Word Back: Trump reached his goal: Make America Grate Again

Make America GREAT Again

Great as in...The Greatest Generation.

As he wrote his famous book on his Montana ranch, Tom Brokaw gave a lot of thought to the GREAT-est Generation. He gets credit for popularizing the term although its first documented use is by U.S. Army General James Van Fleet ("our greatest General" Pres. Truman called him) during the Korean War. Brokaw might cover it in the book but, well, you see, I never read it. As offspring of that generation, I already knew how great they were. 

It took some time to realize it. 

My parents, two Denver natives, born 1923 and 1925, who found themselves growing up in The Great Wall Street Collapse of 1929, the Great Depression, The Great War Part Deux, and America's post-war boom which, as far as I know, does not have "great" attached to it. Great Caesar's Ghost! That was a term The Daily Planet Editor Perry White in "The Adventures of Superman" made famous, first in 1946 on the radio show and then on TV in the 1950s. We Boomer kids loved Perry White's apoplectic outbursts. We loved cub reporter Jimmy Olsen getting blasted by White: "And don't call me chief!" And his outbursts at Clark Kent, "mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan daily." "Great Caesar's Ghost, Kent!" Kent just took the abuse as underneath all the mild manners and big eye glasses was a super man from another planet who "could leap tall buildings in a single bound" and round up passels of bad guys before breakfast. 

We loved Superman. Our parents were not so sure about this hero worship. But our first heroes were our World War II fathers. We sort of knew their good deeds. We played with his medals and shoulder patches and uniforms. He had a helmet and machine guns, booty from the war. We played war, having no idea what it was preparing us for. But our parents' generation accomplished great things and we knew it.

Vietnam and assassinations and Watergate almost banished the greatness. Today marks the 81st anniversary of the D-Day landings. The end of the war was in sight. Our fathers were still in great danger and we wouldn't know the stories first-hand had they been killed on that day and the others that followed in 1944-45. Death on all fronts. Our Denver neighborhoods swarmed with our fathers' memories and the ghosts of those who made it home or made it home and died later or were not quite right. You'd think all of that would be enough to lift a nation, cause it to avoid pointless wars and entanglements. You would think it would be enough to stop a charlatan and his goons from taking over our great country. 

Researching this post, I came across all kinds of references to great. I watched the first season of "The Great," a satiric retelling of the Greats of Russia: Peter and Katherine Very funny. Educational too.  

I came across this reference: "Literae humaniores, nicknamed Greats, is an undergraduate course focused on the classics (Ancient Rome, Ancient Greece, Latin, ancient Greek, and philosophy) at the University of Oxford in England and some other universities."

Make America THE GREATS Again!

Finally, the Online Dictionary writes this: "great is sometimes confused with grate."

We can certainly see that Grate is a far better term for what America has become. Make America Grate Again. Yes, MAGA is grating, it grates the nerves. It's prime spokesperson, POTUS, may be the most grating person on the planet. His online rants are beyond grating, they get on my last serve.  Not so great.

"Death Cleaning" is as pleasant as it sounds

The April 9 New York Times op-ed section featured a piece with this heading: " 'Death Cleaning': A Reckoning With Clutter, Grief and Memories." There were letters from more than 500 responses from the paper's request for personal stories about getting rid of a lifetime of possessions or those of a relative.

Responses were interesting and heartbreaking. Chris and I, both retired, have decided to clean out the clutter of our own lives as we contemplate a move to a retirement community. Her approach is "everything must go" and mine is "almost everything." This reveals the difference in our backgrounds. She is adopted, an army brat with one sister (also adopted) who had to help her mother purge much stuff for many moves. I am the oldest of nine. During our childhood, we moved quite a few times and, in adulthood, we've moved more that Chris's sister and her Navy lifer husband. We've done some purging over the years. Yet, now, we still have an entire household of stuff. We've lived here for 16 years. I look around my writing room and see photos of my kids at various stages and family photos of relatives. Books and papers are piled on every surface. And this is the tip of the iceberg. I have bookshelves filled with books and boxes upon boxes of books in the basement. 

When Chris retired a year ago, she embarked on a cleaning binge monumental in scale. Everything must go! And much did. A local nonprofit removed most of the furniture from the basement. We donated three sets of china to Goodwill, sparing boxes of teacups and saucers that went to the local botanic gardens for its Mother's Day teas. We remodeled our upstairs bathroom and redid the kitchen floor. Chris called the junkman who came and removed old lawnmowers and tools from the storage shed, even had them remove an old storage shed that was home to items dating back to the previous owner. She ripped up all of the carpets and exposed our very nice wood floors. 

Since I am partially disabled, I was tasked with sorting through books. How I sorted. Our daughter hauled a dozen boxes out the door to the library sales room where she volunteers. Still, many books remain. 

I also have two large plastic bins with dozens of journals dating back to 1972. I was going to donate them to my kids, both dedicated readers who like to write, and hope they would find some lasting value in them. I lasted one day reading through my life, gave up, and put the bins back in the closet. It's quite sobering to contemplate a life. Most entries are mundane, even boring. Some are embarrassing. I decided that the journals have to go but not yet, as I have more reminiscing to do. How long will I procrastinate? Until I am unable? Not exactly what I had in mind for my kids. And not what they had in mind either. 

I did not have to sort through my parents' goods. I lived far away at the time and my siblings took care of it. My mother died at 59 of ovarian cancer and my grieving father called in my four sisters to go through her things and they did it cordially. I inherited a third of my accountant father's library and all of his clothes as we were the same size. I still wear his Aran Islands sweater. My father bought it in Ireland and rarely has occasion to wear it in Central Florida. I live in Wyoming so the sweater is my friend most times of the year. I wear his sport coats and they will undoubtably go to Goodwill when the time comes. 

The books and the journals -- those are the sticking points in our Death Cleaning saga.