Winger claims "9/11 Generation" answered "the call," unlike Vietnam era's Boomers

BurtWorm

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Mon Jul-23-07 07:53 PM
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Winger claims "9/11 Generation" answered "the call," unlike Vietnam era's Boomers

Glenn Greenwald tears this asinine "argument" into tiny shreds:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/07/23/911_generation/index.html

Monday July 23, 2007 07:10 EST
The Weekly Standard's "9/11 Generation"

This week's issue of The Weekly Standard features a cover story by Hugh Hewitt blogger Dean Barnett. Entitled "The 9/11 Generation," it argues that America's current youthful generation is courageous and noble because it has answered the call of military service, in contrast to the cowardly Vietnam era baby boomers who chose protest instead. The article is being hailed in all of the predictable right-wing precincts, even though its reasoning highlights (unintentionally) exactly what is so corrupt, ignoble and deceitful about that political movement.

The crux of Barnett's homage to what he calls the "9/11 Generation" is expressed as follows:

In the 1960s, history called the Baby Boomers. They didn't answer the phone.

Confronted with a generation-defining conflict, the cold war, the Boomers -- those, at any rate, who came to be emblematic of their generation -- took the opposite path from their parents during World War II. Sadly, the excesses of Woodstock became the face of the Boomers' response to their moment of challenge. War protests where agitated youths derided American soldiers as baby-killers added no luster to their image.

Few of the leading lights of that generation joined the military. Most calculated how they could avoid military service, and their attitude rippled through the rest of the century. In the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, military service didn't occur to most young people as an option, let alone a duty.

But now, once again, history is calling. Fortunately, the present generation appears more reminiscent of their grandparents than their parents.

How does one even begin counting the myths laid on top of more myths on which these claims are based? To begin with, while Barnett contrasts two significant groups of the Vietnam era -- those who bravely volunteered for combat and/or who were drafted (Jim Webb and John McCain and Chuck Hagel and John Kerry) and those who protested the war -- he revealingly whitewashes from history the other major group, the most ignoble one, the one which happens to include virtually all of the individuals who lead Barnett's political movement: namely, those who claimed to support the war but did everything possible to evade military service, sending their fellow citizens off to die instead in a war they urged.

Most revealingly, Barnett condemns those who refused to fight because they opposed to war and chose instead to work against it, but ignores completely those who favored the war but sent others to fight and die in it. Barnett has to ignore this group. He has no choice. He cannot possibly criticize such individuals because this group includes the editors and writers of the magazine in which he is writing, his blogging boss, and virtually the entire leadership of the political movement which he follows.

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