There is a good thing about being in my early sixties: I know Walter Cronkite’s voice the second I hear it. So if the television is playing in the background on the Military Channel or the History Channel International as it so often is, I am alerted that there is a good show coming on by the sound of his voice.

I stopped what I was doing this morning to watch a show that covered the time from the Japanese Attack on Port Arthur through WWII. Cronkite referred to the ‘unity and disciple” of the Japanese culture standing out among Asiatic groups. And that triggers a memory of a 60 Minutes episode about Japanese businessmen in training being required to stand on a busy street corner shouting out about mistakes they have made.

Generals came from all over to view how Japan had mastered the strategy of Western war and modern weapons. Nine years later, as Cronkite announced, they would be at war with each other.

Yes, I remember the Schlieffen Plan – the assumption the Russians would take six weeks to deploy and that France would fall in that time. I like hearing Cronkite explain it so much better than any history professor I have had. I remain fascinated by the first engagement of that August begun war: an airplane spotted Germans in Belgium and British Cavalry was sent in which was repelled by a German group traveling on bicycles. There were pictures – pictures of these young Germans  – four abreast – pedaling along a road. Pictures of men on horses.

The Battle of Mons and the audio recording of a British soldier who won the Victoria Cross as he held the Germans off at the bridgehead long enough for the British Army to fall back. And I’m thinking of that man who had that voice – “He’s dead now, been for some time.” Cronkite is dead too, now . . . as are the 20,000 British who went “over the top” at the Somme and died in the very first hour.

And somewhere in the narrative I hear him mention that Napoleon had 20,000 shells at Waterloo; the British stocked up 3 million in preparation for the Somme.

Despite himself, there is pride in Cronkite’s voice as he speaks of Midway  when the battle seemed going Japan’s way until “Thirty-six American planes spotted the Japanese fleet . . . On that day, Japan started to lose the war.”

The show went on and ended talking about the month and year of ’45; I was born in ’48. I saw the generations of the time from 1905 to 1045 through the lens of accomplishment without visible war wounds. The maimed were hidden away in Veteran’s Hospitals; we didn’t see them. We saw the prosperity and vitality of the GI’s turned students. For awhile America was still the America of small towns and girls still wearing skirts and Currier & Ives holidays. There was energy and church going and laden dinner tables smelling of roasts and turkeys and pies. Autos were big and heavy. Shoes were leather and high-tops until the were bronzed and made into bookends.

I went to college in the era of Western Civilization; within a decade,  multi-culturalism would be re-witing the curriculum.  Political correctness would discourage questions. Citizens of the world . . . but I think it might be a facade – that we are still leaning toward our tribes. And, quite frankly, I wonder about what was remarked upon over a century ago – that Japanese “unity and discipline”.  I wonder, too, about just what the American spirit is now.

I guess I’m not being so political correct, mentioning something like this. But I see it; I think I do – in my electronics, in garages, in quality. I don’t think what I’m viewing is an optical illusion.