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Who’s gonna tell the kids?

15 August 2008

Liberal Boomers and Courage

What is it about liberal boomers and courage?

I guess the short answer would be that they OD’d on the John Wayne-style propaganda of the fifties and early sixties and decided that, as Dick Cheney once said, they had “other priorities” for themselves and their children. As a late boomer myself, I very much understand this rejection of the hyper-masculinized, faux patriotic tripe turned out by the media elites born in the teens, twenties and thirties. Indeed, given that the ghost of this childish propaganda still gallops quite happily across great swathes of the nation, I applaud the ongoing efforts of Glenn Greenwald and others to demonstrate how flimsily contrived so much of it really was.

What is less clear to me, however, is how and why this intelligent reaction against a cartoonish and bellicose conception of bravery—one which sadly still has much relevance on the Fox-consuming Right—morphed, on the so-called Left, into a snoring indifference toward the very ideas of courage and courageous actions. Look around.