Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Brokaw from Indiana, grounded by heartland values from a bastion of Republican virtue, de-
livered the news nightly for years with competent credibility, so his opinion would be hard to
refute. But I hail from Hoosierville too, and I'm here to tell you: both Tom and his kids missed
the best part of it—missed the part best defined by no definition, an anarchy of intent and a
mission to more fully penetrate the mystical meaning of fun as we knew it. Fun wasn't part of
life; fun was all of life.
Of course WWII was about as great a war to fight as ever could be. Could an enemy rouse
any more fervor than the Nazis?
Yet hardly a generation after “the best generation” came another mass fervor against an-
other enemy as formidable and sinister as the Nazis, and that enemy was war itself. For the
first time in the history of man and women a generation sang out in harmony for harmony.
Hell no, we won't go.
War had changed. We had no Nazis. We had Johnson, Nixon, Westmoreland and Dow
Chemical urging war to protect a way of life. The nation changed, because it wasn't our way of
life and
we don't want your dirty war
. Maybe Old Mom, a bona fide best generation gal with
pinpoint recall on those years of denial in Western Europe, on the Wehrmacht backing into
Poland like the butt-end recoil of a 12-guage shotgun, on the sneak-attack bombing of Pearl
Harbor, on the Viche Government and the resistance, the struggles from England to North
Africa, D-Day and the Beach at Normandy, the Manhattan Project, Enola Gay and oh, my
God, the songs, said it best of her sons on the subject of military service in Vietnam: “Oh,
you're going to Viet Nam. Over my dead body you're going.”
Old Mom, patriotic as anyone from her generation, also knew a thing or two about flee-
cing a flatlander, which is what the Johnson, Nixon, Westmoreland juggernaut felt like to her
in the heart of the heartland. The 60s legacy was that war is over. That legacy has since been
lost, because the military/industrial complex realized that the Selective Service Draft beat
them—beat them in the streets, beat them on the airwaves, in the schools, the homes and
watering holes around the nation. The m/i complex cannot force peaceable, over-educated
people to fight a war of resource allocation with no share of the dividends. Volunteers must
do the fighting for the sheer love of battle and for national fervor. And we as a culture must
praise those volunteers as heroes, or, short of praising our soldiers, we must stay mum when
cultural leaders praise them. And so they do, and we do too. War wages on with fewer com-
plaints.
Meanwhile, Tom Brokaw, a homespun fellow in a turtleneck and bell-bottoms, walked his
kids to the park in “the 60s,” hardly oblivious to the world at large. But by making personal
selections in his perceptive life, he missed the 60s. No shame there, with a dynamic career in
broadcast news to consider.
Sly Stone was another homespun fellow but from the other side of town. Sly woke the
crowd with the cutting edge of revolutionary good taste. Sly got down and let it rip. He said
