Every once in a while I take time out from my busy day to wonder what’s happening to us as a nation. I mean I know what’s happening. I read the news. Way too much of it. One of the blessing of writing is that while you’re writing you’re not reading. It doubles as a form of mediation. But you can’t write all the time. Nor would my constitution allow it. After several hours I’m exhausted.
Also, you can’t escape your thoughts in the middle of the night. And I sometimes wake up to find myself enraged by current events. But articulating that rage, explaining it, if only to yourself, requires that one be something of a student of history. I’m not I’m ashamed to say. Most of what I know and have retained about the American Revolution, for example, I learned in Mr. Smith’s 9th grade history class. Could have been eighth grade.
Mr. Smith, something of a fossil who doubled as the school’s assistant head master and sold Compton’s Encyclopedias on the side — my mother bought a set hoping that it would guarantee her children’s graduation to the next grade — apparently acquired his pedagogic techniques during the Great Depression, if not earlier. His method wasn’t to make history come alive. Rather it was to bore a hole in your head and fill it with names and dates. For example, the Magna Carta was composed in 1066. Or was that the Battle of Hastings?
Possessed of a loping Groucho Marx gait his specialty was time lines. In a single sweeping dramatic motion he’d draw a line — actually it was more of an arc — in chalk from one side of the blackboard to the other and fill it with the names of world historical events, great men, etc. Little context or analysis was provided. But I’ll say this for Mr. Smith: repetition, as well as frequent quizzes, seared the information onto my brain.
Perhaps it’s to Clair Smith that I owe my penchant for reducing complex trends and movements to simplistic factoids and catchphrases. But I think I’ve figured out where we are and why it’s so disturbing — especially for someone of my generation — and why I wake up in the middle of the night stewing. We’ve become SPECTRE. SPECTRE was the villainous, ruthless terrorist organization with whom James Bond did battle and eventually beat to a bloody, bullet ridden pulp by the end of the movie, if after a few close calls. The acronym SPECTRE, by the way, stands for Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion. I had to look it up.
Other movie and TV franchises had their versions of SPECTRE. For example, the nemesis of the Man from U.N.C.L.E. — United Network Command for Law Enforcement — (that I didn’t have to look up) in that mid-Sixties, hour-long series was called THRUSH; the Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity.
The evildoers and their acronyms were spoofed in shows such as “Get Smart” where CONTROL fought to save the world from KAOS. Speaking of subjugating humanity, if A.I. is good for anything it’s looking up the names of mock movie international terrorist organizations.
But I now realize that the added value of the James Bond films wasn’t just that I was rooting for the good guys. I was the good guys. I was also battling them from my movie theater seat, bed, or wherever I happened to be watching. Our secret agent’s struggles were our struggles, even as they fought them with more panache, courage and cool weapons, than I ever could. At the height of the Cold War we knew who the real enemy was — the Soviet Union — even if it was cloaked in wordplay.
In the same way that I never forgot the date of the Magna Carta — it was actually 1215 — I also never lost that 1950’s Superman American flag waving sensation of fighting for “Truth, Justice and the American Way.” My mother claims that she took me to Europe for the first time when I was eight-years-old because she was terrified that I’d become a chauvinist. I used to binge watch “Yankee Doodle Dandy” on WOR’s Million Dollar Movie with patriotic anthems such as It’s A Grand Old Flag, Over There and, of course, Yankee Doddle Dandy sung while performing soft-shoe by Jimmy Cagney.
If ever there was a ruthless, expressionless, real-life villain that checked off all the same boxes as Dr. No, Goldfinger or that perverted pussycat stroking Ernst Blofeld, it’s Vladimir Putin. Yet here we are. Taking Putin’s side in his civilizational battle against Superman and James Bond in the person of Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
And it keeps getting worse. We’re not just taking sides, we’re supping with and sending love letters to the likes of Saudi Prince MBS, Mohammad bin Salman of the bone saw; North Korean dictator Kim Jung Um; and Salvadoran strongman Nayib Bukele. You can’t make this stuff up. Mike Myers captured it brilliantly in Austin Powers where Dr. Evil assembles a coterie of similarly unsavory assassins, henchmen and women, such as Frau Farbissina, to hold the world ransom.
Perhaps the reason we find ourselves in this predicament — at least one of the reasons — is that many Americans seem no longer to be able to distinguish the good guys from the bad. Perhaps they believe them all to be corrupt. I’m fully aware that we live in a different world than the one where I grew up. The line between good and evil, virtue and vice, might not be as bright as it once appeared. But it still exists. And it shouldn’t be all that hard to locate it and come down on the right side.
Ralph Gardner Junior is a journalist who divides his time between New York City and Columbia County. More of his work can be found in the Berkshire Eagle and on Substack.
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