You know the hagiography, and you've heard some of my retort to it. But in rx to all the laments for "ye good olde days" when at least even the conservatives wanted The Common Good and were working for it and there wasn't this selfishness and corruption just like in the days of Ike or Teddy Roosevelt (tell that to the survivors of the
Ludlow Massacre) and if only people now were like they were even in the 1950s - and yes, it's true on one level, the laments that things should come to such a pass that even "Tricky Dick" Nixon looks good are valid, but that does not make objectively the Nixon administration and its supporters/enablers any better - nor this any less the natural outcome of the society that enabled them to come to power in the first place.
So, I'm going to goad another Sacred Cow, it being the hinge of the year:
the mythology that the people who came of age in WWII were somehow magically more wise, just, benevolent and responsible than anyone else before or since (except for the Founding Fathers) not only in America but in the whole wide world, since everyone knows that America was the respository of morality at that point, compared to the tyrannies and crazies that were everywhere else.
Bollocks, say I.
And again -- Bollocks.
The people who were children and teens in the Great Depression were the victims of the incompetence of their parents and grandparents and government leaders enabled by their elders. Those who survived did so because, well, that's what humans do. We're good at it, as a whole; we've survived catastrophes that have taken up to 60% of the population of a continent, and trudged on over our dead, for all of recorded history and most certainly before.
To claim that those who endured what was, by comparison to the Black Death, the earlier plagues, the Hundred-Years War, the Diadoch Wars, the catastrophic shifts in weather, climate, and geological disasters that rendered formerly-fertile regions uninhabitable throughout antiquity, a mild and brief period of hardship, with vast infrastructure and resources in place to counterbalance it, are mystically superior and privileged over all subsequent generations by their endurance, is not just insulting to our ancestors, it's stupid.
So they and their parents muddled through a disaster that they didn't understand, some of them by turning to crime, others by legalized meat-for-sex arrangements, some protesting hotly and trying to awaken the conscience and intellect of the nation to addressing the problems, most by keeping their heads down and trusting that it would all work out somehow, until the New Deal did - against much protest from the haves, and notice, O notice all who hope that a coming Depression may fix things, that so many of the names of the Haves today were the Haves before the Depression: Scaife, Hilton, Coors, Sears, Ford, Bush, Cabot, Rockefeller - the Great Houses will weather the storm far better than we petit bourgeois and laborers.
Meanwhile, the pundits of the era talked about how society today was in decay - sound familiar? - and the modern young people were worthless, lazy, ignorant, self-indulgent, not like we were in the hearty days of yore, or better yet, the hazy halcyon days of the Pioneers and the Revolution, and if any sort of catastrophe came along they'd be no use, the human race was in decline, blah blah blah, you've heard it, they're just regurgitating the pap of the 20's today. Go read popular magazines from the 30s for eye-opening rethink of what is and isn't "contemporary" and different from all past decades. (Though my favorite comment of all time, I think, is the live broadcast of the Torture Quiz Show complete with rack and thumbscrews and show host in suit and tie, by Charles Addams, who dared to see how we were going, call it like it was earlier and louder than most.) But we never hear about this nowdays.
And then WWII "came out of nowhere" just like that truck or telephone pole or tree in so many accident reports, at least as far as the mass of Americans were concerned, and though plenty of foresighted individuals and not only Gen. Butler had warned that our racism and aggression in the Far East (or rather for us, our West and Farther West) would lead to disaster, escalating tensions and crippling liberal movements there, and in Europe no less were there voices in the wilderness decrying Fascism as worse than the anarchy it was promoted as the solution to - and all that on which many books have been written, and all the country came together and everything was hunky-dory despite the tragedy, one big happy American family, just like in Victory At Sea.
It was a lot messier than that, in reality. Read Dr. Seuss's WWII cartoons, frex. Or again, hie thee to the library and read old magazines in the archives, though bear in mind that much was hidden back then from popular view which has only recently been declassified or discovered or allowed to be talked about, just as what was common knowledge back then has been forgotten now.
Desertions were rife in the US military - that's something they don't talk about much. The attitude of the officers corps - which has always been rather a hereditary elite, coming from a higher background socially, than the ranks, and never mind what the ideals are, someone who "rises through the ranks" is still a rara avis and it was far more so then - towards the soldiers was not one of respect and concern, and the higher you get the worse it gets, just as in the Civil War. The media has always focussed on the aristocracy's tragedies - the Titanic, WWI, and you'd get the impression that all the Bright Young Things of those days were flinging themselves into risk and service, but that wasn't the case. Most of the people in the military, like most of the people in any country, are the peasantry, urban or rural. Their NCOs come from that background. The commanders do not. This fact, and the rare transcendence of it, forms the theme for Bill Mauldin's work, and the target for GI hostility as much or more than the enemy: those bastards are doing what they're supposed to do, but when you're unreasonably oppressed by your own side, and badly-led--!
And yet, they came back, and were tamed and submitted to the machine and went along and conformed and surrendered their own children to more wars, despite all the anger and fire and rhetoric of the plebian army, the Nie Wiedering! of the victors in re studying war, no more than after WWI did they really do that.
They went along, and trusted the PTB, despite all the evidence of their own experience, in the Depression and after, and handed to them the power to destroy the entire world and closed their eyes to it. They trusted that the PTB were acting benevolently, throughout the world, and never questioned it - despite their own experience of government corruption and mendacity even in wartime.
Some were nice, and decent individuals, and many were not, and some became nice grandparents, but how few ever confronted their own moral hypocrisy, sexual and political and personal, and how many passed these memes of grasp and conceal and scorn and steal so long as you can get away with it, to their own children, who are now enabling the same terminally-fucked-up System with just as little willingness to confront it? They put their heads down, and beat their children who rebelled, and refused to look at the truth of what they were doing ten and twenty years later, what was done in their name around the world to keep them comfortable - like Scarlett O'Hara, hardship did not make them truly generous, but grasping and fearful. And silent in the face of evil, and wilfully blind.
And we are living in the world they made and left us.
"Greatest Generation"--? If true, God help us!