I hope you’ve read my piece on the “9/11 Generation” in this week’s Weekly Standard. I spoke to a lot of men who are risking everything and who are sacrificing much to serve their country at this moment in history. I greatly admire their dedication and devotion, and I hope I did their story justice.
I do feel the need to respond to the charge that some have leveled that I’ve slandered the Baby Boom generation by unfavorably comparing it to the emerging 9/11 generation. Here’s what I said about the Boomers:
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.
I added the boldface above. Maybe I should have also bolded it in the story, anticipating the reading comprehension problems that so many on the left would have. In criticizing the Baby Boom Generation as a whole, I wasn’t suggesting that every single member of the 76 million person cohort performed unsatisfactorily. Obviously, many Boomers did themselves proud in answering history’s call.
But they weren’t the norm, and everyone knows they weren’t the norm. Hell, the Democrats nominated a guy for president in 2004 whose sole apparent qualification for the office was the fact that he went to Vitnam.
This would often be the part in such an essay where the author nevertheless apologized to anyone he offended. But since all the Vietnam vets I’ve heard from (except one) loved the article, shared my view of their generational cohorts and also felt that on the whole their generation did not acquit itself well during their hour of challenge, I will instead suggest to the offended that in the future they read more closely before jerking their knees.
I also found the accusation that I conveniently deployed a hippie straw man both illogical and unpersuasive. For what it’s worth, my original draft of the story had an additional thought on the generation that read, “If you look at the current crop of viable presidential candidates, only John McCain served. (If you feel like being charitable, you can give the field bonus points for Hillary Clinton’s alleged effort to enlist in the Marines in 1976.)” I had to excise those sentences for space reasons, but I thought what remained made it pretty clear that I wasn’t just tossing blame at the filthy hippies but their more hygienic generational cohorts as well.
THE HOSTILE REACTIONS that have emanated from liberal Boomers have been wonderfully illustrative of characteristic Boomer narcissism. Here’s what I thought was the most interesting passage in the story:
One of the soldiers in Colonel Schlichter's 1-18th is 28-year-old Sergeant Joseph Moseley. The outline of Moseley's story matches the liberal narrative of the "soldier victim." A junior college student, he served four years in the Army and then four years in the National Guard. During his stint in the Guard, Moseley got mobilized. He went to Iraq, where he had a portion of his calf muscle torn away by an IED. He has since returned to the United States and is undergoing a rigorous rehab program, which he describes as "not always going smoothly." It's virtually impossible that Sergeant Moseley will recover fully from his injuries.
Yet when asked about his time in Iraq, Moseley speaks with evident pride. He says the fact that he took the brunt of the IED's blow means he did his job. None of the men serving under him was seriously injured. When asked how he would feel about being characterized as a victim, Sergeant Moseley bristles. "I'm not a victim," he says. "It's insulting. That's what we signed up for. I knew what I was doing."
What I found striking about the aggrieved Boomers’ response to the story is that Sergeant Moseley’s sacrifice and stoicism isn’t what hit them on a gut level but rather what they inaccurately perceived as a blanket disparagement of their entire generation. You know, the 2,000 word story was about the 9/11 Generation, not the Baby Boomers. But rather than wanting to talk about Joe Moseley, they wanted to talk about themselves.
Baby Boomers sometimes remind me of that tiresome woman at a cocktail party who keeps talking about herself and then finally comes up for air and says, “But enough about me. What about you? What do you think about me?”
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