There�s an interview in Salon with Joe Queenan, who is one of those people, like James Wolcott, who has a reputation for fierceness that is belied by his actual work � these are strictly Wizard of Oz lions, with claws that tear not, and teeth that do not bite, nor mangle the oh so tender flesh.

That said, Queenan does throw a stone against the �Greatest Generation� garbage. That�s nice � I don�t really understand the current wave of delayed gratitude for Victory over Berlin, except as a ploy to re-invest the war movie with audience interest. Nobody, really, is going to pay to see too many movies about our brave bombers in Serbia, right?

Still, this generational patronizing is not only insulting, but betrays a severely limited historical scope. Well, that such as Tom Brokaw exhibit severely limited historical scope, or none at all, perhaps goes without saying, but the promotion of this G.G. trope through book reviews, and the elevation of conservative historians like Stephen Ambrose, makes me want to put myself athwart the tide and yell stop. What, after all, about the generation of 1789? Or how about the 1620s generation � you know, Blaise Pascal and that lot? At least intellectually, surely civilization peaked about 1670. It has been downhill ever since.

Now, it isn�t that I am wholly without admiration and even nostalgia for the post World War II order � although I could do without the military industrial complex, McCarthyism, and the manic building of missiles. But I am definitely sentimental about Truman�s tax policies � it makes me all old fashioned inside, taxing the rich at about 60-70 percent of their incomes. Plus the encouragement to unionism, another feature of the trente annees glorieuses, as the French call the Keynsian era � roughly from about 1945 to 1975. But spare me the generational talk. It is the supreme historical pseudo-category � spawned by the conservative philosopher/sociologist, Wilhelm Dilthey, for those of you out there curious about the genealogy of this nonsense (the link is broadly about Dilthey, and is, yes, in German), and given its resonance by those who insist that a commonality of knowledge about the hit songs of 1964 is the most important thing about 1964. This is not only a trivial pursuits-like foreshortening of history, but of personal experience, too � slipping the death mask of the eternal over the ephemeral so that we can�t even look into the mirror of our lives without the knowing rictus of pop culture staring back at us.