To me, Nazis are part of “history,” but I remember Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan perfectly well, not as history but as lived experience from my childhood. In fact, in 1980, I was practically old enough to vote for (er, against) Ronald Reagan, so it doesn’t feel so long ago. But Jim Rockford (and, for that matter, James Garner) in 1977 would remember Nazis not just as childhood experience, but from their (earlier) adulthood.

As a child, I often wondered why so much of our popular culture (TV, movies, etc.) was “about” World War II, and Nazis in particular. Some sliver of this presumably had to do with the fact that the crimes of the Nazis were so extreme, and some part of it presumably had to do with the overrepresentation of Jews in Hollywood. But I realize now that most of it was simply due to the fact that World War II was a big disruptive thing that had recently happened to all the grownups in the world. Even my parents, young as they were, were old enough to have been affected by it — my father was even stationed at Great Lakes Naval Station in Waukegan, Illinois for a time, although the war ended before there was time to deploy him.

Similarly, I wonder whether the young political people I work with are curious about why Ronald Reagan looms so large in the popular consciousness. Part of it is no doubt due to the fact that he was larger than life even in life, and part of it due to his charisma, and part of it due to his ideas; but part of it is simply due to the fact that Ronald Reagan was a big disruptive thing that happened to all of the grownups in the world. Everyone my age and older — that is, basically, everyone old enough to have kids in middle school now, or older — has personal memories of that era.

And if you really want to blow your mind, consider this: when my grandmother was born (and she is still alive and well), the Civil War was as recent an occurrence as the Vietnam War is now, give or take a year or two. And I remember the Vietnam War, or at least the end of it; and I’m not that old. So my grandmother must have interacted with people in her childhood for whom the Civil War was part of their adult lived experience. And the oldest of those people, in their childhoods, would almost certainly have interacted with people who remembered the Revolutionary War from their adult experience. That’s a pretty remarkable formulation of the short duration of American history to date.

Dear editor of New York: The Novel for Kindle — the person whose name you render as “Marion ‘The Swamp’ Fox” is not a fictional character named Marion Fox; he is Francis Marion (1732-1795), known as “The Swamp Fox” for his elusiveness, an important historical person of the Revolutionary War era and one of the great heroes in whom South Carolina takes pride. There is not a schoolchild in South Carolina who has not been told, in hagiographic fashion, of his exploits. Indeed, I would wager that if you (yes, you) have only heard of two South Carolinians who died before you were born, one of them is bound to be Francis Marion. (The other is probably John C. Calhoun.)

The fact that this editor would think “The Swamp” is conceivable as a nickname for a historical person may suggest that Amazon’s ebook production is being outsourced to some country where knowledge of English is, shall we say, contingent. Or perhaps it’s just a typo in the original, but that seems exceedingly unlikely, as this is a reputable novel that seems to have been carefully copy-edited on the whole.

Fresno’s Fulton Mall pedestrianization project (which was originally planned to cover roughly a 20-square-block area) was the largest of its kind I’m aware of in any American city, and was hailed (in part by Gruen) as a transformative model. We all know what happened to those pedestrian malls, which were all the rage for about 10 years; their regravitation of their city centers was no match for the centrifugal force of suburbanization, and in any case (we know now) came too late. With very rare exceptions (like Miami Beach’s Lincoln Road and Santa Monica’s Third Street, both of which have been carefully curated and serve populations that include hundreds of thousands of strolling tourists), this kind of brutal pedestrianization has been a failure, at least on its own terms. (In contrast, more organic and porous pedestrianization and “auto diet” programs very often work well, like the new plazas along Broadway in Times and Herald Squares.) Only a force greater than urban renewal — namely, the organic reurbanization of America over the past fifteen or so years — has been able to start bringing the people back to places like these and reanimating them with some of the spirit they were originally intended to have.

This video is worth a watch if only to capture the sense of hopefulness in the narrator’s voice. There’s a wistfulness to the experience. Everyone was so sure this was going to solve everything! In Fresno, I can assure you (having stood on Fulton Mall myself roughly halfway through its current lifetime), it didn’t. Despite the blistering heat in the summer of 1986, I enjoyed my visit to Fresno, which had a sense of place and pride that was missing in the suburban neighborhood I grew up in; but it was in spite of, not because of, Fulton Mall. But oh, how I wanted to believe!

History and photos are on the excellent Downtown Association of Fresno Web site, which is also the source of the postcard photo you see above.

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If you’re feeling more substantive:

• Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam (video, 22 min.)
• AFSCME documentary on the Memphis sanitation strike (video, 10 min.)
• David Halberstam, The Children (via Amazon.com)

Oh, and yesterday was Tarpon Springs’ first annual Manatee Celebration Day. Photo taken on the door of the Tarpon Springs historical museum, where the inimitable Julie Peeler gave us the nickel tour after hours. In the museum, along with local historical artifacts, are replicas of the eight ten-foot murals about Florida history (painted by Tarpon Springs artist Christopher Still) that hang in the Florida State House in Tallahassee.

Incidentally, Hellas Restaurant was already in the Foursquare database, although it was listed as “Hella’s…”

CONSOLATION GROOK

Losing one glove
is certainly painful,
but nothing
compared to the pain,
of losing one,
throwing away the other,
and finding
the first one again.

I want to give my own special shout-out to one of the titles on Kelman’s list:  American Colonies: The Settling of North America by the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Alan Taylor.  I read a fair amount of American and European history for pleasure, and this book (which I read in 2005) is certainly the most engaging book of North American history I read during the decade.  In particular, it effectively illustrated for me, as no previous book had done, the extent to which the European settlement of North America was a complex interplay of political and social intrigue between the European settlers and Native American communities (and of American, British, French, Spanish, and Russian colonial interests, and of course the economic interests of large planters and manufacturers) that lasted for well over a century.  From the moment I picked it up, I couldn’t put it down — the narrative of settlement, made up of dozens or hundreds of factions each acting in its own interests, propelled me forward.

The book also includes an annotated bibliography, which I remember aggressively mining at the time for further reading.