You could feel their emptiness

Digby talks about Bush's evoking images of WWII. Quotes a professor from Alaska who has a great title for his paper, "Operation Enduring Analogy: World War II, the War on Terror and the Uses of Historical Memory,” Analogies are very important to feed the press for their narrative. It helps them when they say, "The world is REALLY like WWII, (not Vietnam!)" And by adding fascists or Nazi to modify Islamo they help keep the analogy going.

Atrios likes to say, "Just go read Digby." So I will too, but I wanted to pull out one of the section from the article that struck me.

I don't think younger people can understand the depth of the generation gap between the baby boomers and their parents, the Greatest Generation. It was a chasm and it turned families inside out for many years. But by the 90's our parents were starting to get very old and for many of us, the fetishizing of the Greatest Generation was a form of generational rapprochement.

For conservative baby boomers, however, it had much more resonance. Vietnam was their war, of course, the most lethal, meaningful hot war of the Cold War, but they had largely avoided it like most of their age group, even as they extolled the warrior virtues and supported the policy. (This led to cognitive dissonance that never left them.) They also sat out or opposed the successful, defining social movements of their generation --- civil rights and women's rights --- and were looking back at a life made up of nothing more than petty culture war resentment. By the time they came into power even the Cold War was over --- resolved by the last presidents of the Greatest Generation. It looked as if the conservative baby boomers were going to be left without any meaningful legacy at all. You could feel their emptiness.

Digby (link)