Category Archives: Screen Enemies of the American Way

Christopher Hayes thinks we can blame the myth of the “greatest generation”—the monicker stuck on the pre-Baby Boom generation—for the way we’ve handled 9/11.
As he points out at the link, 9/11 followed several years of paeans to the WW II era and the people who fought it. And he argues persuasively that the vision of them as the Greatest Generation largely whitewashes the reality.
True, they fought in World War II and won. But as Hayes points out, some of them also opposed fighting the war because it would sacrifice Real American lives for the benefit of European Jews.
Some of them traded with the enemy. Contrary to the image of America chomping at the bit to free the world from the Axis threat, we maintained relations with Germany up until Pearl Harbor. If Japan hadn’t bombed us, we might never have gotten involved. If Germany hadn’t declared war on us, we might never have gotten involved in Europe. Some people, of course, were passionate about fighting, from Edward R. Murrow reporting from London to the Flying Tigers in China. Many others weren’t.
I don’t mean by this that they were all horrible human beings—just that being part of a particular generation doesn’t, in itself, give them any nobility. Some of them fought for civil rights and treated minorities well (or so I’d like to think). Some of them lynched blacks who got out of line. Some of them were heroes on the battlefield, monsters off it; the blogger Jeanne d’arc some years back told how her father, a much-decorated WWII veteran, also liked to beat her and her mother bloody.
I’ve always been inclined to agree with D’Arc’s assessment of the Greatest Generation legend: Baby Boomers spent years demonizing their parents as racists, sexists and supporters of the establishment; now that we’ve noticed they’re dying, we’re swinging in the other direction (“No, you’re not bad people, you’re wonderful! Why you’re—you’re the greatest generation!”). Some of them are genuinely great, but it’s because of who they were, not because of some magical generational element.
Pretty much like every other generation, in short.
Hayes’ argument is that on a wave of nostalgia for WW II as the Good War Against Evil—ignoring any of the complexities or moral ambiguities (check out Studs Terkel’s The Good War or David Brinkley’s Washington Goes to War for some of those) made it easy to see the War on Terror as WW II redux: We were rejecting Boomer rage against the system and Gen X selfishness for the self-sacrifice of an older, purer time.
This, I’m not so convinced about. Hayes argues that the WW II themes rushed in to fill the heroic void left by the end of the Cold War and give us a War-on-Terror template, but I think the Cold War actually fits better. What happened (IMHO) was that when 9/11 hit, we had an administration staffed by Cold War leftovers such as Rumsfeld and Cheney and we almost immediately fell into the Cold War pattern. We’re good. They’re evil. If we fight dirty it’s okay, because we’re good. If they fight dirty, it’s proof they’re evil. The enemy is so horrible that we can’t stop fighting, can’t hold back because they’ll overwhelm us. Everyone who isn’t with us is against us. The enemy’s agents lurk among us. People who oppose the war are traitors.
There was a lot of this in WW II, but it was brought to fruition during the paranoia of the Cold War (as I covered in Screen Enemies of the American Way). With or without the WW II themes, I suspect things would have turned out the same.
Read the article for yourself (and if you want to buy my book too, I won’t object) and see what you think.

As you may have heard, Gingrich told a church gathering in Georgia that “I have two grandchildren — Maggie is 11, Robert is 9 ..I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they’re my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.”
Matt Yglesias argues at the link, the bizarro evocation of atheists who are also Islamic fundamentalists makes more sense than it seems. Gingrich is talking to a right-wing, conservative Christian audience for whom American=Christian (or Protestant). Being Christian is what makes us great; if we turn secular/atheist, we won’t have the strength to stop the Islamists taking over because nonChristian secularists can’t possibly love America.
It’s a reflection of what I wrote about here, that Republicans continue to commit themselves to a white, conservative Christian constituency that defines itself as the Real America and feels it should be recognized as such even as it becomes more and more a minority.
But I think it’s also a reflection of something I noticed when writing Screen Enemies of the American Way (actually my friend Ross Bagby pointed it out to me years ago, which is one of the things that fueled my interest in writing the book). To the politically paranoid wing of America—and there’s a lot of that on the American right—all our enemies are one and the same. Communists, Nazis or Muslims, they have no purpose other than hating America and destroying democracy (Bush’s “They hate our freedoms” explanations reflects similar sentiments expressed in multiple WW II movies). As a result they’re interchangeable.
Hollywood’s version of the USSR routinely employed multiple Nazis, driving home that they were essentially the same enemy (of course, the USSR did make use of Nazis, but that no more proves any ideological kinship than our use of the Nazis). More recently the film Hired Gun showed the Russian Mafia (a frequent substitute for the KGB in film plots) and neo-Nazis equipping an Islamic militant group with a nuke to attack America.
And for some people, of course, liberals—particularly atheists and secularists (you’ll notice Gingrich’s speech assumes that secularism is apparently interchangeable with atheism)—are just as much a threat to America’s values. And so, therefore, interchangeable with Muslim terrorists.
In that sense, lumping Islamists and secularists together makes perfect sense (to the audience, I’m sure—I’ve no idea what Gingrich really believes). If American=Christian, Christian=American, so anyone who opposes Christians running America—liberals and Muslims alike—are all part of the same threat.
For many conservative Christians, there’s also the fact that it’s a given in their worldview that liberals are God-hating atheists who have made it impossible to talk about God in government, or in schools, so the fact they are actually tolerant to Muslims and not trying to ban them is proof they must be in sympathy with imposing shari’a law. Because liberals treat Muslims so much better than the oppressed masses of Christians who have no power and are on the brink of being herded into concentration camps.
So I agree with Yglesias that Gingrich wasn’t at all screwing up his argument, though I’m not sure I agree on the thinking behind it.