A gay old time

Words have a way of evolving over time

There’s a story coming out that the military, now under the direction of the eminently in-over-his-head Pete Hegseth, is preparing to delete thousands of images from its online archives for violating their new anti-woke policies. Apparently there are pictures of the Enola Gay, such as the one seen above, that will be deleted forever under this policy, which is about as misguided as any policy could ever be.

The man standing in front of the airplane above is Paul Tibbets, a colonel in the U.S. Air Force. He was briefed in September of 1944 about the ongoing, top-secret development of an atomic bomb, and he later named the plane which he would fly in the delivery of the bomb after his mother, Enola Gay Tibbets.

As it turns out, the word “Gay” had, at that time, a well-established meaning which had nothing at all to do with sexual orientation. It meant “happy” as in the the line from a well-known Christmas carol: “Don we now our gay apparel (Fa la la, la la la, la la la)” Or who can forget the TV theme song that asserts that being with the Flintstones results in having “a gay old time.”

So a man named an airplane to honor of his mother in 1945 and then, many years later, her middle name took on a new meaning that some people are now uncomfortable with. Does that give modern-day people the right to erase the prior meanings of the word, henceforth until forever? Someone please tell me things haven’t gone this far off the rails quite yet.

Enola Gay Tibbets died in 1966, meaning that while she lived long enough to see her middle name be co-opted by what was once called the “homophile” movement, it’s very doubtful that she ever encountered it personally. Her son, who painted his mother’s name on a plane that was later used to usher in the Atomic Age, died in 2007 at the age of 92.

We can’t know what Paul Tibbets' would make of the current Secretary of Defense’s efforts to remove his mother’s name from the historical record, but it’s hard to imagine that he would approve of such a maneuver. After all, as Shakespeare pointed out in Romeo and Juliet, “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” And I’m sure that goes double for Paul Tibbets’ mother, too.

And here I thought the last election turned on the economy and the price of a dozen eggs, not all this culture war nonsense. How wrong I was, apparently.