DanMargarita.com

Not to be confused with the war on drugs and the war on poverty (which, by the way, drugs and poverty seem to be winning), this is an entirely new and different war. We’re at war with a concept-----terrorism. We’ve been at war with concepts before. We fought fascism and communism, but those concepts had people from defined places that wore official military uniforms, which fought for those concepts. The world seemed so much simpler then when everything was defined in black and white terms.

Thinking back to such a time, I wonder what someone who symbolizes America’s age of innocence, artist Norman Rockwell, would be doing if he were still painting covers for the Saturday Evening Post today. Come to think of it, that would be quite a feat considering that he passed away in 1978. Rockwell was beloved for doing the folksy humorous covers that depicted such images as the boys grabbing their clothes while being chased away from the swimming hole, and the couple ending their prom date by stopping off for a malted at the local soda fountain.

It’s hard to translate Rockwell into today’s society and imagine him painting youngsters dealing crack in an alley or the prom date ending at a motel with a cooler full of beer and a box of condoms.

Indeed the world must have seemed a pretty scary place between the desperation of the Depression and the ominous threat of Adolph Hitler and the Nazi’s. Looking back now, those almost seem like inconveniences compared to the threat of bioterrorism, or what happened on September 11, although people from “The Greatest Generation” may think that I am trivializing those times, which is certainly not my intent. While it may have seemed like the end of the world to those folks, we now live in an age when we could actually experience the end of the world.

Since Mr. Rockwell isn’t here I have decided to step in and make some suggestions as to what he would have depicted if he were. Here are some titles that I could conceive for some current day Norman Rockwell Post covers:

“Norman Rockwell’s Armageddon”

“Smallpox”

“The Looting”

“Timmy and Bobby Fight for the Last Rations”

“The Gas Mask Sale”

In fairness, by the 1950’s Rockwell began tackling more serious subjects such as integration and world peace as well as doing some fabulous portraits, and frankly there was nary a chuckle in the lot of them.

In all likelihood, the old swimmin’ hole is probably polluted and the soda fountain was paved over to make way for a shopping mall.

Rockwell and his era are gone, but for those who wish to step back to simpler times, his works live on at the Norman Rockwell Museum, located in beautiful Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

(No, I’m not getting paid to write that.)