On Sat, 02 Aug 2003 13:41:14 -0400 Brian Siano <siano at mail.med.upenn.edu>
writes:
> On Sat, 2 Aug 2003 13:13:32 -0400, Jim Farmelant
> <farmelantj at juno.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >> Hope was a little older than my father, and I am here to tell you
> Hope
> >> was a whole lot funnier. The so-called great-generation of the
> >> Depression and WWII were some of the least funny, least pleasant,
> most
> >> authoritarian assholes I ever knew---right or left it didn't
> >> matter. They seemed to me to be grim bastards one and all.
> >
> > Sounds about right. My parents were of that generation. From
> > my experiences with them and most of their contemporaries,
> > I would have to agree with Chuck. There seems to have something
> > about growing up in the Great Depression that sucked
> > the life out of a whole generation of people. We rightly remember
> > the so-called "great generation" in this country because
> > they defeated fascism, and yet I cannot escape the feeling
> > that most of them would have just as gladly followed a US version
> > of the Fuhrer as did their contemporaries in Germany.
>
> Okay, I know, my third post, but...
>
> There's an equally valid but opposite spin to put on this one, gang.
> It's
> more than understandable why people would be pretty grim after
> getting
> through the Great Depression. Frankly, I'm amazed that that
> particular
> generation turned out as decent as it did. Remember, this wasn't
> just a
> generation that fought in World War II; this was a generation that
> enacted
> a great deal of social advancement in the years that followed. The
> early
> Civil Rights movement can't be credited to the baby boomers, seeing
> as it
> started in the early 1950s. There was the expansion of public
> schooling
> after the War, and the establishment of antipoverty programs.
True, but on the other hand it was also the generation that gave us such inspiring politicians as Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon, not to speak of Ronald Reagan.
>
> And if their outlook isn't as sunny and open as we'd have liked it
> to be,
> well... look at it this way. They'd just been through a massive
> collapse of
> international finance. And they'd just been through a war that came
> near to
> plunging civilization into hell of jackboots and mass murder.
No quarrel there, I think that both the positive and negative traits of that generation came out of the experiences of growing up during the Great Depression, which was immediately followed by WW II.
>Now,
> suddenly, the country seemed prosperous, and things like the G.I.
> bill gave
> thousands of men opportunities to turn their lives into something
> greater
> than they might've had otherwise. If they were more than a little
> grim
> about the possibility of losing it all, I can _easily_ understand
> that.
> (Heck, I get _very_ protective over the nest egg when faced with a
> big
> expense or a major change in my life, and that's just from having
> had two
> short periods of unemployment. I can't _imagine_ how my Dad must
> feel when
> he faces the same stuff.)
>
> And a generation that sprouted Martin Luther King, Noam Chomsky,
> Joseph
> Heller, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, and hundreds more
> can't
> be all bad.
But I get the impression that people like Heller, Mailer, Vidal Vonnegut, Zinn and all the rest were really rather atypical of their generation, that they were resisting the prevailing currents of their own generation. Its no secret that these people found their most appreciative audiences among the youth of the '60s generation and its successors, rather than among their own generation.
Jim F.
>
>
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