May 7, 2001

8:14 PM

The Greatest Generation?(preventing some thread hijack) While I don't doubt the bravery of those that defeated Hitler, I wonder if it's a little presumptious of any generation to consider themselves "the greatest"
posted by owillis (29 comments total)

It is not as if they bestowed the title on themselves, it was a gift from a boomer. Do you think of yourself as Gen X or a slacker just because it came into vogue?

I know the stories in the original book and the follow-up, and I find them moving, and inspirational, but I think it was people doing what they thought was right at the time. That said, we are different people now, and not anywhere near as likely to make the personal sacrifices our grandparents did without thinking much about it.

Depending on what the criteria is, nearly every generation could be made to shine, but overall the people grouped by the term, lived in some exciting times, and did not do that badly.
posted by thirteen at 8:41 PM on May 7, 2001

This whole "Greatest Generation" thing isn't really news. And, you know, I respect my grandpa for his service in WWII, but it's very complicated. The U.S. people didn't really want to get into it until we were attacked. For me it's all colored by Vietnam too, my dad was there in combat. But me, I might have gone to Canada. Remembering service is one thing, but when we look at the history of war, looking at the bravery and the glory completely misses the point of asking the real question which is: how can we prevent this from happening again?
posted by chrismc at 8:51 PM on May 7, 2001

They unquestionably made the greatest sacrifices of any generation anyone living today could possibly relate to. Most of us will never have to go through 1/10th of what they did. I've often wondered how we as Gen-Xers would react if a World War II-style scenario were to take place today. I tend to think Gen Y might be better emotionally equipped for such a thing than we are. Which would be a good thing, since they'd be precisely the ones doing the fighting; Selective Service ends at 27.
posted by aaron at 8:53 PM on May 7, 2001

"emotionally equipped"? Are you kidding? We'd all be soulless killing machines inside of a month. Just take away the caffeine and MP3s, and you've got a recipe for unmitigated brutality the likes of which we haven't seen since the sack of Constantinople.
posted by aramaic at 9:22 PM on May 7, 2001

And since the Napster shutdown has threatened our MP3 supply, you'd better keep that coffee comin', buddy.
posted by rory at 10:30 PM on May 7, 2001

Like people everywhere and in every age, they were only as great as they had to be. That generation had problems that could not be ignored, so they faced them. For a lot of people, fighting another world war beat fighting the Depression. And in the US, anyway, the war not only ended the Depression but brought prosperity.

When the trouble was over, every couple with enough cash, credit, and government aid bought a big stupid car with fins, packed the kids and the dog into it, headed out of town, picked up a television and a plastic pink flamingo along the way, settled in the suburbs, and became the greatest bowlers and barbecuers.
posted by pracowity at 11:02 PM on May 7, 2001

They unquestionably made the greatest sacrifices of any generation anyone living today could possibly relate to.

Can I question that? At least from a British perspective, the Great War was fought by a generation that, mostly, didn't get to come back to be called "greatest". Because of the local recruitment of regiments, entire towns and villages were devastated when their men of fighting age were wiped out at the Somme.

Not that I dispute the sacrifice of my grandparents' generation, particularly because it brought war to the doorstep. My grandfathers fought; my grandmothers were air raid wardens. Except, that when it was over, they didn't buy the cars and the televisions; they survived on rations for another five years. And it's that distinction which still polarises the American and European character: that while the US was flourishing with the redirection of wartime industries towards peaceful consumerism, we were practically starving, rebuilding, and coming up with quaint things like the NHS to deal with the fact that no-one had any money, and the country was essentially bankrupted by war.

(That's partly why Europe is, on the whole, so offended by Bush's Missile Defence plan. We have a strong cultural memory of being bombed, something that the US has never had to deal with.)
posted by holgate at 3:51 AM on May 8, 2001

Pracowity; your first paragraph was excellent. Then you had to blow it with all your classic US bashing in the second paragraph. I really did like the first paragraph though.

My take is that they may be the generation that faced the greatest conflict and saw it through to the end, or the beginning if you look at the after effects of WWII.

As for big cars with fins. Hell, maybe they deserved it at that point.
posted by a3matrix at 4:39 AM on May 8, 2001

The "greatest generation" is the generation responsible for Senator McCarthy, Richard Nixon, red-baiting, blacklisting in Hollywood, and the Vietnam War. Yes, they were on the winning side of World War II, and yes, they hung together through the Great Depression... but in the post-war period they became ideologues who worshipped at the altar of Capitalism, and who allowed their fears of the Soviet Union to manipulate them into accepting the violation of civil liberties, and the pursuit of an unjust war. It is a legacy we are dealing with today.
posted by LAM at 5:02 AM on May 8, 2001

I'd argue that dealing with those problems is still preferable to dealing with living under Nazi rule.
posted by gyc at 5:15 AM on May 8, 2001

and our generation will be remembered as the greatest whiners who had nothing to whine about.

life's so hard!
posted by Mick at 5:59 AM on May 8, 2001

and our generation will be remembered as the greatest whiners who had nothing to whine about.

Our generation has at least one thing to legitimately complain about: 450,000 of us contracted AIDS in our 20s or 30s.
posted by rcade at 6:16 AM on May 8, 2001

I've often wondered how we as Gen-Xers would react if a World War II-style scenario were to take place today. I tend to think Gen Y might be better emotionally equipped for such a thing than we are.

I think people in general are able to respond to crisis and survive and accomplish great things. I think any generation would; if we're not required to, we'll just sit around and be lazy, of course. Though other generations have had to deal with issues of greater moral complexity... and that doesn't allow for actions of universally acclaimed heroism, because the right thing to do becomes confused, and we lose track of who the enemy is.
posted by dagnyscott at 6:24 AM on May 8, 2001

As opposed to all those silly whiners with, say, leukemia. Don't they know that only AIDS allows you to be a truly noble sufferer?
posted by aaron at 6:24 AM on May 8, 2001

Dagnyscott slipped. My reply was to Rogers, obviously.

And it's true that, given the right crisis, our generation might be able to rise up and tackle a deadly threat to humanity. But the fact remains that we haven't, and probably never will, so we won't.
posted by aaron at 6:28 AM on May 8, 2001

> Pracowity; your first paragraph was excellent.

Thanks, but I prefer holgate's response.

> all your classic US bashing

I think I fairly accurately described the likers of Ike. Postwar Americans who didn't head out to the Levittowns and Bedrocks probably just couldn't afford to be sub-urban.

> given the right crisis, our generation might be able to
> rise up and tackle a deadly threat to humanity.

Television. Kill it.
posted by pracowity at 6:47 AM on May 8, 2001

Kudos to holgate for reminding us that despite the combat experiences of the millions of American men who fought, their sacrifice pales in comparison to that of the people of Britain and Europe.

I don't have any gripe with giving credit to the WWII generation; it's almost unimaginable to us now to think of 16 million men mobilized for warfare, so the scale of the impact of the war on their lives (and ours in consequence) is difficult for us to comprehend. "The Greatest Generation" is hyperbolic, but it was contrived to sell books, not to represent anything.

Mostly I think this is about aging boomers finally realizing that their parents weren't the menace they made them out to be back in the 1960s, and trying to make up for it before it's too late.
posted by briank at 7:19 AM on May 8, 2001

Oh, pracowity -- how could you know that the people who couldn't afford to go to Levittown wanted to anyway? The Fifties were a nasty time in some ways, but the cliche of that era (dull, square, consumerist, paranoid) really is a cliche and not much more. Just like the cliche of the innocent-yet-square-jawed WWII fighting man of the USA. The vast majority of Americans lived (and live) in the spaces we think of as marginal to standard textbook history.

But yes. Television. Kill it. Perhaps we wouldn't have fought the Germans if they'd placated us the way teevee fun does.
posted by argybarg at 7:19 AM on May 8, 2001

Did the part about consumerist 50s ever go away? I mean, the US is more consumerist than ever (from another thread about 4% pop = 25% waste). History sez that war helps economies. If you look at a US GDP chart it just goes up and up after WWII. Probably due mostly to the Cold War. Today's post-coldwar fronts are purely economic. Consumerism becomes nationalism. There's nowhere for today's generation to be heroic except through humanitarian efforts. Sorry about the half-baked thing, but it bugs me to be viewed as less than "great" just for being born with a plastic spoon in my mouth.
posted by greensweater at 7:58 AM on May 8, 2001

yes rcade, no generation as ever faced a disease before. Polio, measles, mumps, small pox, none of them compare to a virus that isn't even airborne.
posted by Mick at 8:04 AM on May 8, 2001

"Kudos to holgate for reminding us that despite the combat experiences of the millions of American men who fought, their sacrifice pales in comparison to that of the people of Britain and Europe."

If we're just talking about body counts, doesn't the Russian sacrifice beat all? 27 MILLION casualties.
posted by muppetboy at 8:06 AM on May 8, 2001

In terms of body count, the US was 15th in losses. Here's a statistical breakdown... Casualties

Even with the lower figure for Soviet casualties, the USSR suffered 70 times more casualties than the US.
posted by muppetboy at 8:17 AM on May 8, 2001

> Oh, pracowity -- how could you know that the people
> who couldn't afford to go to Levittown wanted to
> anyway?

Oh, argybarg -- I couldn't know, of course. I said "probably" to indicate that I was speculating. No one could know what every American would have done.

But I think it's a safe bet that most residents of US cities would have (and still would) head for the land of square green lawns if they could. They want out of the cities so much that they are willing to waste huge chunks of their lives clutching steering wheels and swearing at the guy in front every day.
posted by pracowity at 8:20 AM on May 8, 2001

In this regard, I will always remember a volunteer group meeting I was at* where we had a "question of the week", and it was if you could go forward or back in time to any point, when would it be and why? In response, a visiting older gentleman from our sponsoring club said that he wished we could go back to the days of WWII when our entire society worked together and sacrificed individual needs for a greater good.

The more I think about that, the more it disturbs me. A world war isn't something you should wish on anyone, yet it took that kind of incentive for our society to become what he admired. Is that better for everyone? Perhaps for the country overseas from all the bombing, sickness, death, and destruction, it worked out okay; but for a lot of other people it wasn't the inspirational, comparatively safe ride to pride that Americans had. No question the sacrifices were great; no question the need was great; no question that people rose to the occasion. But most of the time, one would hope, we're not at war; and most of the time, we're going to fall short of those ideals, squabbling, selfish, and soft. I never had to go carry a gun around in a jungle, but if that's what somebody thinks it takes to be a respected citizen, I'm a little worried. Should we have wars just to breed ourselves some future leaders? I hope not. Isn't the privilege of being soft exactly what we've fought for?

* The organization was Rotaract, a Rotary affiliate for 18-30s. Highly recommended if you can find one (they're not common in the US).
posted by dhartung at 8:33 AM on May 8, 2001

muppetboy -- no argument there; I didn't mean to overlook the Russians, although I suppose "and Europe" can be extended to mean Russia, since the Eastern Front was pretty much confined to the "European" part of Russia.

For those who have this notion that the U.S. was one big happy country during the war years, Studs Turkel's "The Good War" paints a far more realistic picture of the time.
posted by briank at 8:40 AM on May 8, 2001

Isn't the privilege of being soft exactly what we've fought for?
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by that, but I cannot think of any angle from which the answer would not be no. I am not suggesting that we need wars to make us great, or that we should even participate in them unless we are actually being attacked. The thought of us being soft slips right into decadence. People who are soft are leeching, or waiting targets, and neither situation is very attractive.

I will suggest that everybody who died during WW2 made the same sacrifice, no matter what side they were on. The US did not enter the war until attacked, and did not war with Germany until war was declared by them. I have a feeling we could have gotten out of the European war fairly easily, and the American lives that were wasted there cost more than those of people fighting for their own interests.

I also suggest that the eco-damaging choice made by our grandparents, are more forgivable that the educated choices made by the boomers, and my peers today.

I have to go. Go read Johnny got his gun, it says it all better anyway.
posted by thirteen at 9:02 AM on May 8, 2001

yes rcade, no generation as ever faced a disease before. Polio, measles, mumps, small pox, none of them compare to a virus that isn't even airborne.

The existence of terrible diseases in the past doesn't diminish the impact of AIDS on our generation, not only in terms of the loss of life and the number of people living with the disease, but in the way it changed social and sexual behavior.

While some of you will probably respond that those behavioral changes are a good thing, our generation has a legitimate beef about being the one that had to learn you could drop dead from sleeping around. Especially since we followed the generation that championed free love -- our parents got drunk and we got the hangover.

Not that I would trade places with them -- or any generation that fought a war. But when we're having "you think you had it rough?" discussions in 50 years, AIDS is currently our best shot at earning sympathy.
posted by rcade at 9:27 AM on May 8, 2001

thirteen: I'm gonna take a stab here and guess that by "soft" dhartung may have been suggesting "peaceful."

The (sub-)point being (as I took it) that war is not, in any situation, something to aspire to. War does happen, yes; if a people happen to work together in the shadow of that war, good for them, but that hardly qualifies the war as a good thing. People are being killed; families, towns, cultures are being decimated. War is the most horrid failure of good will humankind has managed to manifest.

Wouldn't a world wherein benign selfishness and laziness were the major failures of humanity be a better world than this?
posted by cortex at 9:41 AM on May 8, 2001

If we're just talking about body counts, doesn't the Russian sacrifice beat all? 27 MILLION casualties.

Definitely, muppetboy: reading about Stalingrad, and seeing the monuments to the Great Patriotic War, reminds you that the Eastern Front was a sheer horror. There are few films that could be made of that hell. Which is why it's all the more depressing to think that war veterans in Russia are among those who suffered most from the lurch away from Communism, their pensions wiped out at a stroke.

It's not a beauty contest, though: every example shows the capacity to meet adversity when the need arises, and we can only hope to emulate, should we need to.

But again, it would be nice if those who have no direct experience of war took into account the opinions of those who have, when they consider the best way of preventing it from happening again.
posted by holgate at 9:55 AM on May 8, 2001