Being Ordinary

I read myself to sleep most nights. Anytime from 5 minutes to 2 hours after opening the book (yes, an old-fashioned paper-and-ink one) I zone out and it falls out of my hand. That wakes me up just enough to turn out the light, and that is that until morning. The nighttime reads vary in metaphorical heaviness. A few are weighty but there are lots of lightweight detective novels and sci-fi in the mix as well. Oddly, the lighter reads sometimes provoke more afterthoughts. Such was the case with one recent airy sci-fi novel.
 
Fata Morgana (Italian for Morgan le Fay) is a term for a kind of mirage that hovers over the horizon. It is also the name of a B17 bomber in the 2018 novel Fata Morgana by Steven R. Boyett and Ken Mitchroney. Boyett and Mitchroney are experienced screenwriters, and it shows in the structure and dialogue of the book. The premise: in 1943 a damaged B17 returning from a bombing mission over Germany passes through a dimensional portal into a post-apocalyptic future world. The concept is far from original, but that isn’t a serious negative. Very few sci-fi premises are entirely original anymore. What matters is how the author(s) build stories on them. This particular story is no Pulitzer candidate but it is entertaining enough. What piqued my curiosity from the beginning, however, was why the authors chose a bomber crew from 1943 as protagonists. Couldn’t they just as easily have been a 737 crew from 2018? Or a B2, to stick with the military? The authors don’t overtly explain their reasoning in any introduction or afterward, but the text itself tempts some conjectures. For one, setting the initial chapters in WW2 allows the crew (fans of the Captain Midnight sci-fi radio show) to be modern enough in their thinking to quickly grasp what has happened to them without them also saying (as a 21st century crew would), “Wait, I’ve seen this movie.” Perhaps more important, though, is the character of the men themselves.

Not only is the World War 2 generation all but gone, but their kids (Baby Boomers, mostly) are aging out as well, so the number of people with firsthand experience of it grows smaller each year. The generation that grew up in the Depression and then lived through the war was deeply flawed – as Boomers were all too quick to point out two decades later. There was little or no political correctness to them. Yet, they had a competence and style that I miss. They were more natural than most people are today. That’s a broad generalization, of course. Individuals are… well… individual. There are all types of people in all times and places, but the centerline of the bell curve (of the many bell curves) for cultural characteristics really does shift from one generation to the next due (presumably) to historical circumstances. There really are fashions in behaviors and attitudes. In the novel, there is one denizen of the fictional future world whose inculcated suppositions are almost as contrary to fundamental human nature as those typical of fashionable posturers in the real Western world of 2021. She evaluates the B17 crew thus:
 
“They were loud and rude and blunt, but they were highly trained and highly skilled, disciplined when the need arose, and admirable fighters. There was a kind of benign arrogance about them that managed to be charming and off-putting at the same time. If you were on their side they would help you, simple as that. There was also something very alive about them. They were spontaneous, emotional, sentimental. They told stupid jokes and played childish gags… Her own people seemed so deadly dull beside them.”
 
Back in the real world, I and my fellow Boomers in our youth commonly were unfair to the GI Generation on one point (on several points actually, but one that is relevant here): unlike the young lady in the novel, we thought they were dull. By and large they were when we knew them, but this was on purpose and it was in a good way. They had had enough excitement in their youths and weren’t seeking any more of it. After the war they were happy (eager even) to live ordinary lives. Of course they had high ambitions as people always do, but not high expectations. They weren’t disappointed with how their lives turned out if they didn’t move into a mansion on a hill; if they earned enough eventually to acquire a modest Cape Cod on a quarter-acre and a Ford in the driveway in a modest suburb, they figured they had scored plenty big – and not just financially. They were right.
 
This contrasts so much with their grandchildren and great grandchildren. I don’t mean to youth-bash. Boomers undeniably have a special awfulness all their own, but on this one point the contrast is greater with younger folk. There is a well-known formula in social psychology: happiness = reality/expectations. Members of the GI generation in the ‘50s and ‘60s commonly calculated a happiness answer over 1. Members of Generations Y and Z in the 2020s commonly do not. Contrary to modern myth, this is not because they are poorer. (They just might be poorer on average than GenX at comparable ages, depending on how one weights debt and the value of college, but not by much.) By every measure average living standards are higher than for their counterparts in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s; in addition, Gens Y and Z have received far more schooling (if not necessarily more education) than anyone ever before them. Reality isn’t so bad. Yet Millennials (Gen Y) and Gen Z report themselves as unhappier than their predecessors – a self-judgment substantiated by record rates of clinical depression. The problem seems to be with the expectations denominator. The 2019 Deloitte Millennial Survey listed their top five ambitions: travel (57%), being rich (52%), buying a home (49%), making a positive difference in society (46%), and starting a family (39%). Without commenting on the order of the list, one may note that all of those are hard – harder perhaps than expected after a childhood of being told in modern fashion “You can be anything you want to be.” Add to that a fear so commonplace it has an acronym: fear of being ordinary (FOBO). (One acquaintance recently said to me with genuine concern, “I don’t want to be bourgeois!”) Someone experiencing FOBO would consider that Cape Cod a failure.
 
It’s not a failure, of course. By historical standards it is fabulous wealth. If it seems ordinary compared to the dazzling lifestyle displays of Instagram stars, so what? My GI Gen parents in their admirably dull way always said that what matters at bottom is what kind of person you are. (They meant personally, of course, not having the “right” political views – a point they wouldn’t even have thought to clarify.) It’s a choke-inducingly hokey sentiment, but they were right about that too. “Ordinary decency” (also “common sense,” though that is off-topic) is a term once heard more often than today, but it hasn’t vanished from the lexicon. Perhaps it should be a sixth ambition for all of us.
 
 

Joe Walsh – Ordinary Average Guy