These stunning images came to me today courtesy of my relative Mike Dormer, who's visiting San Francisco for a few days. His father, Bob (I knew him as Uncle Buck) Dormer, was in naval intelligence inside China in WW2, when the U.S. and China were allied in repelling Japanese aggression in Asia and the Pacific Theatre.
Besides his old B&W images from inside China (some of which I'll publish in time), Uncle Buck saved these amazing hotel cards from the great colonial hotels throughout Asia, where he traveled during and after the war.
Mike and his brothers grew up for their formative years in Japan, just like his cousins, my first ex-wife, her sister and brother. I first met Mike and his older brother Bob on Sanibel Island in the late '60s.
We were aged as a group from 16-21 or so, and we were infected with the idealistic mood of our generation, not yet cynical about our chances to change the world. Naively, we plotted revolution, just like cells of kids did all over the country in that era of the civil rights struggles and the anti-Vietnam War movement.
One idyllic night, there in a true paradise, in the Dormers' house on San Carlos Bay, the five of us were having one of our 'heavy' conversations when Aunt Ellie Dormer cheerfully broke in on us, "Would you kids like some popcorn?"
***
Decades have passed, as they always do. The WW2 generation, our parents, have passed on, all but the last few. Our generation, the Baby Boomers, may be renamed in retrospect the Seekers, for all our wandering, our restlessness, our sense that what we have known can't be all their is.
To a man or a woman or any other of our genders, we Baby Boomers remain oddly optimistic at one moment, plunged into hopelessness the next. Jimmy Thompson captures our essence as certainly as anyone right now. Rather than pathologize any one of us, for our depressions, our addictions, our breakups, our odd discontinuous lives, it is time that social-psychological-anthropologists start analyzing the way this first post-modern generation has adapted to a world of continuous, massive change.
(Here, a note: I'm not ignorant of history, so I am not arguing that this is the first such generation. There will be time for historical analogies later; or my favorite Australian reader may contribute his ideas, always fresh, in "Comments." But my sense is that ours is the first generation to attempt to come to grips with our documented ability to end life on earth.)
The ethical dilemmas that soon will confront humanity dwarf any in our collective memory. But not, apparently, from the history written in the layers beneath our feet. What's this I read in this weekend's news? That there is evidence that the northern hemisphere was ignited in a giant fireball when a meteor exploded too close as it passed earth in space some thousands of years ago, extinguishing cavemen in the process?
Who knows what calamities preceded us here. Almost every culture has stories, myths, traditions that have emerged from the oral traditions that are layered beneath our written eras. These ancient tales came down father to son and mother to daughter from times so distant that no one can say whether they are "real" or imaginary.
All we know is that, as stories, they have the capacity to make us shudder, even today.
Many times, as a youth preoccupied with the threat of nuclear war, which would have obliterated all human life, and the first post-war plague (polio), which though horrible and immediate in my youth, was but a weak precursor to the terror of AIDS, I wondered why I should be here, in such a violent place?
Inside my own mind, I was a gentle, soft person, sensitive to the movements of clouds, the songs of birds and frogs, the patterns of numbers, the compositions of classic pianists. I felt out of synch with this world. Eventually, as I grew to my full height, six feet, and my shoulders broadened, a line of muscles formed across my upper back, my legs became iron-strong, and my sexual drive coursed through me, demanding pursuit of potential mating partners, I stopped thinking of myself as gentle and sensitive.
In sports, no one considered me a softie. I hit, and took hits, bouncing up laughing every time -- in hockey, football, baseball, basketball. For a career, I chose investigative reporting, or it chose me.
But that's another story. The cinema may romanticize muckrakers, like it does detectives, as tough guys, and sometimes, some of us are, or were. But it didn't take long for me to recognize that my chosen work was actually much more intellectual than macho.
That can be another story. The waves of time bring nostalgic times alive that I never knew. These images of Mike's, of Uncle Buck's life, conjure a world that was effectively ended by the time my cohort came on the scene.
-30-
No comments:
Post a Comment