Eden as Eldorado, part two

As Ronald Reagan would surely not have said,"There he goes again!", namely construing the AD in purely individualistic terms. That is the greatest American fallacy, legitimizing the AD by celebrating how many millionaires (inflation, in more senses than one, makes that billionaires.)

I remember, oddly, the first book review I wrote in College English, of John Dos Passos' "USA". It ends with the anti-hero trying, with outstretched thumb, to hitch a ride back to New York City. My juvenile epiphany was that this country was good at making mendicants as well as millionaires. America has been indulging, for the most part unwittingly, in the most egregious double entry bookkeeping in the history of mankind.

I first became personally aware of this systematic mendacity when I went hiking across U.S.23 into the woods behind our summer cottage on Lake Huron. There I literally stumbled across humungous pine tree stumps, some up to three feet in diameter. Up until this at first puzzling discovery I was more than content with the (as I came to understand belatedly) second growth birches that were the glory of our fifty foot wide lot facing a thirty foot bluff on the Huron shore.

Where once I relished these sweet but dinky birch trees, there must have been millenium old stands of virgin pine.

Which brings me back to Grandpa Fitz, who had achieved more than moderate success in the American Dream department by organizing their obliteration! Hmmm, I pondered, because by then I was in graduate school.

As a boy, our elders had devised a Fourth of July family ritual of driving north about fifteen miles to the Lumberman's Monument in Oscoda. It has been in nearby Ausable that Grandpa Fitz had done his lumbering. There were three lumberman in that monument--two workers with huge bandsaws flanking a man with a notebook, clearly the organizer of the tree cutting. He was alleged to be Grandpa Fitz, and we basked in the warmth of having had such a distinguished forebear.

I could hardly wait until September--when school opened again at the Holy Rosary Academy in Bay City, Michigan--to let it be known among my classmates that my maternal grandfather was a Big Deal. Alas, at the first opportunity, one of my classmates challenged my interpretation--that guy in the middle was his grandpa. Out of such ironies does historical revisionism stem.

But I come not to dispraise my grandfather, but to bury false assumptions I came to learn as a teacher were endemic among Homo Americanus. "Making It"--to use Norman Podhoretz' premature memoir title--is what America is about. Your only responsibility is to make it "on your own" so long as you let others cut their own trails. Nothing could be more solipsistic.

Growing up in Detroit I became more and more aware of how vilely we were treating what were called "the colored". In 1943 I was working at my first job--selling women's shoes--at Gately's, a downscale downtown store with easy credit on Michigan Avenue. I had very snootily developed a negative attitude toward the Wasp/Ivy Leaguer who ran the store--until I saw him give safe harbor to a terrified old Negro fleeing from a howling mob. My first awareness that genteel facades don't matter if behind them is a humane spirit.

My first revisionism, alas, was that my sweet old Grandpa Fitz was a marauder as a lumberman! It would take Teddy Roosevelt and other early environmentalists to teach US that thoughtlessness had environmental consequences.