HAS ANYONE GOT THE TRINITY OF THE 50s RIGHT?

American urban mythology likes to pleat its decades into tidy pop-culture imagery. The 1950s is no exception. Only those of us who lived there aren't exactly comfortable with the images.

The Fifties have been portrayed mostly by outsiders. Painting one cultural extreme or the other. From the simplicity of "Happy Days" and "Father Knows Best" to the sterility of "Pleasantville" and "The Stepford Wives." A half-century is long enough to wait for the truth.

Of course there's no telling if the truth will do much for today's brave-new-world players on Wall Street and in Washington. Big mistake....! You see, those few years may have been the last vestige of an America never to be seen again. History teaches it's harder to get to where you're going if you don't exactly understand where you've come from.

So the Fifties are the hinge on which much of our future may swing. What made it such a one-of-a-kind decade is the way it churned up in the wake of World War II. A still relatively small and strapped society before the war, we emerged as the century's new Rome. Un-matched power abroad; apparent peace and prosperity at home. A near perfect trinity in our history. For the first, and as it may seem now, for the last time.

Living in that trinity, most of us played by a set of unwritten rules. In the wake of 60 million war deaths abroad, it was time to retreat quietly into ourselves...to maintain this quiet, it was time to accept certain fixed rules and roles....and to hold it all together, it was time to replace the social experimentation of FDR with the father figure of Ike.

To be sure there were the realities of Korea, Kruschev and Sputnik. But even more, the reassurances of a Doris Day/Perry Como zeitgeist, conformist life in the suburbs, Dr Spock's catechism on the joys of childhood. Then, as if to crown the Fifties, we elected Camelot for president in 1960.

Crowns, however, can crumble. This one did on that day in Dallas. With Kennedy's assassination, whatever substance there was to this trinity of power, peace and prosperity soon gave way to the angers of the Sixties. Angers which -- in ways both good and bad -- left behind whatever was left of a Norman Rockwell world. Most of this fixedness was repeatedly lodged loose by Vietnam, street riots, a rock 'n drug culture, more assassinations, Watergate, and Washington gridlock.

So whenever today's Wall Street and Washington technocrats point bravely ahead, over their shoulder they hear about that "other" America which Sarah Palin and the commentariat of the right tries to lay claim. Whether you see that America as our best or worst, you might begin by asking those of us who lived there.

No, not really perfect. But really not bad at all...!