A standard for defining civilization? How quaint

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I have this recurring fantasy that I can transport my dad circa 1965 to the present for just a bit. Let him watch a little television. Show him around my laptop and the internet. Take him on a stroll downtown in the city where he and my mom raised me.

I turned ten that year. My dad was running a small manufacturing concern and very civically involved. He held various offices in the First Presbyterian Church. Exchange Club. Foundation for Youth board. His company’s trade association. The alumni association of his alma mater.

Avid sailor, pilot and golfer.

He also smoked cigarettes, poured himself a martini and asked me about my school day as he looked at the mail when he got home from work. He and mom belonged to a bridge club and an investment club.

Staunch Republican and free-market champion.

And, as we know, the US began aerial bombing of North Vietnam and putting ground troops in South Vietnam. The Watts riots. Rock music was in the process of supplanting other forms of popular music from pop radio. Boys’ hair length was a subject of heated dinner table (and dean’s office) conversations.

Such a fantasy can only be taken so far. It would take more time than the kind of visit to the present I envision for me to unwind sixty years of developments and bring him up to date on every area of life.

So I’d take the time allotted to let him know what the latests developments are.

I would start with how woke things became during the last fifteen years.

“Dad, schools are letting kids state their pronoun preferences in case any of them are transgender. Men can marry men and women can marry women, and it’s legally recognized. Several violent men with police records are lionized simply because they were a particular race and involved in deadly police encounters with officers of a different race. Church attendance has dwindled to unprecedented lows. Marriage rates are way down. Government is subsidizing diffuse and intermittent forms of energy, interfering with the price of the familiar, dense, readily available forms.”

But then I’d move on to the present state of affairs.

“Dad, the rules-based international order by a relatively cohesive West - an order you and your fellow soldiers fought World War II to make possible - is collapsing in real time, and the current US President is the catalyst, and the beneficiaries are the tyranical, expansionist governments of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea. Europe is concluding that it must unite as never before and not depend on theUnited States to bolster the continent’s security.

“That president is on record at least twice as saying he hates his political opponents. He has had the East Wing of the White House torn down. He’s adorned the Oval Office in vulgar gold trim. He’s issued a short cartoon of himself piloting and airplane (which he doesn’t do in real life) wearing a crown and dumping human waste on a street rally. He insults and shouts at reporters to shut up during pressers. He appoints family members and people he’s known from his previous career as a real estate developer to high government positions for which they’re not remotely qualified. He imposes tariffs on allied countries, wreaking havoc on industries from steel to agriculture. He peddles his own brand of guitars, calendars, commemorative coins and other merchandise. He has engineered a government stake in US Steel and various mineral and computer software companies. He’s added his name to the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the US Institute of Peace. He’s on the verge of starting a war with Venezuela over some imaginary type of person his administration calls a “narco-terrorist,” even as actual tensions in Europe (due to Russian expansionism) are at a crisis level. He keeps hinting strongly at taking over Greenland. He thinks he’s renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. He’s had the sex life and marital track record of a feral cat. And he has a rabid following whose enthusiasm for him is not affected by any revelation about who he is.

“His entire administration is made up of foul-mouthed liars who have talked themselves into believing in protectionism and isolationism. Many of them also have the sex lives of crazed weasels.”

I guess what I’m getting at when I have this train of thought is the question of what a baseline for normalcy, decency, real logic, real appreciation of art and philosophy, and a real valuing of freedom looks like. And the auxiliary question of whether any amount of unwinding could preserve what my dad knew to be this country’s essence.

I could take him to an upscale restaurant and let him see what’s considered proper dinner-out attire, take him to an airport and let him see TSA agents herd the flyers like cattle. Let him hear some media personalities and public figures use “they” in situations in which “him or her” is grammatically called for. Let him read some of Trump’s all-caps tweets.

But it’s too late to give this kind of contemplation more than the time required for a fleeting thought experiment, isn’t it?

Would I ever like to be proven wrong over the course of the rest of this decade. But the West’s emergence from the Dark Ages took centuries. Granted, we have instantaneous communication technology now, but no one has any idea what is worth communicating.

I suppose there’s some small consolation in knowing he didn’t have to see all the above developments. They disgust me, but I’ve had seventy years of preparation for living through them.

We don’t pick the times we live in. But living in them honorably and productively isn’t so easy in some eras. Still, the effort must be made, for the sake of keeping the light from being completely extinguished.