Tiring American Platitudes, Part One
The baby boomer generation, or rather the portion of that generation that did not permanently lose itself in the “drug culture” of the 1960s, invented the phrase “The Greatest Generation” to describe those Americans who had lived through, and won, World War II. That is to say, they invented this nickname to describe their parents. A quaint tribute, much like giving your mother a “Number One Mom” necklace. But we would do well to remember that this platitudinous phrase is no more than that; merely a bit of popular feel-good kitsch with which a generation of inadequate, poorly educated, morally adrift adults sought to mollify itself with a nod to the idea of virtue, though a virtue which, as they meekly admitted through their bestowal of this phrase upon their parents, they themselves no longer possessed. “The Last Great Generation” would have been closer to the truth, though still an empty bromide. For the parents of the baby boomers were the final generation of Americans (not “final so far,” I suspect, but final as in The End) in which there remained palpable, historically noteworthy signs of genuine greatness, evidence of a spirited population that could still reach beyond itself — that was still aware of something beyond itself.
It is highly instructive to recall that the two most serious and consequential U.S. presidents of the post-WWII era, Eisenhower and Reagan, were men of that last era of American greatness, born in 1890 and 1911 respectively. Meanwhile, the two most consequentially representative presidents of the post-WWII era were Bill Clinton, a slick, image-obsessed mirage of a human who personally reinvented politics as a reality television show and has never intentionally uttered a sincere word in his life, and Donald Trump, an actual reality television celebrity who has consistently extolled Clinton as his favorite president, and who lacks even the psychological development to know the difference between sincerity and insincerity. Clinton and Trump were born two months apart, in 1946. (For my explanation of the catastrophe wrought upon the American psyche by Clinton, see here. For some of my comments upon Trump’s exploitation of this catastrophe, see here.)
The question which typically enters my mind when anyone mouths that tiring phrase, The Greatest Generation, is “How great can a generation be which produced, as its immediate progeny and heirs, a generation as hapless and societally corruptive as the so-called baby boomers?” Perhaps it would have been better if the last great generation of Americans had found something more purposeful to do with their evenings in the aftermath of defeating Germany and Japan, or had at least found the energy to overcome the post-war malaise that allowed them to fall into such a laissez-faire attitude toward their children’s self-absorbed and wanton redefinitions of democracy’s twin ideals, freedom and equality, before it was too late. It is now certainly too late.
