“If I were the Devil”……by Paul Harvey in 1965 America

I watch tv…..I am not a tv fan.   I watch the History Channel,  occasionally the Military channel, some of animal environment stuff,  tornado hunters, but most of all I watch tv true crime collections.

I used to enjoy watching  sports,  especially  Vikings and Twins.   Gradually, I discovered losing was boring and turned to other expressions in life……my devotion to the art of landscape garden in particular.     I still work most days of the landscape season’s labor….and am blessed considering that I can still do so.

I also  watch and  live  in  our time of decay of the American Way.

Those who cost in life have become powerful politically, narcotically, financially,  educationally,  sexually, and religiously well organized to disenfranchise those of us who still believe and strive to defend traditional American values.

Barack Hussein Obama is still president.

This past weekend I saw for the first time a Hollywood film I haven’t seen in nearly 70 years when probably on a Sunday afternoon my family, a mom, a dad, and a sister went  off to see “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn at our neighborhood movie theater.

Americans had a bigger vocabulary then.  It was a cleaner, moreChristian-influenced communication  filled with a variety of adjectives and  and adverbs with their command of  nuances  Obama America,   even its college graduates no longer use or understand.

The ‘f’ word and kin are easier  to pronounce and easier to reach regardless of one’s level of emotion.

These, after all, are the days of emotion over mind..

The War had ended.   Stories of American life and its struggles replaced the battlefronts and its heroes after summer, 1945.

No movie I have ever seen anywhere at any time   has had a more powerful  effect upon me  as a person seeking good and learning,  than  “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” .    I identified the film’s  mother with my own  mother and the father with my own non-drinking but  great guy and hard-working dad whom I adored but who was always at work.

I remember it being the first time I ever thought outside a child’s world,  about the  future….. …and it made me afraid…

.Could my life, could my family of my future  wind up like this family and its tree  in Brooklyn?   Preferring facts, at first,  I sped to the library to find out what the tree might be……

Ailanthus……I learned and never forgot..

It was then, a direct result from seeing the movie,  I, a ten year old,  began my exploring.      After school while my mother was at work,  on a ten cent   token, I found I could sneak downtown St. Paul to explore skid row and the seedy slums I like the one I  had viewed watching  the movie.   I did so twenty or thirty times over the next few years.

I was a high school teacher for 13 years.   For eight of those years I taught senior year students  classes called ‘Modern Problems’.    I hadn’t forgotten the film and its profound effect on my developing curiosities, but I hadn’t found a use for it  for classroom studies.   I was a Liberal then.

If I were that teacher today…..I would require viewing the film for every student of mine…….and probably would be fired for doing so.

I rarely  watch the Ted Turner Classic Film channel, and then only if the film is preWar.   I have always been taken by history things.    Old movies are part of that take.

Last Friday evening , I caught “Tree”  at its title-time while spining the channels, as if the movie were meant for me….and for me only.

Twenty years after I viewed the film, Paul Harvey, a well known conservative radio personality in the early days of the American moral wars against its Christian values,  represented the “Old Guard”….the kind considered  unworthy of quote and thought by  any and  all  modern up-to-date  American collegiate graduate’s ears,  mind, and mouth.

Chaos from  the American Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976 with  its anarchy and violence, its atheism, feminism, and  black racism, its sexual revolution had arrived.

The American decay had begun.

I had just finished teaching and studying at college, filled with college knowledge and ideas.    I transfered to teach at  a working class white neighborhood high school in Minneapolis, Thomas Alva Edison Senior High School.      It was there I learned much  about the best in America.    It was then I’d listen to Paul Harvey, dutifully  because parents of my students often would listen to his radio tidbits….such as the following:

(Unfortunately the radio habit above was corrupted by a foreign insert.

Please review and think.     Thanks.