When I was young, most of the giants of the earlier twentieth century were still alive. Men and women who often needed only one name to identify them in our common, Western mind. Churchill and Mao, Crosby and Hope... well, maybe I better say more. Winston Churchill and Mao Tse Tung, Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, Marlene Dietrich and Orson Wells, Chiang Kai Chek and Herbert Hoover and J.Edgar Hoover.Now I am middle aged and the century and the millenium is over. The giants from the world before, they are all gone, gone with the century, gone with the millennium. Except for Hope - and Ronald Reagan. The baby boomers who were the children and grandchildren of those giants, well, we are growing old now, and yes, beginning to die.
Such is the course of things. New generations have taken over the world. Now it is their turn to defend it/us/them against the terror and then the raising of the oceans and the melting of ice caps which our children shall face, and blame us, all of us, for. Three... two... one... in the blinking of a geological zero it shall be upon us tomorrow. Today jihad, tomorrow the Flood.
Yet at this moment writing I worry more about the fact that I remember Hoover and Hoover and the Hoovers, and wonder if anyone will ever know the difference between them again.
1. My grandmother of the north
3. The big engines growled and thrummed
4. I think I was three when we moved
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