06-25-2020, 09:35 PM
(06-19-2020, 01:06 PM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote: Looked at the Wikipedia article for Vera Lynn. She was born March 20th, 1917, during World War I. She was well into her career by the time Britain was confronted by World War II.
The "forces' Sweetheart" would have been 23 years old during the Battle of Britain ( summer of 1940).
Of course, the 20th was a rather tumultuous century, so she would have seen enormous changes during the course of her long life. She a young adult during a Crisis a lifetime ago and survived long enough to reach another Crisis era.
Oddly enough, once someone reaches their hundredth birthday, I think of them as a sort of time traveler.
She still reaches us in this Crisis Era. She reminds us of the great human needs of a Crisis Era. Do we have anyone like her now?
OK, things are not so desperate now as they were in Britain in 1940... and they are unlikely to ever get that bad here.
I look at all the dislocations and the friendships on hold, the frustrations of the dreams of many of us. I have gone through some rough times over the last few years... and I personally need to connect with others. In her time, multitudes with deep roots where they were were suddenly relocated to strange and unpleasant places even if they were in the only "good guy" power in Europe then at war. Maybe I say something excessive in self-pity if I say that I am uprooted yet stranded in a place in which I never felt comfortable.
Were I thinking of the song to sing it would have the title "I Need to Love"... something difficult for someone with my problem on DMS-IV. Better what I have than anything else there, but it is certainly miserable. I don't do bad things to people, but I can certainly make people uncomfortable without trying -- and often despite trying to do so. But I digress. With someone like her she expresses what everyone feels as if it were unique to the person who hears her song. But this is a very different Crisis. As late as 1932, persecuting people for a specific religion was something that modern people just did not do. One year later religious bigotry became a core principle of a sick political order. Today we have gotten smug about respiratory infections as killers in their own right... maybe they kill people dying of other causes or poor people in very poor countries, but not here in America except for.... and then 120 thousand Americans die of something that just does not happen here.
We are all time travelers in a way. Time moves even if we don't. I do a simple mathematical exercise... subtract my age from my year of birth, and I get 1891. Think of how long ago that was. America was a nation on wheels, but those wheels were on a train, bicycle, buggy, or pram. There were still many veterans of the American Civil War around. Telephones, telephones, phonographs, and electric lights were present but rare. Wireless communication )the foundation of radio) had yet to come into existence. My maternal grandmother was born that year, and she lived until I was seventeen -- so I knew people born back then. So if I seem a fogy when it comes to the newfangled technology of the cell phone... there is a good reason. How far back was 1891? In musical composition. Johannes Brahms, Anton Bruckner, and Giuseppe Verdi were still alive. Sergei Prokofiev and Ernest Honegger were born that year, and they have been gone for nearly seventy years. Politics? Russia had a Tsar, Turkey a Sultan, Iran a shah, China an Emperor, Germany and Austria-Hungary Kaisers, Italy and Portugal kings -- and those are not returning. Colonial rule was the norm except in the Americas and western Europe. America had 44 states, and we were on our 23rd President (and halfway to our next one). Some things don't change.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.