(03-02-2020, 11:34 AM)Warren Dew Wrote: I have to admit, I like "Gilded" too. Kind of like one of the reactive generations got to win a little bit.
Howe and Strauss note that "Gilded" also refers to the superficiality of their achievements. They were extremely materialistic, but most were losers in the great economic struggle by standards of generations that they knew who followed or succeeded them (Republican through GI). Gilding is mere plating.
I see them as a Reactive generation going into the Civil War, the survivors remaining Reactives in the defeated South, but becoming Civic-like in roles after the Civil War. They became Civic-like after the Civil War to the extent that great GI (undeniably Civic) convincingly portrayed the adventurers (including law enforcement) of the Wild West -- John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart, Gary Cooper). Don't forget TV westerns as Bonanza and Gunsmoke that featured Lorne Greene and James Arness; those were quite good, and they probably killed the cinematic Western in movie houses for about ten years, except for Clint Eastwood (Silent) making "spaghetti westerns" that had to be censored for television. It might have been interesting to see such late-wave great Lost actors as Jimmy Cagney and Humphrey Bogart in Westerns... but that never happened.
The GI Generation obviously isn't doing Westerns anymore... are Millennial adults taking over there? I do not get pay cable anymore.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.