There may be a generational rebirth of sorts going on. Maybe.
I wonder. The spirit of the Pentagon Papers days, the era of Woodward and Bernstein, peace signs, rallies, marches were but a memory until days recent.
Woodward is still around and writing books and editorializing at The Washington Post; signs of renewal from the inherited at the NYT... after groggily shaking off a few minor journalistic faux pas dealing with fake reporting and bad golf judgment.
Oh, but where is the new Dylan, Guthrie? Is there another Woodstock to be? Christ! The strangest people call for a military draft. Rangel out of this.
An old warrior, he of Chappaquidick, has vision anew. He sees Vietnam, clearly (only the eyes are blurry, the head...hmmm, clear).
Hell! Parts of a whole generation seem to see the past. Where? From what, which, whose... rearview mirror?
Generations get defined how? Wars, decades, events, happenings. All. WW II, flapper era, "the" depression, Generation X, baby boomers, etc. They're gloried: "the Greatest Generation", the Victorian Era. They're remembered badly, even with horror: the depression, the WW I generation.
For "we" (careful here) of my "generation"...well, we are stumped. We seemed to have fallen into a crack of sorts. WE? Who are WE? Pogo may have known (though from his swamp the phraseology may have been, "Who is US?")
You see, you must. I am not WW II, the Greatest, nor am I a baby boomer. Maybe "generation tweener"? The baby boomers' fault line apparently definitionally involves being "conceived" post WWII. That's back when babies were wanted and "a borning" was more fashionable that aborting.
Now just a few years earlier...just maybe more than few at least, I could have been a part of the "Greatest". But, my parents (who were of "the Greatest") were married on the 6th day of December, the year 1941. I, having, graciously and, with due consideration given thereto several weeks later not having being aborted, was born on the 9th day of September, the year 1942, some proximate nine months from the events (Pearl Harbor for the young, and the historically challenged) occurring on the 7th day of December, the year 1941.
A few years later due to the fortunate timing of my birth, I had less of a problem than the baby boomers with facing problems of war and service. I was a little ahead of the curve. Oh, we graduates of the Class of '63 had to annually notify our local draft boards of where we were and what we were doing. But this was mere ritual in the spring of 1963, like remembering to renew one's driver's license or registering to vote on changing residence. I wound up going to law school some two years later, but this was planned before and I had saved some little money for the project by working at an accounting firm. Later for all, there were exemptions for various situations (undergraduate and post graduate education, marriage, wife's pregnancy, etc.). I had been married in '63, went to law school in mid 1965, a child came in 1967, none of which had anything to do with the draft and needed no special planning or notification to my local draft board in Crestview, Florida. At least that I can remember. The draft lottery came later.
I wasn't affected, being too old to be considered for inclusion. I needed no lucky number (was it high or low?).
To tell the truth, I don't remember much about the draft now. Perhaps my recollection is bad. Anyway, I'll take precaution and remind myself not to place my name before the body politic.
I did think about that war a lot though. Did then. Do now.
I kind of tried to join in once. Annoyed at law school in November or December and in between my second and third quarter of my first year, I took some tests. Passed. Then went over to Stewart Air Force base outside of Nashville for a physical and more tests. Thought I wanted to be a pilot. Fortune again intervened. A newfound friend and I spent a night at the NCO Club (I, an Air Force brat, managed the entrance.). We got uproarishly drunk. Both passed the physicals and tests the next day. Out of 13 taking the same exams that day we were the only two passing. But, they said my eyes weren't quite good enough. Something about depth perception. I could go to OCS as a prospective navigator, but not pilot. I left in a snit when they said I couldn't retake the eye exam. And I finished law school. And I've always wondered how many of our baker's dozen of candidates would have passed those same exams had the December been 1967, or even 1966, rather than December 1965.
I began with a theme of generational rebirth...and remembrance. And it does seem to me that at least a part of the baby boomer generation is reliving a past. Some enjoying it, even seemingly glorifying in it. I wonder why? Some with guilt, perhaps?
But, also perhaps they clearly see. They see parallels I don't perceive. Maybe my time was "out of joint." I was born too early. What, too late? That's the reason
I don't see. (Oh, of course, there is also the possibility of mere wrong headedness, hopeless myopia, genuine terminal stupidity... variants... a multiplicity of such?)
The part of these baby boomers of which I speak and their media leaders of similar time and experience have common cause with many. The many being most of the populations of Western Europe including mighty France and Germany (even lesser "Western Europe" counting the pure of heart and soul in Russia), the East and Near East, much of our northern and southern neighbors in Canada and Mexico, others too many to name. Also, there are groups generally in concert: artists and intellectuals (count the movie industry well here as they represent both - witness Michael Moore, the guy who's president of West Wing, a song and dance girl, et al), the poets and philosophers of Europe (Villepin? Chirac?), those fighting to protect the world's oil supplies from greedy Halliburton (the United Nations, again France and Russia, leaders such as Kofi Annan and his son, the sheiks of Arabia, Maureen Dowd, etc.). Yeah, essentially all the right-thinkers. No, I didn't say right-wing (as in conspiracy), just the more appropriately named left-thinkers (the term left-wing being non-existent... liberal is the euphemism... a very feel-good word).
I said that I too, though without the parallel, remember Vietnam. I also remember Korea, a war (conflict?) that caused almost as many American lives and in
a much shorter timeframe. It's horrors far greater in my memory, for I do remember and knew many who served, than Vietnam. And perhaps we temporarily still live waiting for a finish to that war, now interrupted only for some 51 years.
Let me look in my rearview mirror. The mirror of one of my self-named tweener generation.
I see a war renewed. Lain low nigh a thousand years. Risen, not from ashes but from ancient quarrel remembered. Risen in the late, later half of the preceding 20th century. Risen and rising due to the availability of money to teach a philosophy that requires conquest. Money that is available because tyrants, comfortable in power can be, have been, blackmailed by priests of the religion. Militant Islam has a philosophy and a grudge. And a requirement that the expunging of the lives of others who do not agree is Allah's will.
A necessity. It is on the move, resurgent.
Some talk of terrorism. Rightly so. But that is a device, a method. The war involves the philosophy of a militant minority of the faithful, the chosen few of a religion that would be, but for time and circumstance, and has been in past times, a significant contributor to the progress of mankind. Their war, the militants' war, is against us. We, I judge to be at present, more civilized.
Minorities have led good peoples, otherwise civilized peoples, to evil ends and pursuits... and recently. Witness Nazism, fascism and communism.
Not so politely: These militants want to destroy us, to kill us, to take our gonads. And our children, those not killed, to be educated and to become believers.
So, my baby boomer friends, my peaceloving, negotiate-forever, European friends, all you United Nations international law folks, collectively you Dr. Panglosses, look in your respective mirrors.
You think this war will go away? That it has something to do with Israel? That Halliburton is the evil wrongdoer? That a guy named Bush causes these problems? The deaths... the horrors. The airplanes as bombs that sentence thousands of innocents to die?
Israel and all its Jews can be pushed into the Mediterranean. They can drown crossing the Moses-less Red Sea. Halliburton can go bankrupt and all its officers tortured and hung. Bush can be "Berged."
And militant Islam will just fade away. Yeah.
I'll look in my own damned mirror.
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