The Greatest Generation

Tom Brokaw's book The Greatest Generation -- which portrays a gallery of veterans of World War II, both military and homefront -- had been sitting on my shelf for some time. Sometime last week I decided it was time to read it to draw strength from the tales of togetherness in a time of unified struggle and privation.

It must be owned that in many ways it's not a great book and he's not a great writer by any standard measure, there's very little craft, it's just a gushing, uncritical and sometimes incredulous love letter to his dad's generation. And yet, I am glad that I own it and glad that I am reading it. Because it is instructive in very important regards. First and foremost, it's a story of people who grew up in the Depression with very little, went off to fight (or stayed home to support) and saw unimaginable human suffering, and then came home and went on with their lives and were appreciative of what they had. Some did big things, many did not so big things. Some of them were workaholics and absentee dads of the sort that gave rise to dysfunctional families. Many of them, it seems, felt they had by their privation earned the right to lord over their households, and Brokaw gently but uncritically hints at that. In some basic sense maybe they in fact had.

Certainly it is a generation that gave a lot and earned a lot of respect. At present, our suffering is trivial compared to theirs -- may we hope that it remains so -- but it is nonetheless reasonable to try to draw strength from them.

Interestingly, I couldn't remember if I had blogged about this book before, so I searched the Grouse for "Brokaw" and came up with this post from February 22, 2009, two weeks before the bottom of our last bear market, when everything seemed as hopeless as it could be. I have often pined -- as I think many have -- for Walter Cronkite, the one voice who for a while almost all Americans could regard as authoritative or at least reasonable. Brokaw might be as close as we could get now. Problem is, he apparently had a sexual harassment accusation. Sigh.