During the historic "brown shoe" war (1941-45), which only a moulding minority of current Americans experienced personally, France and Russia were our big buddies, Rome-Berlin was the evil axis, and men removed their hats while dining.

These things, like all things in life - with notable exceptions, such as cockroaches and human greed - came to pass, to be replaced by new alliances and mores. Not all of these were an improvement over the old or endowed with any more permanence.

Like the stock prices and necklines that go up and down like yo-yos and the human yo-yos in charge of international affairs who play musical beds with diplomacy, what is "in" today can be out to lunch in the future, only to return at a later date.

It was in the 40's that Sulfanilamide, first of the so-called "miracle drugs" was introduced, saving countless battle-wound victims and spawning extensive "sulfa spin-offs" over ensuing years.
Another nostrum, this one non-medical in nature, was prescribed to promote conservation of our natural resources, productive capacity and civilian manpower for diversion to the war effort.
It was characterized by sloganeers as "Sulfadenial," and promoted by billboards exhorting those on the home front to "Use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without."

Rationing and other controls enforced the campaign, which was not all that hard to sell to a populace toughened by the Great Depression, inspired by patriotism and/or imbued by their forebears with the thrift discipline - exceptions being the few well-to-do or don't-give-a damn people.

For the most part, we Americans emerged from that war with our economic conservatism intact and returned to the single-income/Mom-at-home family structure, existing from paycheck to paycheck in an atmosphere of "kinetic solvency" - the outgo of cash carefully adjusted to its inflow.

In the early part of our half-century of cohabitation and procreation, this meant that Firstwife and I developed a taste for tuna noodle casseroles and potato-heavy menus and did much of our discretionary shopping in in store windows or the Sears catalog.

If we wanted something and didn't have the money to buy it, we didn't get it, and except for emergencies we didn't borrow. (Well, there WAS that Remington typewriter for me, a few baubles and frocks for her and the 7-inch Philco TV which was the envy of all our peers...).

Between then and now, a sea change occurred in America's family finances, with the advent of superstores, easy credit and the siren song of television advertising.

Mom was no longer housebound and kids no longer bound to her apron strings. There was not a car in every garage, as earlier generations had dreamed about, but that was because the garage was filled with other "stuff" and there were two cars parked in the driveway.

Polio and many other dreaded health scourges had been defeated, but an epidemic of acute Plasticarditis had swept the land, with Yuppies smothering under a blanket of maxed-out credit cards, installment loans, mega mortgages and descendants with patrician tastes in clothing, education and hedonistic pursuits.

Gone is the tuna noodle casserole, supplanted by fast foods at gourmet prices and gourmet coffee houses priced in the champagne stratosphere.

An increasing number of people in the Inflated State of American lifestyle have eschewed the fiscal restraints of yore and view prudent money management with scorn, while simultaneously chewing up large chunks of what might have financed a comfortable period of retirement leisure.

The so-called "Now Generation" would be well advised, given their promised longevity, to think about the time when what is now their now will then be their then, at which time it may be too late to repair the floodgates of free spending now ajar, if not fully agape.

This surge of spendthriftery, bad enough when it involves people's own money, has been raised to the level of a satanic art by those charged with the management of public funds.

From the White House to the whorehouses of local government, trillions of dollars are being thrown at projects that might be done without and people who might be doing for themselves. Witness, if you have the stomach, the recently passed spending bill, covering the basic cost of governance, but festooned with an estimated $11 billion in pork projects, pandering to special interests and the self-serving wishes of our Sinators and Reprehensibles.

In my more tolerant moments, occurring less frequently these days, I try to recognize that times have changed and with them the values that are embraced by contemporary movers and shakers.
Although it pains me to do so, I am forced to equate my geezer-like rantings with the criticism by my elders of my own breaks with financial discipline.
Like that 7-inch Philco, for example.