Book Passages

[Fake Messiah]

I always found the generational talk to be hysterical nonsense and this is just one example:

Years later, Tom Brokaw would call the young Americans who battled the Axis Powers “The Greatest Generation,” but in the first year of the war some people questioned their commitment.

In 1942, the social critic Philip Wylie published a widely influential book about the youth culture of his time, Generation of Vipers. In the late 1930s, while the armies of Hitler and Hirohito threatened freedom everywhere, American teenage boys hid their heads in the sand, Wylie charged, riding souped-up cars, reading cheap comic books, and listening to Sinatra records. They performed shoddily in math and science and had a horribly deficient knowledge of history and the world they lived in, 59 percent of them having failed to locate China on a map.

But after flying on several missions with them, Tex McCrary found them “the best that ever came out of America; they are the richest harvest of all American history,” he told a friend in a wartime letter from England. “I never knew they existed, or maybe…they really never did exist until the challenge of total war revealed the same high qualities that have always been beneath the skin of the American people when the time of great testing has stripped them lean.”

"Masters of the air: America's bomber boys who fought the air war against Nazi Germany" by Donald L Miller