“The value of a generation must be somewhat determined by its progeny, for a generation is partly responsible for what legacy it passes on,” says Stephen Masty in an entertaining rant against the “cult of the ‘Greatest Generation.’” And what did the Greatest Generation leave behind? Baby Boomers.
America’s so-called Greatest Generation is great only in comparison to the rubbish that followed them, which frankly and literally they begat. The rest is mostly sentimentality, projecting onto an entire generation what we may more rightly respect about our own dear relations.
While it may sound ungrateful to the veterans of the Battle of the Bulge, from where did these ghastly Boomers come? Did they spring like Athena from the forehead of Zeus, fully-armed with credit cards, neuroses and BMW motorcars? Or did they have parents?
The so-called Greatest Generation created Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society that metastasized welfarism and made permanent the culture of entitlement. They created or enabled the Permissive Society that shattered millennia-old values leading to the decline of marriage, a level of narcotics-abuse never seen before in a developed country, an epidemic of sexually-transmitted diseases and the industrial-scale production of bastard children. They ran America when Roe-v-Wade opened the floodgates to 50 million abortions since.
Too nice to argue and too weak to put their foot down, they spoilt their offspring with the kind of good-natured generosity and blind tolerance that is far more harmful than parsimony and even cruelty.
December 6th, 2011 | 10:08 am
I remember Steve Masty as a politics-humor-satire columnist for the Washington Times in the 1980s. At some point he got fed up and went to Afghanistan, as did a few other restless young conservative men. I’ve occasionally wondered what happened to him. His writing was entertaining and pointed then, and I see it still is, though he now has better points to make.
December 6th, 2011 | 11:08 am
This is silly. Ah, yes, the horrors of America’s minimal social safety net.
For anyone who has spent any amount of time studying the question, government safety nets appear in just about every developed country where there is universal suffrage and capitalism. The U.S. is no exception to this rule.
If you object to a safety net, the conclusion is that you either have not seriously thought about the question or else you object to capitalism, economic development or universal suffrage and perhaps all three.
December 6th, 2011 | 11:25 am
For anyone who has spent any amount of time studying the question, government safety nets appear in just about every developed country where there is universal suffrage and capitalism.
Safety nets catch people when they fall.
When the net is providing for every aspect of an entire generation’s life, we aren’t talking about a mere safety net: we’re talking about a dysfunctional relationship between dependents and providers.
December 6th, 2011 | 11:46 am
Masty echoes the sort of thing I’ve been saying for years (the jury’s still out on whether or not that speaks well of Masty).
And Mark: the “bandwagon” argument is an extremely weak tactic. But even without objecting to a “safety net” per se, one can argue that the Great Society was a disastrous example of the breed. And that anyone who sees a declension between the WWII vets and their offspring shouldn’t give a free pass to the former, who reared the latter.
December 6th, 2011 | 12:01 pm
I think the worshipful attitude toward the “greatest generation” is a kind of mystified awe that people had the resilience and fortitude to bear up under the kinds of hardship that were common place for almost all of human history.
To the baby boomers who enjoyed unprecedented wealth, security and indulgence such qualities seem utterly heroic, perhaps because they themselves were never called upon to make such efforts.
Or rather, they were in fact called upon to make them — self-sacrifices for the sake of families, for the greater good of society, are always demanded of us — but the baby boomers chose not to respond in the same way that other generations had.
Staying in a “loveless marriage” for the sake of the kids and social stability, and finding meaning in the shouldering of such hardship, is an example of the everyday heroism that we admire in the “greatest generation” but refused in our own.
Now that the free ride of the post-war boom seems to have finally and definitively ended, perhaps we will again be faced with no choice but to accept the everyday heroism that almost every other generation in history knew.
December 6th, 2011 | 12:13 pm
Anyone who seriously thinks an entire generation is deserving of either praise or criticism is not worth listening to, and that includes Tom Brokaw.
December 6th, 2011 | 1:42 pm
I remember having a discussion with some co-workers about the “greatest generation.” I had the temerity to bring up the notion that before we romanticize the greatest generation too much, we must keep in mind, they were responsible for the Baby Boomers. Full disclosure: I’m a tail-end boomer (born 1961) who is closer culturally to Generation X.
December 6th, 2011 | 2:00 pm
I have heard it argued that the greatest generation was, in fact, the one that reared the ones who fought World War II —Baby Boomers’ grandparents rather than their parents.
Also, it can be argued that Baby Boomers rejected the values of their parents, so maybe we shouldn’t pin the blame on those parents.
It can be amusing to discuss the generation gap (remember that term?), but it does seem to require an oversimplification or sweeping generalizations.
December 6th, 2011 | 2:29 pm
If you are going to blame the previous generation for the faults of the current one, then you must blame the generation that preceded the previous one for the faults of the previous generation, and so on, all the way back to the dawn of humanity. It reminds me of a cartoon I once saw of a child showing his parents a bad report card and asking them, “What do you think is the problem—environment or heredity?”
December 6th, 2011 | 2:54 pm
“Anyone who seriously thinks an entire generation is deserving of either praise or criticism is not worth listening to, and that includes Tom Brokaw.”
And anyone who doesn’t understand the difference between comparing groups of people in the aggregate and discovering that there are characteristics that are widespread in those groups that distinguish those groups from one another, and claiming that every member of those groups merits whatever praise or blame the whole merits, needs to think more carefully.
December 6th, 2011 | 3:40 pm
And this piece of Nasty-Masty semi-literate conservative boilerplate appears on a site invoking the name of T. S. Eliot? Should anyone care what this demi-Limbaugh “thinks”? I’m a boomer (didn’t ask for that silly name, thank you) who is bloody sick of this my-generation’s-better-than-yours nonsense. I WILL assert that the 60s were much better TIMES for America than ours (high art was better, popular art was better, we were still profiting from the contributions of the gifted refugees from Hitler’s Germany, science was more revered, the Market had not yet been totally deified outside the pages of National Review, we were capable of astonishingly sucessful *GOVERNMENT* projects like Apollo, we were at least trying to make amends for long-standing social sins) but I’m not making any claims for my generation’s virtue per se.
December 6th, 2011 | 5:54 pm
My dearly beloved and departed father was part of what is called by many “The Greatest Generation”, but as much as I loved him and respected and even am in awe of what he and his cohorts did, I do not consider his “The Greatest Generation”. If I were to give that title to any generation (and I wouldn’t), I would give it to his parents’ generation. Consider what they did:
First, they fought the First World War, then they came home, got married and started their families and then right in the middle of rearing their families, the greatest economic calamity since the 14th century struck and it lasted for more than a decade, right in the heart of their peak earning years and spending years. Then, they sent their sons to fight the second world war, while many of them led them in that war, men like FDR, Truman, Marshall, Eisenhower, Leahy, MacArthur, King, Nimitz, Halsey, Arnold, Bradley and their immediate subordinates. For the more ordinary members of that generation, they were in their late 40s to their late 50s when the war ended and the post-war boom began, too late to make up for all those lost years of the 1930s and early 1940s. And, despite all their hardships, they paid the taxes to win the war and then to win the peace, to pay for benefits for the returning veterans, like the GI bill, and to fund expansion of the colleges and universities which the veterans their children attended, to build the nation’s infrastructure, including the interstate highway system, and to start the space program. Oh, and they were the one’s who reared the young men and women whom so many now call the Greatest Generation.
This is often called the Lost Generation, but they are only lost because we have forgotten their contributions. Here’s to my grandparents, who endured more hardship for longer than any generation in American history, were never recognized for it, but without whom none of the accomplishments attributed their children (some of which were in fact at least as much, if not more, their own) could never have been achieved.
December 6th, 2011 | 6:41 pm
Big skeptic on labeling a generation “greatest” who peopled lynch mobs, segregated, turned Jews back to the Nazis, staffed the Klan, poured nicotine into cigs, sacrificed Eastern Europe, and lots of other niceties. And who’s to say that Vietnam vets, Peace Corps volunteers, civil rights advocates and lots of other so-called rubbish didn’t offer sacrifice?
If the premise is off-kilter, why read any further?
December 6th, 2011 | 8:28 pm
The Baby Boomers were the first generation that had wide access to post high school education, and education is poisonous to certain beliefs — it’s no coincidence that the civil rights and women’s rights movements happened at the same time.
December 6th, 2011 | 11:17 pm
Todd — nicotine occurs naturally in tobacco, which started being widely cultivated in the 16th century, and most of the 60′s civil rights leaders *were* from the Greatest Generation. And I thought it was Stalin who sacrificed Eastern Europe.
If half the facts are off-kilter, why read any further?
December 6th, 2011 | 11:18 pm
And turning Jews over to the Nazis? To what degree were American teens and 20-somethings involved in that?
December 6th, 2011 | 11:36 pm
The “Greatest Generation” went off to fight Supreme Evil in the form of Adolph Hitler, and didn’t realize it was marching beside them also. They embraced it, and brought it home with them to incubate in the hothouse environment of the 1950′s. The disease they contracted was Utopianism, of which National Socialism was a fine example, but not the only possible form. Our symptoms are different, but none the less deadly for that.
The parents of the GGs did not trust the world, did not trust the government, and therefore exercised the vigilance against evil we are exhorted to in the pages of scripture. Once evil ceases to be looked at as a real possibility, the watchman is asleep, and the enemy creeps into the city.
Cultural achievement is an unreliable indicator of the health of a society; the Age of Socrates was also the Age of Thucydides. The Cultural flower is often in full bloom while decay is striking at the root. Cultural energy is generated in austerity; what we call a cultural renaissance is the burning off of some of this energy, but it is also dissipating it, and usually attention is not being paid to its renewal. The focus of a society can be either on Virtue or on Enjoying The Fruits Of Our Labors, usually not both at the same time. The Greatest Generation of any time are those who practice discipline and self-denial, and communicate these values to succeeding generations.
December 7th, 2011 | 7:39 am
There is no way the World War II generation was the “Greatest.” If anything that honor belongs to the generation that founded this country and drafted such seminal documents as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Or perhaps the generation that fought the Civil War and abolished slavery in the United States. Those two generations were far more significant than the World War II generation, for without them there would be no United States.
December 7th, 2011 | 11:26 am
BTW, I agree that the GG had its problems, some inherited, some that they eagerly cultivated, that contributed to the apparent decline of succeeding generations, so I agree the title is something of a misnomer. But they were hardly responsible for every evil that existed in the world before, during, and after their time — judging them cynically is no more reasonable than excessive plaudits.
December 7th, 2011 | 11:43 am
It seems that one would need to look diligently to find a “greatest generation”. Each time period has had its atrocities committed, negating the right of those people to claim that title.
We Boomers are blamed for so much but look at what we inherited. The Pill, abortion, divorce, emphasis on material wealth, etc. Our generation was the result of all of these “developments” of the previous generations, being told by our parents and grandparents that all of these things would be so good for us. We were an experiment that turned out to be a grand failure, but we were the mice, not the scientists.
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