I grew up watching a small black and white television in the living room. Not the family room, because we didn’t have family rooms in 1,300 square foot ranches in 1955. My older brother and I would watch the Mickey Mouse Club, heart throbbing as Annette would grace the screen — all 1.5 inches of grainy image. That was high tech back then.
Lassie would dash back into the one room farmhouse and announce that Timmy had fallen in the well again, and Superman would boldly declare that he stood for Truth, Justice and the American Way. Oh, the patriotic pride we would feel — young army brats, freshly back from Germany where our father had been stationed for three years. But that’s another story of concentration camps and sausage restaurants on the Danube.
Back to Superman, because that’s what this is all about. Truth, Justice and the American Way. Straight from the 1940’s comic books — not graphic novels. They were comic books. A graphic novel was Classics Illustrated doing The Last of the Mohicans.
Truth was the TRUTH. It was telling the truth. Real truth. What do we have today? We have Truth Social, and we are told to believe it. But what is it? It is whatever Donald Trump and the MAGA movement wants you to believe. I’m not saying it’s all lies, because everything has to have an element of truth to stand. But believe at your own peril.
How about X.com? Look at the bots. Look at how many times posts have been reposted — not 5 or 6 times, but hundreds. That’s a machine. Posted by Betsy, a housewife from Atlanta. Check her profile — courtesy of Elon, finally — and you find that Betsy has changed her name 83 times and is posting from Asia or Eastern Europe.
Get a clue.
Justice. That’s a good one. Look at what our courts have become. We have so much partisan influence that the very word has little meaning anymore. I learned the hard way fifty years ago that all you can reasonably expect is a decision. But fifty years ago it was a mostly unbiased and impartial one.
Today at the federal level that’s an ongoing war. A war because we do still have honorable people in power — but they are outnumbered and outfunded, all the way to the very top. It’s a stacked deck.
And lastly, perhaps the most ambiguous but most important — The American Way.
When you’re ten years old watching the Mickey Mouse Club, Superman, Zorro, Father Knows Best and the rest, the American Way seems perfectly clear. We were strong. We were proud. We had clear cut enemies. At school we were told to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance with pride, and when the air raid sirens went off we got under our desks — as if that would actually do any good. But it made us feel safe.
We had presidents who built America. Eisenhower chose highways over rail because he saw how disabling rail lines stopped troop movements. He should have prioritized both. JFK, with all his faults, still told us that our strength was to stand together and build a great nation. Not a monument.
Sometime after that I took a break. I married, I divorced, I had children — not necessarily in that order. I raised families. I now have grandchildren. I learned how to build businesses and was part of the great technological revolution — time spent at gin joints like Tektronix, Intel, my own consulting and more.
And when I stopped and took a breath, I looked around and saw an America that had become super wealthy and gone to hell at the same time.
So I ask you — by today’s standards, what is the American Way?
