If there is an upside to the social isolation induced by the entirely legitimate “stay at home and flatten the curve” mantra, it was the decision, in a desperate need to find something useful to do, to clean out that room in the basement where everything “I just might need again someday” had been stored since moving into the house in 1989.
As one who has had a passion for music since childhood, the COVID-19 cleanup confronted me with my collection of VHS tapes, vinyls, reel-to-reel tapes, eight-tracks, cassettes, CDs and DVDs.
Netflix and iTunes — who knew?
Accompanying all this was an impressive collection of equipment: Receiver/amplifiers, VHS players, CD players (which became gradually more compact over the years) and DVD players — all vitally necessary to home entertainment over the years and, at the same time, marking the passages of a life well-lived.
For some reason, my 32-year-old son seems uninterested in inheriting this treasure trove and, without comment, points to my iPod (with thousands of downloaded tunes) and noise-cancelling Bluetooth earbuds.
Some kids have no understanding of the desperate search for “perfect stereo sound” or seamless TV movies that taunted their parents.
Music and movies have always been available to today’s generation via iTunes, high-end noise-cancelling earphones, speakers that weren’t the size of the Notre Dame organ, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Netflix and YouTube.
I, on the other hand, remember buying vinyl 12-inch “albums” for a single track I could not live without. Single iTunes tracks for a dollar or so — who knew?
But the real find of the COVID cleanup was a December 1943 copy of Life magazine.
As distractions from the serious issues which dominated the news of the day there was a two page series of images showing how much weight Alfred Hitchcock had shed as well as naughty glamour pics of Mary Martin’s legs, all a necessary diversion from the demands of the Second World War that dominated each edition.
The building, by the U.S. Army, of the Canol pipeline as a wartime expediency across Canadian territory was reported in Life simply as a major engineering feat, not a source of placards-in-the-street controversy.
Politically, in 1943, U.S. Democratic governor Keen Johnson, as his last official act before leaving office, restored the citizenship of a “housebreaker and hog stealer” and created 125 new Kentucky colonels.
Well, maybe some things have changed and others not so much.
No wonder politicians, even 80 years later, still find war or the prospect of a war a convenient pretext for fulfilling personal or political agendas.
In 1943 most Life ads relied for their appeal on a jingoistic “war theme.”
Even the prolific every-other-page alcohol and cigarette ads of the day featured war images.
That’s not to say that the war was not a serious, even necessary piece of business — it was, but Life’s feature articles inevitably emphasized the heroic side of war, not its downside.
Heroic accounts titled “Experience by Battle,” “Guadalcanal — The Jap,” “Submarine Warfare,” “Hill 609,” “The Saturation (by bombing) of Hamburg” and so on filled the pages of the magazine.
It was not until almost a generation later, somewhere between 1960 and 1964, usually via TV, that the brutal and graphic realities of war arrived in many households.
For almost a decade in between school, work, and dinners, the voting public could watch villages being destroyed, Vietnamese children burning to death and bodybags being sent home.
Then, in 1968, media coverage of the carnage of the Tet Offensive had an impact on public opinion, which finally moved from the celebration of war to resistance to war.
My how things had changed since 1943’s Life magazine celebration of the camaraderie and bravery of war.
Life ceased publication in 2000 but, what, I wondered, would Life magazine be featuring in 2020?
Given its somewhat xenophobic 1943 approach to journalism, how would it deal with a sketchy U.S. president, environmental controversies, racial intolerance, health care, the political management across the globe of the COVID pandemic, gun violence and the inadequate funding of public education?
Seventy years from now, will my grandchildren look back on 2020 issues of Time, Maclean’s and other newsmagazines and wonder what on Earth my generation could have been thinking not to have addressed these problems head-on?
Will they wonder if too much information from MSNBC, CNN, CBC and the networks served our consciousness no better than the 1943 Life magazine I found in my “junk room”?
Or will they decide as French sociologist, philosopher and cultural theorist Jean Beaudrillard wrote: “We live in a world where there is more and more information and less and less meaning”?
Geoff Johnson is a former superintendent of schools.
