THE MUSIC OF A HAPPY COUNTRY.

The WGN Radio Theatre airs Sunday evenings, featuring those radio dramas of days gone by, with the ominous music just before each station break.  Host Carl Amari wraps up each show playing the tune that topped the pop charts the week the show first aired.

Several episodes first aired when the national mood was "Cheer Up, Face, the War is Over," and it's time to go Cruising Down the River on a Sunday Afternoon.

Yes, popular songs used to be optimistic, and often celebrated love fulfilled, as opposed to today's hits that (even outside the country songs) call attention to love unrequited, if not betrayed.

It's possible that Serious Thinkers will lump the optimistic ballads of the late Forties and early Fifties, along with the tract houses and the family formation, as a collective suppression of post-traumatic stress disorder, and it took the Kingston Trio and Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley to call attention, in varying ways, to the fractures that were always there.

Dear reader, you deconstruct traditions at your peril.  "Is anybody surprised, when the aspirational Leave It To Beaver and Father Knows Best give way to reality TV and the tabloid culture, and bad behavior in some circles is transgressiveness or authenticity to be celebrated in other circles, that bad choices become the default?"

There once was an American High, only it occurred before the living memory of most of our fellow citizens and co-residents.  That it lives on only in radio archives stands in judgement of our culture choosing which monuments to destroy.