In the 50s I was reading one of those popular paperback books about a macho tough detective like Mike Hammer that was so popular at the time. The first pages were always about how touch the guy was.

The Macho Man described himself as having an unset broken nose Like a Real man, his broken nose was “From the War, not the police action.” Korea was a police action, not a declared war, and no member of the Greatest Generation ever let you forget it.

I had a suspicion that the Veteran’s Hospital had separate places for wheelchairs of the Real Men who had gotten crippled in the Real War and the wimps who got that way in Korea.

Those who are used to magazine stands today would not recognize the ones we had in the 1950’s. There were some with titles like Argosy, but they were all carbon copies of one called Men, which featured a scantily-clothed, bound woman on the cover and usually it was Nazis torturing her.

Half the magazine stand at least consisted of those magazines, which one of my buddies labeled Meaty Men‘s Magazines. Today a label like that would apply to queer stuff.

This genre is not even remembered today, but BBG will remember when they constituted the bulk of the section where you now find everything from stereo mags to news mags.

The generation that demanded those publications liked photos of The War that showed dirty, exhausted soldiers in the War with beards on their faces and cigarettes in their mouths.

Today’s young soldiers with their neatness and cleanliness are often looked on by the GG as kids playing soldier.

In fact, now that Basic has to do something besides beating every last atom of moral courage out of every recruit, those young guys really are soldiers. I have known people who fought for all sides in World War II, and I have never heard a good word said about Americans as soldiers other than by Americans.

In fact, if he Italians had not become the joke of the War, American soldier jokes would have dominated.

Yes, today’s army has women in it. But their training is TRAINING. Instead of weeks dedicated to knocking every ounce of actual manhood out of recruits by humiliating and exhausting them, they must fill that time with real training.

My guess is that five of today’s soldiers could clear out a platoon of the rabbits the old sadistic training put out.

It has been estimated that about 20% of the soldiers in the average big WWII battle did 80% of the shooting. You won’t find that sort of disproportion in today’s army.

Those newsstands were just another way the WWII generation tried to convince itself it was Macho Man.

But what I am criticizing is not those soldiers. What I am attacking is the lesson they brought from it, the idea that being humiliated and beaten down makes one Macho Man.

As H.L. Mencken said, Americans are generally lousy soldiers. You don’t have to give a European Obedience Training. His whole life, his whole outlook, is Obedience. Those who cease to obey their Uppah Clahss instantly begin to obey the Intellectuals and become socialists.

This is where our problems have their basis. Those who bitch about the Boomer Generation and so forth are concentrating on Americans who were raised with the World War II Disease.

A whole generation of Americans was fanatically dedicated to the idea that groveling was what a Real Man did.

You can’t get more un-American than THAT.