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.
#1 by BGLass on 12/05/2010 - 8:38 am
Sometimes defiance seems even worse, since it’s about getting the worst of the beatings and then getting back up. By age 30, those ones can be kind of dullards in the way of prize fighters that suffer various repeat traumas. That’s why it seems wrong to be so hard on the “armchair warrior,” as some are. Some can’t do more than sit, saying, ‘I can’t Do a damn thing, but I can see what’s going on.”
The 70s seemed mostly about that. Kids flung out in the worst of the double speak—poor yet “privileged,” culturally abandoned yet positioned as “having everything,’ girls born to seek “careers” when they had never heard of such a thing nor ever wanted it, boys told to please the girls by “being sensitive” like girls, and on and on. All the parents divorcing for the first time, all the mothers working, all the dads pissed off and raised on humiliating their kids as they had been humiliated–in the news, at work, in their own country, providers who were set up not to be able to provide. The decade of blindness and beating. By the 80s, it seemed like some formal resistance was taking place, even visible in msm. It was the most evil decade, maybe.
But when I talked to a boomer who started school around 1943 or so, all the person could talk about was the terror at school, due to the bomb drills (they were nowhere that could be bombed), the food rations (the person showed me a card they saved), the “victory” garden and all that.
The convo changed my mind about the “rich 50s kids” and how they were just SO PRIVILEGED that they exited their own country and had “fun doing drugs” in the 60s. I had the conversation in the 90s and the “60s” kid was still talking about terrors from schooling in the 40s-55’s years. They had rationed food as a first memory and thought they were going to starve (and the folks were depression era, dependency era, AND starving again, so they were pretty paranoid about food and bombs, maybe.
Starting school in the U.S. at the height of WWII was no cakewalk, sounded like from talking to that person. Later, it was all about “the nuclear blast,” and the big childhood image of terror was the mushroom cloud. Condoleza Rice made some mushroom comment and t.v. showed that image; some probably hadn’t seen it since second grade. It’s not used now. Now it is bio-terror.
#2 by BGLass on 12/05/2010 - 9:02 am
That’s the other thing. Talking to that person, they said they did not see a t.v. until they were in high school and it was not very impressive at all, just mostly snow. Later somebody else got a t.v. and they saw it the way it became, usable images and it was a little better, but the person and their family still liked radio better. So a lot of evil 60s people, the boomers, actually kind of grew up without t.v. at all, pretty much. Even very middle class people in 1950 or 55 might not have SEEN a t.v. in action, and it was a novelty for awhile. Lots of people didn’t think it would catch on. Like any new product
#3 by BGLass on 12/05/2010 - 9:10 am
Children of the 70s (the “lost generation”) were really the first t.v. generation, seems like–raised on that and “day cares,’ and gone parents. They should receive very large Reparitions Payments perhaps.
#4 by Dave on 12/05/2010 - 11:46 am
The police officer’s enquiry begins with his ringing of a doorbell. A few seconds pass. Then he knocks. Not hard, just an ordinary knock on the door. A full minute passes after which he begins to get insistent. Then impatience begins to reign and his hand contracts into a fist and he begins to loudly and urgently bang, again and again, loudly and insistently. This door banging is authoritarian. It has the force of epaulets and a sanctioned organization behind it. And it is right there things begin to go horribly wrong.
The shift in the police officer’s mentality and behavior is unacceptable. He is offside’s in a free society. And how a society responds to this shift of mentality and unacceptable behavior determines what a society really is.
This unacceptable and authoritarian shift in mentality and behavior was wholesale visited upon America in the form of the military draft with the excuse of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor during WWII. Wholesale, Americans reacted with cowardice and the men of America shamefully succumbed to the military draft. It remains a shame that even today its shamefulness, and the cowardice it represents, is not acknowledged.
The military draft is an abomination in a free society. It is absolutely intolerable and it is absolutely un-American. There are no circumstances to ever justify a military draft. People who think otherwise should have their citizenship stripped and they should immediately be expelled from the country. They are traitors.
Yet the defeatists among us seem unaware of the enormity of the accomplishment represented by the fact that the military draft has been abolished from America forever. Americans today would never succumb to an attempt under any circumstance to reinstate the draft. It is not doable. Furthermore, the government knows it is not doable and would never attempt it. Instead it gives excuses that it is no longer necessary in today’s “modern military” to have a military draft. It makes this excuse to cover up the fact it is unable to exercise that control. It knows that in contrast with the WWII generation, the resistance by Americans to the draft would be universal under any circumstances whatsoever.
The sickening abomination of the military draft has been dumped into the dustbin of history in America. Good riddance. This represents great progress for the cause of freedom.
It is how a people react to the unacceptable and insistent authoritarian banging on their doors that determine what a society is. And for any police officer that dares to bang on my door in such an unacceptable fashion, I will nurse a grudge against forever. My hatred and resentment against him will be so great that it shall sink into the very molecular fabric of the world to become a malevolent spirit that lives on for the sake of revenge.
That police officer is going to be made to pay for the cowardly deal he has cut for himself and pay with a punishment that is manifold in severity, this done upon the count of the very spirit of freedom, simply because that attitude is what freedom really is.
To hell with cops, to hell with clowns in uniforms, to hell with judges in their black dresses, and to hell with the whole sorry mess of chimpanzees running around with epaulets pinned on them (and this includes those that run around with the abomination “PHD” pinned on them). We have a much better future ahead of us than that.
#5 by Creator on 12/05/2010 - 1:18 pm
I must say, Dave, your posts are outstanding.
#6 by Creator on 12/05/2010 - 5:05 pm
Found an interesting quote just now and thought it fitting.
Men will be free when the last king is strangled
with the entrails of the last priest. ~ Diderot
Denis Diderot even has a Wikiquote page, well worth reading.