The Inner Who Part 1

 In the six months since Bubbie died, the world seems different now at its deepest levels. But it isn't the lack of Bubbie that makes it different, or just the lack of Bubbie... it's the lack of twenty-five years of daily memory that left my life with her. It's the whole ethos those now missing years created, the whole cast of characters that she brought to time spent around her, and it's the whole worldview she brought to literally every day spent in her company. It's the world of ostentatious gifts and long thank you notes and three hour phone conversations, and also her continual umbrage at people who did not take social niceties as seriously as she did. It's her belief in the common ordinary decency of all people to whom she spoke so volubly for hours on end. It's also her contradictory belief that vulgarity and 'commonness' is something to be avoided like the most dreadful horrors. It's her belief that learning and culture for its own sake is the highest of all callings and one that should be pursued to the ends of the earth. It's also her contradictory belief that those impractical artistic dreamers like her oldest grandchild who can't do enough to make their way in the world have only their lack of character to blame for their troubles since people like me didn't apply ourselves to do something realistic with our lives like becoming a realtor or shoe salesman. Her world was made by Classic Hollywood, Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Life Magazine and Norman Rockwell, broadcasts of the NBC Symphony and the Metropolitan Opera listened to by a literal ten million a week. Her America, the America of her generation, was an America newly the preeminent culture of the world, and consequently, still barely distinct from the culture of Europe. The entire century thereafter was what happened when America finally was able to shape the world's destiny.

World War II is basically now out of living memory, and The Great Depression is almost definitively out. Yet everyone in America still feels as though we know everything about them, and yet these events which shaped everything about our country are all second hand now. Our whole society is shaped by a history no one remembers anymore. So it stands to reason that history is very much coming to these shores again, and rather than being the protagonists of the new age, we may in fact be very much the antagonists.

Everyone over the age of 75 was alive during the 'Old America', but no one under the age of 93 was ever an adult in the old America for even a day, and Bubbie was not only an adult in the year before the German invasion of Poland, she was fully able bodied and compos mentis until a year and a half after the Trump election. She was an emissary from America as it evolved from Lincoln to FDR whose mind and body were fully functional through the entire Obama Presidency.

But suddenly everything from the League of Nations to World War II is now second hand. Bubbie, like Modern America, was an entire worldview, and in her, I and we can see everything was glorious about what they both represented, why it has to end, why we should mourn its ending, and why, at this moment, we need their advice more than ever. The people who could best tell us how to endure our current struggles are probably the people who just left us.

When most of the people reading this were born, the twilight past started at World War I, and the recent deceased were living witnesses who could have told the Baby Boomers about where the process of rebellion and decadence would lead.

So for the Baby Boomer generation, this historic twilight zone was the world pre World War I, the world of the Belle Epoque, the fin-de-siecle, the world of decadence; overripe cultish romanticism and rebellion that created a golden age of art and music just like the Boomer's golden age of popular music and New Hollywood movies. But no one would have been better equipped to tell Boomers that however pleasurable and common sensical their rebellion seemed, nothing would lead more quickly to making right-wing populism more powerful than ever before.

The world that created every generation is always the world that just disappeared from living memory. We all were created by Bubbie's generation, for good or ill, and the people who created our world were responding to a series of circumstances they inherited just as we have. They, the generation of everyone from Kennedy and Johnson to Nixon and Reagan, ran the world through a series of unwritten moral codes that were nearly impossible to break because, when they were broken, the world dissolved into chaos. To us, all these codes seem arbitrary, and many of them clearly are arbitrary.And yet, they did break these codes - they desegregated schools and the military, they enacted civil rights and the Great Society, and they helped save the world first from Nazism and then from Communism. What they show is that it's possible to gradually break down these arbitrary codes, but breaking them is a very fraught process that is either done with the utmost care, the way they generally did, or quick and dirty, and quick and dirty results in the return of all kinds of things Bubbie thought the world was done with: the collapse of democracy, mass refugee crises, dwindling natural resources, even world war.

At least a third of everything in our life is determined by our birth. Not just who we are at the objective genetic level, but the 'inner who', the circumstances handed to us as a deed at birth, that tells our stories both to the world and to ourselves. The 'inner who' that determines the life circumstances that allowed our parents to meet each other, and gives sense and animation to how we see the whole world.

The great tragedy of the 'inner who' is that the further we are from our births, the more perspective we have about what made us what we are, and yet the less people are there to interview about what those circumstances might have been like.