europe, our mortal enemy.

How did they emerge so powerful? Well I guess they had those nuclear weapons, and then the power of their army was vastly exaggerated by our politicians. But we always have to be an enemy, and as enemies go they were a tidy one with a well defined country. There was a certain stability to the cold war, so that it kind of ran itself.

But I’ve gotten far afield. For me it was my parents who went through the great depression, and they never got tired of telling me about that whenever I lost my coonskin cap and wanted to go out and buy a new one. I don’t know if it was the depression, but there was something very cautious about them, and they were very submissive to authority. I assumed that was from being downtrodden by the depression.

And our parents did well for us, in that conservative bungalow beltway of Gage Park. We were all fed, we were all clothed, we all got a sufficient education enough to learn to read and write.

I was cocky, and I expect you were too heading off to Alaska with a shoeshine and a smile. The land was fat, and so if we fell it was going to be soft. If we were a bit hungry or without a fixed address for a time, it was by choice and temporary, we knew if it should come down to it we could always get some kind of job somewhere.

Anymore, I agree with you, it is not the same. Kids today they can’t drop out of high school and get a pretty good paying job at the factory down the street. If they do the right thing, stay in school, don’t do too many drugs, and go to college like everybody tells them to do, they end up with a shitload of debt, and either some low paying job making lattes, or a nice college job where they have to do the work of two people.

Well I don’t know where this is going either. Here is something that has begun to stick in my craw, the phrase the bad guys. We used it a lot when were kids, the good guys and the bad guys, a simple world. And it used to be used a lot in describing movies, because they are almost all based on good guys and bad guys.

But now you hear it everywhere, spoken by adults about the real world. The army spokesman doesn’t say Taliban, or ISIS, or whatever, he says the bad guys. The police spokesman doesn’t say miscreants or perps, he says the bad guys. I don’t like it. It gives a distorted view of the world where it is nothing but good guys (us) and bad guys (them). What do you think?