An Idyllic Marriage - No Diversity, The Happy Family Of Fifties Television Returns

'Où sont les neiges d’antan?' wrote medieval poet Francois Villon where the melting snow symbolizes the disappearance of past beauties and glories.  

 

'I am a poet' said Marnie Owens, reading  Ballade des dames du temps jadis in her richly flowered garden in a pleasant suburb of the city, 'and I want to live in the past', a lament by a woman who had lost in love more times than she could count, and for whom life in a far more romantic age might have been more congenial. 

'But I can't' she said, turning on the television to watch a rerun of Ozzie and Harriet a family sitcom of the Fifties where Ozzie Nelson, his wife and two boys led an idyllic life.  There was nothing to interfere with their schooldays, family dinners, and evenings by the fire.  There were no hostile mobs in the streets, no diversity, and only one common, shared identity. 

It was an age of innocence, a patriotic, settled time after American victory in WWII, the return of heroic soldiers and the beginning of an era of unparalleled prosperity. 

Every family was like Ozzie and Harriet's, or so it seemed.  Everybody had a home, a garden, children, and faith.  Times were good, strangers tipped their hats, neighbors looked out for children walking to school, Fourth of July was a celebration not just a three-day weekend, and the future was bright. 

There were a few unmarried people in New Brighton, the small New England town where Marnie grew up - Anton the hairdresser, business partners and roommates Edna and Zoe; old maids Hortie Brown and Mable Finch, warty old things who came out of the house only to hang the wash; and a few 'confirmed bachelors' who were normal enough, interested in women, solicitous and engaging, but simply not interested in permanence.  

These bachelors were not Casanovas or Don Juans, unmarried but always with a beautiful woman in tow, just single men who lived alone.  'If you had known Norma Carlson', said a lifelong resident of the town, 'you wouldn't be surprised that Anthony never married.  

Passersby could hear Norma shouting at her husband through the open windows, a horrible howling, a lambasting of the poor man who took the abuse and every morning went to his office at the New Brighton Bank & Trust, for duty demanded it. 

Shortly after his wife gassed herself in the garage, Herb Carlson married again to a woman who turned out to be just as hectoring and mean.   Some men simply can never be whole. 

But all in all, the town of New Brighton was as settled, happy, and forward-looking like a thousand others in post-war America, and Marnie was a pleasant, ordinary, well-adjusted child. 

As a young adult she expected to be courted and married soon after college. She had gone to one of the Seven Sisters schools, Ivy League parallels when co-education was still some time in the future.  She did well, dated, went to mixers, had the frequent weekend at Yale, and looked forward to graduation day by which time she hoped to be sporting a diamond. 

No such luck, and she watched with no little disappointment as her classmates headed for the altar, the suburbs, children, and the good life. 

Times were changing when she graduated.  Marriage, children, and the suburbs was not the be-all and end-all of a woman's existence.  One of her classmates joined IBM in the time of mainframes and the first inklings of computer facilitation, and other secured a position at a French pharmaceutical firm experimenting with new mood changing drugs. 

The less serious joined publishing firms in New York, but these were just holding pens, something to fill the hours of the day until it was time for the singles bars of the Upper East Side - meeting places for the interested and eligible. 

No dice either way.  Marnie was neither a math whiz nor a biologist, and she was far too picky to find a mate at just anyplace on Second Avenue.  She had grown up, after all, in the almost unreal idyll of New Brighton and had faithfully watched Ozzie and Harriet. 

The men at the singles bars simply weren't up to it.  They were either too full of themselves, too busy making money, or involved in too many serial affairs to make the grade. She wanted a kind man, a thoughtful man, a good man, and he was not to be found at Max's On Second. 

Nor was Marnie one of those women who took pot luck and assumed that they would reform the men they randomly picked and make them into the husbands they wished them to be. 

She was simply a woman caught in a time warp.  She couldn't believe the Fifties and its generous propriety were done and gone.  It simply wasn't possible, and so it was that after five years in New York and then five more in Washington, she was still single. 

Of course she had lovers.  Single and looking did not necessarily cancel a good time, so there was Henry from Treasury, Bob from the East Wing, and Luke, an Army Major from the Pentagon. 

As time went on, America changed, and suddenly Marnie's world was diverse.  She in all her years in New Brighton, Miss Porter's School for Girls, and her four years at Smith had never seen a black man except for the janitor in Main House.  There were no Latinos or Asians either, and her social environment was still as pristinely white as that on Ozzie and Harriet. 

Now, things were different.  Not only was the crop of eligible men meager, but half of them were gay and the other half a genetic admixture as complex as that of a Turk in whose blood ran that of Hittites, Mongols, Circassians, Bulgars, Greeks, Russians, Georgians, and Syrians. 

There was nothing wrong with this racial potpourri.  It was just that she was still a Fifties girl who wasn't concerned so much about whiteness per se, just sticking with her own kind - and that kind was becoming a rare commodity. 

In Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story, the Broadway 50s musical based on Romeo and Juliet, a boy and girl from two opposing gangs, one white and the other Puerto Rican, fall in love. Anita, a friend of Maria, warns her against getting involved with someone from a different community.  She sings:

A boy like that
Who'd kill your brother
Forget that boy
And find another
One of your own kind
Stick to your own kind
A boy like that
Will give you sorrow
You'll meet another boy tomorrow
One of your own kind
Stick to your own kind

“Stick to your own kind” is her refrain. If you don’t, you’re asking for trouble.  Of course Maria does not listen, bad turns to worse, and the final scene is a melodramatic replay of the end of the star-crossed lovers.

Diversity has been heralded by progressives as the ideal society a multicultural community in which different ethnic and racial groups celebrate their own special identities than 'one nation under God'.  Yet in what society has that ever worked?  The earliest human settlements were suspicious of the other.  Tribal groups fought each other for territory, resources, and influence.  Ethnic majorities always ruled their minorities. 

Brazil is renowned for its seamless multiculturalism, yet although the white population is less than half of the country's people, it makes up most of the ruling class, the wealthy, and the privileged.  Brazil maybe multicultural, but it is a white nation.  

 

China is made up of a hundred different ethnic groups, but the ruling party insists on a singular culture without which the country cannot remain strong, economically and financially powerful.  Diversity equals divisiveness. 

So, there was nothing unusual in Marnie Owen's desire to marry a white man, live in a white suburb, and have white children.  It was shared values, a common cultural and social history, a shared legacy.  Marriage was hard enough without having to navigate tricky international waters. 

Marnie didn't want just a white husband and a white community, she wanted it to be an Ozzie and Harriet Fifties community where neighbors looked out for children, where faith was the rule not the exception, and where church dinners, chatting over the back fence, and mutual respect were the stuff of community life. 

She was lucky.  There aren't that many Ricky or David Nelsons around these days. The gene pool of such men has shrunken to almost nothing; but there he was, under a lamppost, looking up at the sky on a starry night, dreaming - or at least that is how Marnie remembered it, embellishing everything as she did with the brush of what she called 'idealistic realism'.  A restoration of the Fifties was indeed possible (reality) and to wish for it (idealism) was to create it. 

They found their idyll, lived a long and happy life within it, isolated - or at least insulated - from the diversity outside, their own Grover's Corners, Ozzie and Harriet Land. 

'Isn't it dull there?', wrote a distant California cousin; but of course she missed the point. In sadly short life, disruption - diversity- did nothing by way of enlightenment, peace, or spiritual evolution.  It only distracted and disassociated. 

'We're just fine', Marnie answered. 'Come visit us sometime'.