The Greatest Generation

And this week's inductee into the Overrate Hall of Fame is ... (drumrollllllllll) ... The Greatest Generation.

Remember a few years ago when this nation gave a collective hummer to the so-called "Greatest Generation?" Mush-mouthed NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw came up with that moniker for an entire generation of Americans, then made a boatload of bucks talking about it to anyone with a camera or tape recorder. For the next 18 months, every media outlet in the country proceeded to ram it down our throats about how this generation of men and women was as great as any in the history of the planet. It was typical American jingoism on typical American overdrive. Being the nation of critical media analysts that we are, we all bought into it without any questions. (We also bought that dimwit's lousy book, too.)

Few dared to question this assertion of all-time greatness for fear of being labeled unpatriotic, ungrateful or free-thinking. But before we finish off the "Greatest" Generation with a nice big swallow, let's take a closer look and see if this group of Americans were truly the world's greatest generation.

We're supposed to be impressed because they "made it through the Depression." I know that times were harder than anything this 40-something white male has ever known, but let's all agree that it wasn't some African-level famine or "everyone-on-zee-train-schnell-schnell" round-up of an entire race. When times get tough, people toughen up and adjust. What do you think would happen today if a similar depression hit? Do they think we'd all lie down in the fetal position and suck our thumbs until we withered away? No. We'd do just what the GG did - suck it up and suffer and skimp and go hungry and fight and claw our way out of it. Or, if we were as lucky as them, we'd have a big fat war delivered to our doorstep courtesy of the Japanese and a couple of follically-challenged madmen in Europe. (I know Hitler had hair, but c'mon, what was with that hairstyle? He should have found a bunk at Auschwitz for his barber.) Which brings me to the GG's biggest bragging right - World War II.

Yes, they fought in and helped win WW II. For that, they get kudos times infinity, admiration, gratitude, the whole package. But it took them long enough to get their asses involved. They sat around tsk-tsking the news that Jews were being rounded up and that Hitler and Mussolini were carving up Europe one country at a time. They didn't decide to become Mr. World Saver until the Japs put a stiff boot up their ass at Pearl Harbor. It was only then that they turned on the patriotism and self-righteousness and decided that it was high time to stop all that Hitler bullshit.

Even then, the vast majority of WWII soldiers were draftees, not enlisted men. Of course, our image of the eager-to-go-kill-Krauts-and-Japs soldiers comes mainly from hokey Hollywood movies that try to make us believe that the recruiting centers were overrun by flag-draped teenagers, angry old vets from World War I and even legless cripples who were willing to wheel their asses up onto the beaches at Normandy. In reality, the military had to devise clever indoctrination campaigns to get most of the draftees to buy into the war and its rationale. Most of them found these films and pamphlets laughably bad. The War Department (it wasn't The Pentagon or Defense Department yet) spent a great amount of money and time trying to sell the war to all those draftees who were more pissed off about being drafted than they were about Emperor Hirohito's Sunday morning surprise.

As for those who did enlist, I'm betting most of them saw it as a chance to get three squares a day after living through almost a decade of the Depression. "What? I get breakfast, lunch AND dinner ... every day? With dessert? Hell yeah, I'll get shot at for that. Just tell me where to sign and make it quick - I'm hungry!"

Most movies would have us believe that "our boys" were all clean-shaven, clean-talking, God-fearing young men whose sole thoughts were winning the war and then going home to dear old mom, a waiting virginal sweetheart and church. I'm sure those thoughts of getting home sustained them when they were in mud up to their scared-shitless asses, but they had other things on their minds as well. Honolulu was home to a major prostitution system that had servicemen waiting in lines 20 deep to become, um, serviced men. It was a huge, extremely organized and stunningly efficient industry which thrived day and night thanks to the nonstop patronage of our innocent young freedom fighters, who then went back to their barracks to write sad letters to their girls back home with one hand while scratching their rash-ridden balls with the other.

After they won the war, how did they spend the '50s? They fought military powerhouse Korea to a tie, losing over 50 thousand lives in the process. (Maybe they'd have fared better if they didn't have so much gin-soaked fun cracking wise at the MASH units.) They ruined countless lives by gutlessly pointing fingers and screaming "Commie!" They tried to have rock and roll banned because some moderately handsome rube from Memphis shook his hips on TV and got the little girls all creamie-drawered. They did all of this while reaping the benefits of the GI Bill.

What did these aging fellows do in the '60s? Got us mired in a devastating and pointless war whose only purpose was to keep the war machine greased and humming, killing tens of thousands of poor bastards who got drafted because they couldn't get into college, didn't know how to play the system or weren't Dick Cheney. Who were the politicians and military leaders who botched this tragic decade-long war against barefoot 100-pound rice eaters who bested our M16s and B-52s with crude booby traps in the jungle? The Greatest Generation.

Finally, we are supposed to laud them for the values they had that supposedly no longer exist in this country. You know, values such as hard work, selflessness, devotion to church and community, looking out for one's neighbors, etc. Oh yes, those are things that exist only in the past. No one today works hard anymore, or puts in long hours, or works two jobs to make ends meet. When I ride by churches on Sunday morning, why, the parking lots are pretty much empty. Every time there's a disaster, you can't get people to give a damn dime to the cause. Why, I don't remember any of today's softest generation donating to 9-11 charities or helping any Katrina and tsunami victims.

While we're talking values, let's take a look at that 800 pound elephant in the room, that black elephant, if you will. This generation, whom we are supposed to venerate as near saints one and all, had a record on civil rights that was for shit. The majority of them lived through decades of segregated schools and a proliferation of "whites only" and "colored" signs plastered on everything from lunch counters to goddamn public water fountains. Most members of this Greatest Generation didn't raise a peep in protest. They liked it that way. They couldn't even stomach having black soldiers fight beside them in WWII. Can someone please explain that mindset? "Yeah, those Kraut bastards are some evil stuff, what with them locking up all them Jews in them awful camps. But you're only a tad better, nigger, so stay away from our schools, bathrooms and fountains, and go fight with your own kind. But first, howzabout you put a nice shine on these boots for me." Who was it that conducted hundreds of lynchings for capital crimes such as, oh, talking blue to a white woman, then smilingly posed for pictures beside a grotesque black corpse as it hung from a tree? Yes, the redneck contingent of our Greatest Generation. Of course, since they had family values (which hardly exist today, we're told), they would sometimes take their children to pose for these pictures with them.

In fact, if you want a generation to rival theirs for greatness, why not consider the first groups of slaves that were brought over to this country? If a hyperbolizing Tom Brokaw wants to run his marble-mouth about a group of people with a strength with which we are not familiar today, let him write a book about them. Yanked out of their homeland, stashed on a boat in unfathomable conditions for an endless trip across the ocean, somehow beating the odds and surviving the trip, shackled, whipped, beaten, considered sub-human, forced to learn a new language, living in conditions only a few steps up from the squalor of the slave ship, working ridiculous hours in all kinds of weather (but mostly searing southern heat), bought and sold like goddamn horses, stripped of every bit of human dignity, stripped of any hope of ever returning to home and family ... and yet they somehow survived. They had children and somehow kept them alive. They inexplicably found a reason to keep looking forward for, oh, only a couple of hundred years.

That sounds a mite more difficult than surviving a decade-long depression. But I guess orally challenged Tom Brokaw probably found it easier to pronounce "D-Day" than "Emancipation Proclamation."

Ned Bitters teaches high school and dreams of one day seeing one of his former students on stage at a strip club. You can contact him at teacherslounge@hobotrashcan.com.