Dole Spouting Nostalgia, Not Facts

Children, believe me: Things were not better in the old days. I was there, too, just like Bob Dole, and I was shocked to hear him say things were better back then.

Things were not. I distinctly remember, back then, bathing out of a tin basin by a coal-oil lamp. I remember black people riding in the back of the bus. I remember summer being a season of fear because summer was when polio stalked the neighborhood, crippling and killing.

I remember cars being cranked by hand and seeing men with arms broken from cranking carelessly. I remember headlines about gangsters spraying crowded streets with Tommy guns, remember hoboes at kitchen doors begging for sandwiches.

Don’t let him kid you; Bob Dole remembers all this too. He knows that back then was not the wonderful place he cracked it up to be in his speech the other night.

Just like right now, back then was chock full of meanness. On Sunday afternoons, you could hear Father Coughlin spewing hate out of the radio. Irritating a policeman could get your skull seriously cracked. Corporations paid thugs to fight bloody battles with striking working stiffs. Midwestern farmers, left destitute in the Dust Bowl, became dirt-poor stoop labor in California.

Nor was heroism as commonplace as the talk would have us believe. The age’s greatest hero - Charles Lindbergh, “The Lone Eagle” - urged the country not to get involved with European resistance to Hitler. Joseph P. Kennedy, founder of America’s own heroic House of Atreus, shrank from FDR’s decision to help England survive Hitler’s onslaught.

Things back then were just as nasty as things are now, and just as wonderful, too. Such is usually the case. Dole is too good to peddle nostalgic bushwah about the good old days. It is the kind of hooey that comes naturally to political hacks trying to market an elderly candidate in a land that calls its largest population group “baby boomers.”

Maybe Dole’s technicians made him tell those fibs about back then. In both parties, so many beliefs are now being junked to gain political edge that Dole’s turning history into baloney may be too trivial to trouble anyone but a fact-checker.

If Dole sincerely believes things were better back then, we had best beware. Elderly folk who yearn publicly for the good old days must always be approached with caution.

They are not remembering what the world was really like back then; they are only remembering what it was like to be young. The time of one’s youth commonly seems in retrospect to have been a golden age. It is almost impossible, after middle age has done its grisly work of destroying the child within, to remember how much suffering and fear must be endured in a typical youth.

The Republican purpose, of course, is to spread the idea that the good old days have given way to bad new days created by Democrats. Thus Dole’s speech lamented crime and drug use as new afflictions caused by President Clinton.

A nit-picker might observe that crime and drugs flourished robustly under Republicans Reagan and Bush long before Clinton’s rule began. Never mind. This is not about inconvenient facts; it is about ignoring facts in the higher interest of fooling enough of the people enough of the time to get elected.

Let us hope that Dole will drop the silly argument that the country is in worse shape now than back then. In 1940, when he was 17, only an opium eater could have imagined the soft, lush future in which we now wallow. There is no war, nor threat of war. We are the mightiest military power in the business.

We cannot build highways fast enough to stop our millions of cars from locking them in traffic jams. Speaking of millions, statistics show that in 1980 there were 17,000 households with income of $1 million or more and, by 1990, 200,000. That’s a lot of new millionaires for one decade.

Wall Street is booming. The middle class, though not so booming, is far richer than in 1940 when its hope of owning a house and two cars - two cars! - would have been pure fantasy. Have women ever had more freedom or opportunity than now?

Those bankrupt, dirt-poor Midwestern farmers, who fled the Dust Bowl for the West Coast back then when things were better, now account for much of the population of Orange County, California, and vote conservative Republican. They will doubtless vote for Dole and the return of those good old days.

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