On popular music these days I hear a lot of

  I think

  anthems

  Reminds me of George Washington's low point before Independence.  People rallied in their own ways as they grappled with how things were piling up on the scales.

  When the bones are good

  Poets couched criticism to keep a low profile; churning sentiment, the ocean spray plonked words like skeleton keys.  There was a shift from romance, let's just write about love and shit, into

  There were complicated morale issues.  Fur trappers couldn't be bothered with Cotillion clothing measurements.  Spies were ambiguous.  The compassing, canon-toting ragged uniformed, tired legs couldn't be anything but soldiers.  Town squares were still forts but with outlets like pubs and taverns there was, on the sly, increasing chatter like off-track-betting.

  The start up nation went through a bunch of different flag designs.

  People were eating a lot of onions.

  There was and wasn't a general sense of united.

  Back when our poets were trying to convince us that we didn't start the fire psychologists were pushing hard for personal responsibility.  There was a shift from having become a pop rocks sugar-coated warring culture, abusive as all get out, BUT

  We couldn't seem to decide on united beyond blue jeans.

  I was traveling a lot.  My touchstone was my mother's take on Olympic ice skating.  For my reams and reams of wrestle, she'd keynote as the calm continuum, a master wordsmith, a brilliant commentator because she just uttered that truth;

  That truth that is standing before you in an understated formal-wear version of Glory.

  That one's under a lot of pressure, she'd get me to look up from reading and see a Russian trying to out point another.  I'd notice whole scene on screen and sink back into my nautilus shell.

  Oooooo, she'd wince as a Korean slightly turned an ankle.  Aaaaah, she'd be joyous for the dance-skating couple who'd gone to college and delivered pizza to get to the pinnacle.  They don't give up, I'd hear her say as I was reading a paragraph on shredded torsos and landmines.

  Some shifts are sea change.  Some wars come to people.  Other shifts are subtle.  Sometimes people slide and/or backslide into warring.  There is a continuum even when there is obliteration.

  The Serb "demands" were nothing new in the formulas of culture/warring that had developed as the Cold War hung like a blimp no one would bust.  Hostages, embassy take-overs, the tit for tat reporting turned jungle of information running craggy like Vietnam's peaks and valleys, just too lates in sat reports and phospherous residue....even people not directly involved with "war" had become accustomed.  In the 1980's and early 90's the TV magazine show 60 Minutes was a Reader's Digest version of the world.

  Likewise the photograph by Susan Meiselas/Magnum Photos (page 243, Problem), "Dr. Clyde Snow, forensic anthropologist, exhumes the blindfolded skull of a Kurdish teenager from a mass grave in Erbil, northern Iraq, December 1991" is the equivalent to a WPA image of woman holding rusty-bottom bucket.

  People "vegged out" in front of episodes of Ring the Bell as we had Gilligan's Island.  Without red, white, and blue balloons an America created a parallel universe where it was dropping into a USO tent.  Like the parents who bought toys by the cartfull and dry cleaned Granny's afghan every spring, a virtual safe space was put into place before the Internet and social media.  And the TV networks were able to pinpoint hacks into the TV tubes, like Hamas in ski masks targeting widest audience during Sunday evening Disney programming.  Spliced it from where?????  Uniformed AV people rank and filed with light bulb electronics.

  What blanched Bob Simon's tan was the tensions like earth quake pressing news people to believe "they" should be able to prevent everything.  "They" should be the "intervention".  That, and, in a feld swoop, partly televised, there was the root-shift....

  "Bosnian Serb general Ratko Mladic was not dabbling or using a petty landgrab to send a political signal; he was taking a huge chunk of internationally 'protected' territory and challenging the world to stop him" (preface, xiii).