The Questing Beast

While Biden hasn’t been polling well on “unity” compared to other isssues, Klain has repeatedly reassured colleagues that the country will be unified when every American gets their vaccine doses and their coronavirus relief checkshttps://t.co/JvjmoQsDXg

— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) March 14, 2021

In “The Best Years Of Our Lives” we get a time capsule of how World War II affected “real” people; not war heroes finding their courage and purpose and national unity on the battlefield.  And it turns out the “unity” of the war wasn’t all that unified.  One character returns from war having risen in the ranks and taken on the responsibilities of life and death and command, only to find the only work available to him is as the soda jerk he was before the war.  Civilian employers on the “home front” didn’t treat all returning vets as heroes. He’s accosted in the drug store by a man who tries to tell him the war was a scam, a conspiracy (I want to say a.Jewish one, but I think it was just a conspiracy of the wealthy.  Sound at all familiar?).  The central conflict of the movie is returning to civilian life, and how hard that is.  The war, it turns out, didn’t unify the country they way I thought it did watching World War II movies and Bugs Bunny war-era cartoons as a kid.  There were disagreements about the war even after we had won it; and while Pearl Harbor was a galvanizing and even nationalizing moment, that “unity” only lasted so long as the war effort subsumed everything.  In peace, the fractures resumed. As African-Americans began to demand their rights as veterans returning from war, the country began to divide again, a division that wasn’t healed by the Supreme Court or civil rights legislation.  But the “unity” of the ‘40’s that everyone alive today takes as the normal state of this union has always been the aberration in our history.  In the 19th century we got as far as secession; in the 20th century we got civil rights and the violence of the’60’s and’70’s, all of which sowed the seeds that blossomed into Trump and QAnon.  In the 21st century, we got January 6, 2021. We’re into our third century, and national unity is still more honored in the breach than in the keeping, still more noticed in its absence than in its presence. Polls tell us 75% of the people approved of the relief bill just passed. That is national unity in reality if not in ideal.

What we have never had, is unity as the pundits look for it.  If we did, we’d be England united under the monarchy (the “unity” of Great Britain is another question entirely). We were divided on the war until Pearl Harbor, but our unity was never 100% uniform. Even the idea of “unity” is a myth, like the London “fog” which isn’t fog at all, but air pollution from so many coal stoves burning at once in the English winters.  Unity of the type some President is supposed to create is just as mythical.  It’s the product of a story we’ve all agreed was true once upon a time; it is not reality. 

Everything old is new again. And again, and again, and again.