My g-g-generation

You’ve heard of the “greatest generation,” that won World War II and conquered Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan?  Dozens…no, it’s probably hundreds by now…of movies have been made about propeller-driven fighters and bombers lifting off from aircraft carriers, muddy Willie’s and Joe’s in foxholes in Italy, LST’s filled with baby-faced soldiers wading ashore at Normandy.  Magazine covers of triumphant parades of Americans and French soldiers parading down the Champs- Elysees toward the Arch de Triomphe, ticker tape descending on victorious parades down Broadway, husbands and dads returning to the outthrust arms of adoring wives and children back home…

These images…these facts…of battles won and victorious armies and great leaders like Roosevelt and Churchill and Eisenhower and De Gaulle have filled our history books and the hearts of our nations for decades.  There’s a sense the greatest generation earned it, all those accolades and bringing on all that prosperity and putting two color TV’s in every home and two cars in every garage and McDonalds hamburgers and all the stuff that came with making the world safe for democracy.

But what the fuck happened?  After all that comes George Bush?  Let’s go after them WMD’s and get that nasty Saddam and them Al Qaeda’s, and by the way, get us some of that oil and fill up the coffers of Halliburton and KBR, and oh, while we’re at it, let’s pass us a couple of nice, fat tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires.  And then let’s hang around where we’re not wanted for 20 years killing people until a bunch of guys in baggy pants and flip-flops run us out of their countries with our tail between our legs.

And Donald Trump?  A clown who looks like somebody poured a tequila sunrise on his head, who’s got a taste for dictators and white guys in preppy khakis and white button-downs running around carrying torches screaming “Jews will not replace us,” a guy who can’t open his mouth without lies flying like a swarm of bats out of a cave, whose idea of a nice place to live looks like outtakes from a bad B-movie of “1000 Arabian Nights,” who thinks a relationship is playing handsy under the table with a woman he doesn’t know and has never seen before, whose idea of a man to idolize and look up to and curry favor with is…

Vladimir Putin?  Gee, I’ve got a good idea!  Let’s carpet-bomb our own citizens in Chechnya and turn their capital Grozny into smoking rubble and then let’s run down and invade a little teeny state called Georgia that used to be part of the almighty USSR and throw a few bombs their way because they had the temerity of talking about joining the EU, and then let’s do the same thing to our Slavic neighbors in Ukraine and while we’re at it, let’s toss some thermobaric missiles at their downtowns and knock down some houses and hospitals and schools and set fire to entire blocks of their apartments and kill enough civilians to cause more than a million of the people who used to be our fellow citizens of the good old USSR to become the biggest flood of refugees Europe has seen since Hitler’s day. 

What’s with these assholes, huh?  Bush is 75, Trump is 75, Putin is 70, they’re all in my generation, goddamn it!  Was there something in the fucking baby formula?  Was it our mothers smoking like chimneys as they rocked us in our cribs?  Was it our sullen, angry daddies who lived through the depression and the war only to get stuck in the dullsville of the 50’s so they could have everything they stood for be laughed out of the room in the 60’s and get sent to oblivion in the 70’s?  Was it all the fault of the sexual revolution followed immediately by women’s lib which was followed immediately by gay people in short-shorts parading down main street followed by more liberation movement than there are letters in the alphabet?

The greatest generation begets the leastest generation.  Is that the way the world works?  Doris Day becomes Connie Francis becomes Lydia Lunch?  Rickie Nelson morphs into Iggy fucking Pop?  Pedal pushers become Pelaton?

How did the idealism of the 60’s turn into what’s left of Aleppo and the Twin Towers?  When did ice cream sundaes at the luncheonette and cotton candy at the county fair become ISIS and suicide vests? 

What did we do to deserve Ted Cruz and Tucker Carlson, huh?  How much more can one generation fuck up?  Can somebody tell me?