Voice of the Kingfisher speaks out …from a different perspective
by Elinor Montgomery
July 05, 2010
It was with great sadness this week that I watched the Boston Pops on television’s celebration of Independence Day in the United States; in fact, I finally turned it off. The patriotism of the audience and the thrill of the patriotic music used to make it almost impossible to hear the announcer over the excitement of the people. That no longer seemed to be the case.
Someone, probably a well-known star of today, whom I did not know, stood on the platform, hair uncombed, tie loose, wearing a suit, which had the appearance of having been slept in. He spoke in an un-inspiringly, mono-tone mumble with an accent, which was of no American origin that I know. He was a most pathetic Master of Ceremonies, looking bewildered as he glanced at the prompting notes in his hand.
The conductor, usually full of vitality, seemed to be disinterested, with the spirit gone from the music that had stirred patriotic hearts in the past. I had to wonder if the people even knew the words to their national anthem, anymore. After all, such patriotism has been taken from the children, along with prayer, no longer allowed in the classroom. It appeared to me that the heart had gone out of the celebration and it was left to the spectacular fireworks to spark some excitement from the audience. Has the American dream died?
When I was younger, I felt a thrill just crossing the border between Canada and the United States to enter into the land of my dreams. It seemed to me that any dream I had ever had as a child could come alive by simply being on the other side of the border, it didn’t matter where, as long as it was there.
As a young child, I was raised on patriotic war movies about American bravery and the men who fought for love of God and country. We knew God and country meant all good things with endless possibilities. It was an era in which America stood for the land of opportunity for the ordinary person, along with a government and judicial system that protected her people and their families.
The country-side was warm and welcoming with its all American apple-pie-and-hand-stitched-quilted-home-spun nature. New England exemplified the American, patriotic spirit, apparent in her small-town houses, everywhere. There would be an eagle over the front doors with an American flag waving from a flag-pole on the porches of painted clapboard and brick houses that dotted the entire New England country-side. American warmth and patriotism thrilled me to the core.
I loved what Hollywood and New York represented in the hearts of most young, red-blooded Americans. If you could make it there you could make it anywhere. Stars were stars in those days, with the biggest and most shocking Hollywood news being that of the great female idol, called Ingrid Bergman, caught in a scandal, which rocked the government and the people of a nation. She made the choice to leave her American doctor-husband and child to run away, divorce and later marry her lover, Italian director, Roberto Rossellini. What a scandal! To me it was unthinkable that anyone could make such a choice to forsake the American way.
This was only sixty years ago and take a look at how America responded then to immoral behavior. It was on Mar. 14, 1950, when Sen. Edwin C. Johnson of Colorado took to the floor of the U.S. Senate and delivered an extraordinary and impassioned harangue. He was not rallying against the red peril or his political rivals, but against a movie actress. The actress was the same Ingrid Bergman, and during his blistering tirade she was labeled a “free-love cultist” and a “powerful influence for evil.”
This was typical of the heated public reaction in those days. For Ingrid Bergman, Hollywood’s favorite embodiment of saintliness and virtue, had given birth on Feb. 2 to little “Robertino”. The child had been conceived, not in sunny Hollywood, but in far-off Italy, and its illustrious father wasn’t Ingrid’s husband, Dr. Peter Lindstrom, but rather the Italian film director.
Senator Johnson wasn’t alone with his righteous wrath; Bergman and her lover Rossellini had literally managed to inflame the entire American public with passion. Sermons rang from pulpits, women’s clubs sniffed through raised noses, and pickets paraded around theaters showing Bergman films. Producers, already feeling the pain of the television industry, cringed, and Hollywood moralists, led by gossip columnist Louella Parsons, raved in indignation at the adulterous activities of the idolized star of Joan of Arc and The Bells of St. Mary’s.
This is what it took for an idol to fall in those days and land with a crash. The noise was still reverberating when Bergman secured a quick Mexican divorce from Lindstrom to marry Rossellini. Can you imagine even an eyebrow raised today in a society that considers this commonplace, not only in Hollywood, but throughout America? Governments now pass laws, endorsed by the Senate, which legalize such common-law arrangements, and add to it the abomination of homosexuality to complete its endorsement of our present, total, decadent, moral decline.
In the 50’s, it was expected by the stars’ public that they use their stardom as an example of respectability, to which the American dreamers could aspire. Men, such as John Wayne, Charlton Heston, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Stewart spoke out politically and patriotically for the good of their country and never to bring it down to the level of an Obama bow.
The change began to take place with the next generation that gave birth to Jane Fonda, who carried out what was to become known as her ‘political vaudeville’, anti-war tours with the troops, only to be nick-named as ‘Hanoi Jane’. She sickened the patriots, like myself, when she became one of the early internal enemies of the American state, which I so loved.
As a young girl of thirteen, full of dreams for the future, I begged my parents to take me on a trip to New York. At the time I was a great fan of certain popular opera singers, for I have always been a worshiper, and New York was the city where one’s dreams came true. My parents decided they would combine a New York trip with a visit to North Canton, Ohio and our good American friends, the Hoovers, whom we knew from our summer-cottage-days at ‘the Crow’.
Yes, they were the family that epitomized the American business dream whereby anyone could make it in America, if one had a dream and were willing to work hard enough to make it happen. Thanks to the Hoovers, we have vacuums today to suck up the dirt and keep our floors and carpets clean.
From ‘the Crow’ to North Canton was like going from a humble cottage with an outhouse and no running water to a palace with servants to draw your bath and lay out your clothes. I did feel like a princess and knew this was all about my American dream. Someday I, too, could have my own palace, I believed, in that great country of patchwork quilts and friendly, wonderful people.
New York was all I had dreamed it would be. As we approached the city, to see the skyline rise up on the horizon beyond the rural fields, I felt an unimaginable thrill, which I can remember very well to this day. I knew that all dreams would come true in that city and my dream did just that, when we were able to get tickets to a radio show to see Jean Dickenson, the Metropolitan lyric soprano known as the nightingale of the airways. Now I also had another hero of the Opera, a tenor called James Melton, who was on the radio every Sunday afternoon. It was as though I were living my dream when we walked into the theatre where he was about to tape his Sunday program.
We saw the Broadway show of all shows, the musical called Oklahoma, about as American apple-pie as it gets. Just being on Broadway in New York was like walking on a cloud, though we could not walk the streets at night; no one walked the streets of New York after dark. This was something I had never experienced before in my hometown, where a young girl could walk anywhere at anytime, never having to think about danger lurking nearby; the Canadian small-town streets were as safe as one’s home.
It was only a few years later when John Kennedy was elected to the Office of the President of the United States; now we had a real prince and princess in that country. The idolized princess of the screen, Grace Kelly, had given up her American life to marry a real, live prince, which became America’s loss of a dream and Monaco’s gain. Well do I remember seeing pictures of this beautiful woman departing on a ship from New York to marry Prince Rainier, looking considerably less thrilled than the radiant bride she should have been.
On the other hand, the Kennedy’s brought Camelot to America, yet, beneath the surface lay the seeds of a certain darkness that was not quite discernable. They were the early signs of a double moral standard beginning to surface from beneath the political dream. They were the seeds that would bring liberalism into full bloom within the government’s highest office in America.
Yes, Franklin Roosevelt was leading a double life in office, but he seemed to be seen more as the cripple in the wheelchair for whom the public cut a great deal of slack as their war commander. But now we had a war hero in the Oval Office with a beautiful family, an image the press protected and guarded well. Yet, the plant was growing that paved the way for the scandal of President Nixon, not even to be compared to the open scandals and unthinkable lies and sexual misconduct of the Clinton era. And Hollywood rode side-by-side with the changes to become a hot-bed of sexual immorality with a leftist, liberal agenda to present to the public.
We were in Ottawa at the time President Clinton was fudging rather than confessing to gross immoral conduct before public hearings. I remember friends and parents of teen-agers telling me that the youth were using him as an excuse for their own sexual misconduct in hotels during the noon-hour break from classes, supposedly for lunch. After all, if the President “was doing it”, could they not “do it” too?
Somewhere on the decaying moral landscape, American political wars had reached the point where they were being fought with no intentions of winning the battle. The psyche of America was changing dramatically with the introduction of the hippy-tattooed-leather jacket kind of life-style and the heavy-metal hard-core music that could damage the very brains of our youth, all of which were taking their toll on the American image of decency, formerly witnessed by the rest of the world. Add to all of this a growth in technology, the introduction of drugs and lives running out of control at high speed, and you have the picture of incalculable damage being done to this generation by the growth of the evil of run-away liberalism. It has brought us to the brink of disaster.
During this period of time, no one was quite sure about what was going on behind closed government doors, between our leaders and the Eastern cultic nations. Prime Minister Trudeau, in Canada, had opened trade doors to China while, at the same time, trying to shut diplomatic doors to her trading partner and sister nation under God in the United States. Added to Trudeau’s legacy was a determined effort to turn Canada away from God and into a multi-cultural nation, with open borders and an invitation to all the cults of the world.
It took very little time before the terror of war came to American shores with bombings in New York, Oklahoma, and that fateful day of 9/11, which changed the American landscape forever. The sadness was that we, the people of North America were inviting the terrorists to set up shop in our own country, which they so wanted to destroy. The old Hollywood of dreams had become a left-of-center hot-bed for political propaganda with the media now reporting from a totally slanted, liberal position, which has grown to unimaginable proportions.
The decency of church-going America began to change as our liberal governments infected the minds of our children with false messages about the word ‘tolerance’, which came to mean tolerance for evil, but not for good or God. We were all told that we must honor the growing number of cults in America, which know nothing about our heritage in this land, nor do they want to know, as they maintain their citizenship in Islamic and Hindu nations. They want nothing more than their ghettos in this land, without a hint of patriotism for it.
The schools had the Bible and prayer removed from the classrooms, where they are no longer allowed to sing the national anthem, as government and the judiciary demonstrate their treason to God, the Supreme Ruler over the land. Heaven forbid that we should offend these cults, which not only dislike us, but are also preparing to kill us the moment that they gain the upper hand in this nation! The name of the game has become appeasement through that thing called Political Correctness, which, in fact, is not about correctness at all.
As I look out this morning over the water from my window and know that the United States is just on the other side, I could weep for the sad state of that land and the terrible government that is changing her as quickly as it can. Before she knows it, America will no longer be the land of the free when, too late, the sleeping giant awakes to discover that they were just a few little people who had managed to bind him in the chains of liberalism while he slept.
I am afraid the dream is nearly dead, and that it is all over, but for the shouting. In no time the lights of Hollywood and New York are going to dim and even go out. When the reality sinks in, perhaps we, at last, will come to value the truth we once knew in this land, which came from God.
He was the One, all along, Who was behind the dream. He was the One Who gave us the good life, the peace and liberty we have enjoyed ever since our ancestors provided us with constitutions to protect our liberty in God. What fools we have been to lose all that was handed to us on a silver platter! They created this land through sacrifice and now, in pain and suffering, we will give it up without a whimper and turn it over to the cults who care nothing for the dream.
Woe to us, for our days are numbered! God is not dead but very much alive, and what He once protected as His own will now feel His wrath. Get ready, America, for the floods, hurricanes, fires and earthquakes. Mother Nature has nothing to do with it, but Father God will let us know exactly who is in charge over this land.
As I turned off the television last night, I felt in my heart that the dream I once had about America had died. A deep sadness filled my soul for the terrible loss of all freedom-lovers everywhere, who have shared in my dream.