Thursday, February 12, 2009

The "greatest generation", fable.

I'm getting fucking tired of this one.

The "greatest generation", fable goes like this...

Everyone in the WWII Generation went to WWII, everyone acquitted themselves heroically, everyone came back Republicans, everyone gleefully got on board for Eisenhower's Donna Reed/Father Knows Best America, and then the Baby Boom Generation invented social criticism and dissent from thin air, and ruined paradise.

Fuck that propaganda.
It's not real history, and it feeds a retarded social agenda.

First of all, every ingredient of that little fable is demonstrably false or at best grey.
Yet all of those have to be objectively true in concert for that narrative to work.
But that's the narrative that's being sold, and it grates.

I mean, let's look at each one...


...did everyone go to the war?
Obviously not.
And it's never really openly claimed...but it seems to be vaguely assumed whenever the WWII stuff comes up in the media.
And that assumption is never challenged.

And was everyone who fought in WWII a hero?
Look, even ignoring emotionalistic stuff about what makes a hero, and avoiding calling anyone's grandpa out there a coward, did every single last vet mow down a thousand Nazis, and save all his buddies?
Come on.
For those stories even to work, some one was the rescue-ee.
For there to be a hero, there had to be some poor shlub.

And that's before we even get into the grey fuzz of the guys who nothing really interesting from a war movie perspective happened to, and they just dubbed around, and pooned French whores.

And they all weren't Republicans.
Fuck, FDR had 4 terms, someone was fucking voting for him.
Yet it's the conservatives that typically use WWII to drumbeat the war shit.

And everyone wasn't on board for the whole little Donna Reed robot world of the 1950's.
That WWII generation was full of dissent.
That generation saw novels like "The Man In The Grey Flannel Suit", and the rise of Playboy magazine, for fuck's sake.

But then you have to suffer this fairy tale that life was like the filmed propaganda of that day, and social conservative backward douchebags like Anne Coulter spinning this yarn that it was all The Hippies fault, and if we could just go back to "traditional values", America would be full of sweetness and light.

Would you give me a physical fucking break??

And it doesn't help that these same fucking people exploit these 80 year old codgers for their shit. They'll prop 'em up in front of a camera, and they'll nod along with whatever the bullshit is.

Hey, get me one of those vets who thought the war sucked, and that war in general sucks, or that Patton was a fuckenasshole, or that hated Ike, or spanked it to Playboy, and thought Hef's articles were right on, and thought the Hayes Code was a piece of shit, and that films under that censorship were largely banal mediocrity, etc, etc.

Get me one of those guys.

That's the guy I wanna hear from.

They never put that guy on Fox News.

And it's not like they aren't out there.
That's part of the "greatest generation", fable.
That those guys aren't out there, and if they are, they're somehow magically not worth listening to.
Well, excuse me, I'll take a guy who lived through those years over friggin' Anne Coulter, thanks.

And of course, the final ingredient, the baby boomers ruined everything.
Fuck you.

Like I pointed to above, Hugh Hefner, Sloan Wilson, Betty Friedan, the Beatniks, etc, etc, were doing their thing, and had the ball rolling long before the first hippie was getting his first whiskers.

And anyone with a brain, access to Google, or hell, anyone with access to parents and grandparents can knock all this shit down.

And yet it persists.
This black and white, dumbed down, Cliff-notes, fable-ized version of history.

And it would only mildly annoy me, except that, again, like I said, it didn't feed this butt-ugly retarded social agenda.

One that in my opinion, actually denigrates the sacrifices of the vets.

What freedom were they fighting for, if they're going to be exploited as props in their dotage for this propaganda shit?

It annoys me.
At best it annoys me.
Usually, I get shout at the screen level pissed, and after awhile tired out, and gloomily bored.
And the latter is the mood I'm writing this in.
Gloomily bored with this "culture war", horseshit, and the mountain of lies it rests on.
And this is just one of 'em.

But again, it ties into all my other rants, and shows America has this big fucking reality problem.
Can't fucking face it for some reason, so people want these pre-packaged little myth patterns.

Well, sorry, this is another one I'm kicking in the dick.
And I'm doing it for the vets, not against them.

1 comment:

Lanz said...

You realize of course that the era of the "greatest generation" is not the first epoch of American history that's been sanitized and rose-colored-glasses-ized, right? There's the whole romantic mythology of the wild west, the distorted and PC-ed version of the Civil War, and of course the holy of holies, the Revolutionary War period and the founding fathers. The World War II period at least has the advantage of being a time when the good guys and bad guys were fairly well identified.

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