November 20, 2008 Issue
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Classified Chestnut Hill Local Don't Miss an Issue, Tell us what you see or Winner of Two |
Opinion
A light or two in the dark For years, this was our annual session of indulgence, a holiday spending spree that began after Thanksgiving (these days, Halloween), culminating in a holiday gift fest at the end of the year. Yes, the holidays are about sharing traditions with family and loved ones, but the backdrop has always been the gift buying and gift giving. The economy, we’ve been told over and over again, depends on it. Annually, we get stories in newspapers, TV and radio about Black Friday midnight openings and retail sales indices. This year, however, the backdrop to the holiday season is grim news from all economic corners. Credit markets have dried up, unemployment is climbing and the stock market is tumbling. The national dialogue is now preoccupied with deciphering hedge fund failures, bailout package details and credit default swaps. Shoppers, fearful of the news and worried about the future for the first time in a long time, are not spending money as they have before. Prognosticators are reading the tealeaves and they don’t see a happy ending to 2008. Locally, we’ve had our own grim news. Since September, nearly a dozen Chestnut Hill retailers have closed or have announced they will close by the end of the year. The economic downturn, recession – whatever its proper name – has played different roles in all of these closures, but the end result is going to be a large number of vacant properties on the Avenue that Chestnut Hill is not used to. We can only hope that more announced closures don’t follow slow December numbers. Locally, Chestnut Hill and other Northwest Philadelphia residents who may feel there’s not much they can do have several options this week. First, on Thursday, Nov. 20, the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission will hold a three-hour open house and public meeting at the Chestnut Hill Library (4:30 to 7 p.m.) to discuss an ongoing regional study that will give those who attend a voice on everything from use of local properties (like Magarity Ford) to public transportation. The study should be of interest to many as it includes, not only Chestnut Hill, but also Mt. Airy, Germantown, Flourtown, Erdenheim, Wyndmoor and Lafayette Hill. Second, on Friday, Nov. 21, the Chestnut Hill Business Association will hold a celebration at 5 p.m. Friday to light up the Avenue’s trees and, it is hoped, the spirits of local shoppers and shopkeepers. The latter have been putting a brave face forward in interviews in this paper and in a Saturday, Nov. 15, story in the Philadelphia Inquirer, but privately, when they don’t expect to be quoted, they say they are worried. They are counting on their neighbors to shop locally. Hillers who want to act locally and focus their holiday spending here as much as possible can do so on Friday. It will not only be a nice atmosphere for holiday shopping, but an opportunity to celebrate with neighbors. The times are certainly dark, and there is not much point to pretending otherwise. We can, however, if we put our minds to it, add a little light. Pete Mazzaccaro
The Day After still resonates — 25 years later Late November 1983, I found myself standing outside my parents’ home in suburban Pittsburgh in mute terror as I studied a metallic-looking speck in a bank of gray clouds that stretched across the horizon. I was 13 years old and had just watched The Day After, a 1983 made-for-TV movie fictionalizing a nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union — and I was reasonably sure the speck signified an end to my short and happy life. Paralyzed by fear, I suspected that I had discovered a Soviet ICBM bent on our destruction. In a vaporizing flash, everything I knew and loved — my friends and family, my dog, the video arcade at the mall, the defensive line of the Pittsburgh Steelers — would be instantly, irrevocably gone. For nearly 30 seconds, my heart raced as I stood transfixed in the chilly autumn air. Was it time for nuclear war? Or just time to go inside for a nice cup of hot chocolate? I stood and waited a few seconds more to find out if there was going to be a tomorrow. In the end, Pittsburgh remained un-scorched and some cocoa duly prepared by a mother wholly unaware that an entire apocalypse had just passed through her son’s imagination — but not before a terrifying image of absolute destruction had superimposed itself in my imagination over our quiet and peaceful little neighborhood. Like millions of other kids growing up in the 1980s, The Day After was a jarring and seminal event for me. In the 25 years since its airing, I can recall dozens of conversations with people who had similar reactions to the movie — usually in the form of lingering fears popping up at odd and unexpected moments. In terms of its widespread insinuation into our collective consciousness, the movie was as much a touchstone as Easy Rider or Saturday Night Fever had been for previous generations. Originally broadcast on ABC, The Day After represented a moment of national conversation almost unthinkable in our world of fractured media choices. In terms of household viewership, it had been the fifth most viewed program in television history. Nearly 100 million Americans viewed at least part of the film. Nearly as many watched the roundtable discussion that followed, which featured such intellectual luminaries as William F. Buckley and Carl Sagan. (It was during this debate that Sagan compared the nuclear arms race to “two men standing waist deep in gasoline; one with three matches, the other with five.”) It is tempting to compare The Day After to another movie, Dr. Strangelove, that seems to cover similar ground. Both films helped crystallize and internalize a generation’s Cold War anxieties. Where Dr. Strangelove dissected the absurd logic of the Cold War with cathartic humor, The Day After offered the viewer no such release. Instead it approached its subject with such a lumbering realism — verging at times into outright hoakeyness — that it was impossible not to see it as a plausible image of miseries of nuclear war. The plot follows several residents of Lawrence, Kansas, in the aftermath of a nuclear exchange. Though the characters seem mostly plucked from the director’s stock book of Midwest stereotypes — including the pragmatic farmer and the decent, white-haired doctor — it was shocking at the time to see a movie where ordinary people attempt to survive a nuclear war far from the seats of power. The movie’s director, Nicholas Meyer, in fact purposely avoided delivering any particular political message. Meyer claimed in an interview that he wanted politics completely out of the film. The movie’s message, he said, was nothing more complicated than “nuclear war is bad.” Where Dr. Strangelove was gallows humor of the highest caliber — offering the viewer, if nothing else, the dignity of great wit in the face of the abyss — The Day After maintained all the grinding specificity of a root canal. The 60s, it seems, even knew how to make nuclear holocaust more joyful.
As a child of the 80s, of course, I was well aware that the 80s was no Age of Aquarius. With only the faintest idea of what “decadence” meant, I knew that the scourge of AIDS had pretty much ended it. We were told that, from that moment on, life would somehow be more serious—and that the most elemental human desires would now be fraught with gravest danger. To be a child of the 80s was to open the door to the party only to find everyone inside already sleeping off their hangover. The decadence of the 70s, which collapsed in the age of AIDS, had been matched by a newly austere foreign policy. In the ascendance of the Reagan years, the idealistic foreign policy of the late 1970s became as despised and endangered as the promiscuous sexual mores of the Disco years. Multilateralism, a fetish for human rights, and such do-gooderism as giving the Panama Canal back to Panama had began to be seen as decadent indulgences the nation could no longer afford. In its place came an aggressive foreign policy that, during the early 80s at least, seemed to replace any hint of idealism with bluster. Suddenly the Cold War was back with a vengeance. The Soviet Union now became the “Evil Empire” (evoking no less than the imperial Death Star of The Empire Strikes Back). Memorably, a Reagan Defense Department official was even quoted as saying that nuclear war could be survived if there “are enough shovels to go around.” It was the first time in history that the government created anxiety merely by contemplating a victorious war. Perhaps the most terrifying part of the movie, in fact, was not the after effects of nuclear war — which though perhaps “plausible,” still remained essentially unimaginable — but the believable way its events unfolded. The war began as a series of increasingly nervous TV news announcements that resulted from military grandstanding gone awry. The events seemed to track the peace-through-strength saber-rattling of the Reagan administration of the early 1980s, which, like the Bush foreign policy of today, stressed credible use of force above all other considerations. It was in this environment that the movie struck a chord. Though promoted for months and predicted to be widely viewed, executives at ABC were surprised at the sheer numbers that ended up viewing. In fairness, however, it should be noted that in his diary, Ronald Reagan noted that the film made him “very depressed” and that after successful arms limitations talks later in the 80s, a Reagan official sent director Meyer a note letting him know that The Day After had been an impetus for the talks. The price of great national power is anxiety. It’s likely that, as long as America is a great nation, our youth will grow up in with anxiety. In the 25 years since the broadcast of The Day After, we have traded the imagined (yet still unimaginable) prospect of nuclear calamity for the concrete (yet amorphous) threats rising from terrorism. The blunder years of the Bush Administration offers those coming of age in this decade a set of anxieties less dramatic than the threat of nuclear extinction — a threat not entirely eradicated, of course, but long since supplanted in our imagination — but more immediate. Many of the attack scenes in The Day After were taken from 70s disaster films. Were this movie to be remade, a director could simply use news footage from 9-11. Some of the scenes of destruction from The Day After marked an uncanny resemblance to the dust and panic of that day. Nothing that happened during the 1980s can compare to the horrifying reality of 3,000 Americans slaughtered on our own soil — nor the thousands more that died in the resulting wars. Nor could we have imagined in 1983 leaving a great American city like New Orleans to fend for itself after a disaster due to the gross incompetence of the government. And with a financial system now teetering on the precipice (the result of letting the foxes guard the financial chicken house) the nation is on the brink of yet one more shock. No one can tell where these great American disasters will lead. We all hope and pray the worst has already happened. If the last eight years has shown us, however, its that things can always get worse. The Day After will mark the 25th anniversary of its broadcast this coming November. I do not envy the youth coming of age at the time of this anniversary. They face problems more immediate than any faced by our relatively safe and secure generation— and will need reservoirs of resilience and character we never needed. Robert Slack is a Philadelphia writer.
Another way of reading on the Reading My first question, going anywhere by train, is what to read. Generally speaking I prefer to take a small book, preferably a paperback that fits my jacket pocket. Long wait on a train platform? No problem, I have my book. Very long wait at the doctor’s office? Take your time doc; I can get in an hour of reading waiting for the five minutes you spend with me. No delay, large or small, daunts the devoted reader who’s remembered to bring a good book along. For this ride I took bang Bang , by Mt. Airy writer Lynn Hoffman (2007, available through Amazon). I actually read this book last year, but it has haunted me, so I wanted to re-read some passages. And since the action of the book takes place in Center City, Philadelphia, an atmospheric appropriateness tinged my choice. Hoffman is also a food, wine and beer writer who knows the Philadelphia restaurant scene as a consumer and behind-the-scenes observer, both of which color his unique and tense (and satiric) “crime and revenge” story. All good intentions aside, however, I did not open the book once I got on the train — though I did re-read bang Bang at home that night. No, once the train rolled into motion I started another kind of reading. Sitting on the right, facing forward, I was mesmerized by the backyards of the houses and business buildings the train passed by. The sad, slanted, paint-peeled, rusty underside of things that once were shiny and new makes me feel, if not sad, pensive. And philosophical. My first years on this remarkable, unpredictable planet were spent out in West Philadelphia. The backyard fences sagged even then. And those leaning, tired fences enclosed small yards barely covered with grass — the entire natural world for us city children. Some blades of grass, dirt to scratch in, a bee hovering over white clover, sumac growing out of a crack in the wall where just enough dirt had flown to help the tough seed get a grip. The walls and cornices and rooftops of the city are filled with these gritty, determined survivor plants. A slanted fence, a patch of grass, a sagging clothesline and a father and mother in the grass holding up their two-year-old son for a Brownie snapshot, another, younger baby lying on the blanket beside them. I have a constant urge, every time I take this ride, to get off the train at the next stop and go down and wander in and out of those alleys, explore those lots where tall weeds have sprung out of the cracks — as though I could, like stepping through a curtain, re-enter the past: Philadelphia as it then was, as I was, as my departed parents and grandparents were. It’s all so sad, in the happiest, most inspiring way I could imagine. I always get off the train feeling so philosophic and calmed. Lovely, and cheaper than a lobotomy during off-peak hours. My lunch with my friend was pleasurable. We walked together afterwards to Suburban Station. From there he went back to work, poor fellow (actually, he loves his job), and I rode the right-hand side of the R8 back to Chestnut Hill. On this leg of the journey I spent half my time noticing my fellow passengers. Four of them were actually reading books! A very pleasant sight and one I always interpret as the … what is the opposite of ‘decline’? … the ‘incline’? I’ll say: The ‘Rise’ of the West. Naturally I get nosey and try to see what they’re reading. One middle-aged, respectable-looking fellow was reading a book called Mormon Scientist. Typical Hiller? I wondered. But at Allen’s Lane he asked the conductor, “How many stops to the Chestnut Hill Station?” and several people turned and assured him that was the end of the line, so he couldn’t miss it. Near him sat another fellow, middle aged, neatly trimmed beard, wearing a luxurious tweed jackets and, beside him, a sharp-looking snap-brim hat with a leather band. Reading Wilkie Collins’ Basil. (Originally 1852.) There you go, I thought. A professor. He can’t be reading that just for pleasure. I thought I’d ask, but he left the train at Carpenter’s. A well-dressed-for-the-office woman had a large hardback in hand, but closed it before I could see what she’d brought. I guessed that a book that size is the mark of a regular commuter. The other reader was sharply dressed in black slacks, black bulky turtleneck, comfy low shoes, and gray hair. She was deeply into Henry James’ The Wings of The Dove. She disembarked at Highland, my stop also, though I didn’t bother her with any of my usual “Why are you reading that?” questions. I felt as warmed and happy and fulfilled by my experience as Wally Shawn at the end of My Dinner With Andre. I’d been out in the big world, seen all the bustling people, had a good meal and a great conversation with an interesting friend and then spent my two train rides in one of my favorite ways: reading without a book. I welcome your comments, questions, or anything you want to share at: gilmorebooks@yahoo.com.
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