WASHINGTON — I told my mom I thought this Greatest Generation thing was getting a little out of hand.
She gave me a steely look.
"We saved your butt," she said.
She began reminiscing about the way she finagled to get meat during the war by finding a vegetarian family in the neighborhood and trading her vegetable ration card for their meat ration card.
Sipping my $5 cup of coffee, I pondered how sad it is that the Unsung Generation had become the Singing Generation.
We encouraged our parents to stop being so modest and share their stories. Now they can't stop gushing and celebrating themselves.
Boomers have done a bad, bad thing. We have made our self-effacing elders as self-regarding as we are. We plumbed our own yuppie depths and found them shallow. So we moved on to plumb our parents, and fill our shallows with their depths.
Not satisfied with one Me Generation, we made two.
We felt guilty about not being more like them, strong and silent. So we made them more like us, gabby and navel-gazing.
There is a geyser of World War II reunions, oral histories, Web sites, panels, TV specials. The veterans want to violate the beautiful Mall here with a kitschy memorial to themselves. There is even talk of a World War II channel — all Hitler, all the time.
"I'm still getting a couple of hundred letters a week," Tom Brokaw said Tuesday, flying back from giving a speech in Toronto to neurosurgeons about the Greatest Generation. "You can't turn it off. Everybody wants in. I can't go out without people pressing their stories into my hands.
"I'm a little concerned. I hope the World War II generation doesn't lose that quality that made them so appealing: their modesty, and the way they are always looking forward and seldom looking back."
Hollywood is lavishing more money on World War II movies now than it did during the war.
The Steven Spielberg-Tom Hanks 10-part HBO mini-series "Band of Brothers," about the Army division that captured Hitler's Eagle's Nest at Berchtesgaden, will premiere at Utah Beach in Normandy on D-Day.
"Pearl Harbor," with Ben Affleck, the biggest movie budget ever approved, will debut in May on board a Navy battleship in Pearl Harbor.
The danger of forcing the Silent Generation into self-examination is that they will come to regard their children as even more spoiled and vacuous. They will have to immodestly admit how infinitely superior wartime sacrifice is to millennial fripperies, how much cooler it is to save the world from Nazis than swivet over the NASDAQ.
Will they look at us and conclude it was all downhill after V-E Day?
New York Times News Service