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Owen named them, "the old Lie," few periods of history seem to have relished war more, or taken to it more readily. From the array of wars that have ravaged Europe, the Middle East, the Congo, Korea, Malaya, Viet Nam and Central America in our times, with new sites added almost daily, one might conclude that the main characterizing idea of the past 60 years was war itself. (Who could have dreamed up the war in the Falklands?) It follows that what will have mattered most about these years is the apparent universal desire to knock each other off.
Yet an urge for self-destruction has not so characterized the period as the wider compulsions of experimentation and free expression, almost a motor reflex to lurch in new directions. In the years immediately following World War I, Gertrude Stein was offering as much challenge as pity when she branded Hemingway and his contemporaries as the "lost generation." Hemingway took to the bullring, Fitzgerald to the dance floor, where much of his nation joined him. Like Gatsby, most people "believed in the green light" at the end of the dock, despite the disillusionment and damnation around them.
Green was both the color of newness and the universal sig nal for go. To be sure, there were times when the light turned red, but that was almost always after things had already gone too far—after all the money was spent and the stock market crashed, after a demagogue had swallowed a dozen countries, afer the ashes of millions had been blown away. Before then, lands off, wait and watch. In 1934 Cole Porter wrote Anything ties; in 1970 Paul McCartney sang Let It Be.
How free can one be? The question has not seemed rhetorical. The century began with the Russians shaking the world, but he world seemed prepared to be shaken. Hitler was free to conquer most of Europe and to kill most of the Jews. India free; Africa free. In the 1930s scientists sought to free the atom. In the 1960s blacks and women sought freedoms of their own. Free ove. Free fall. Psychologists freed minds from guilt. Vatican II freed the church from its past. Drugs too proffered self-fulfillment. In the 1980s experimental engineers would see if the body could be freed from genetic dictates. With organ transplants, can one be free of mortality? Break the sound barrier, the color barrier, the four-minute mile. Rockets, free of gravity, shoot into space, land men on the moon—a demonstration of both organizational and individual will. The professional athlete becomes the free agent. Free Angela. Mr. Middle Class wishes to free himself from home, wife, children, job. Let it be.