U.S. Marine Corps Maj. Chris Hughes shares some time with an Iraqi girl while U.S. Marines distribute food and water to Iraqi citizens.
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Cough. Not since the 13th century.
Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Fridays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.
YOUNG AMERICANS HIT THE BEACH
BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Here's a two-word phrase you don't see or hear much any more: young adults. It sank beneath the waves of a more recent, more powerful force: the "youth culture."
The youth culture in America is a lifestyle, emphasizing the one thing that youth tend to be very good at: thinking about themselves. Pridefully inner-directed, it opens itself to the outer world primarily in two ways: style and "attitude." Membership in the youth culture is defined by mass marketers as a "demographic," which begins about the age of 12 and runs without interruption to the age of 35. A "young adult" is an anachronism.
Some say the youth culture began at Woodstock, the celebration of song, self and mud in 1969. Perhaps the beginning of the end of that era is taking place right now in a similarly grimy but singularly other-directed gathering of young-adult Americans in the Iraqi desert. This war is the anti-Woodstock.
At Woodstock, the idea was born to love the one you're with, meaning whoever was handy.
In Iraq this week, one of the embedded reporters, CNN's Martin Savidge, came across the new meaning of love the one you're with.
Mr. Savidge offered four young Marines a chance to call home on his satellite video phone. Instead, one of the Marines ran off to get his sergeant, who hadn't talked to his pregnant wife in three months. Mr. Savidge offered the phone to the other three. They said they'd use the phone time to call the parents of Lance Cpl. Brian Buesing, who died last week near Nasiriya. "Where do they get young men like this?" Mr. Savidge asked.
There is an answer to that question. It was provided in this newspaper nearly eight years ago by our then-Pentagon reporter Tom Ricks. Mr. Ricks did what became a famous piece on the training of Marines on Parris Island for the new, all-professional U.S. military. "Parris Island routinely transforms the Beavises and Butt-Heads of America into United States Marines. After 11 weeks here, recruits emerge self-disciplined, with a serious bearing. They are drug-free, physically fit and courteous to their elders. They have overcome deep differences of class and race and learned to live and work as a team."
The core of Mr. Ricks' piece, however, was not this training, but the resulting alienation these young Marines often felt from their peers back in "the world." For example, Mr. Ricks noted: "Once notoriously foul-mouthed, Parris Island's drill instructors today are forbidden to use obscenities. At the same time, their recruits arrive steeped in casual vulgarity from pop music, cable TV and everyday conversation." That of course remains our culture; in the military, it's left behind.
I am not suggesting that all young people need a tour through Parris Island. Despite the persuasive arguments for the benefits of universal service, the Pentagon will never go back, preferring young men and women who've at least shown a commitment to the military's culture of selflessness. But for two weeks now we have watched, in random interviews, remarkably well-spoken, courteous and other-directed 26-year-old American adults. These young soldiers seem without modernist guile; they show no need, or inclination, to create an ironic, snickering distance between themselves and everything around them. What I am suggesting is that maybe it's time for the "youth culture" back home to think about growing up.
Even antiwar protests now get reduced to a kind of goofy joke, as with the recent "Puke-In for Peace" in San Francisco, featuring forced vomiting by some protesters. Or wearing a big smile and a baseball cap to accept an Oscar and insult the President of the United States. This is infantilism. This isn't protest by people concerned about what is going on over there; it's about drawing attention to them, to "me."
Young America's Journey to the Center of Me started about 20 years ago. I learned this when a newly graduated Wall Street Journal reporter back then recounted to me how when she arrived as a freshman at Princeton University, from Beverly Hills High in California, her Eastern classmates thought she was virtually a shaman because of her ability to talk, for hours, about herself. "But I'd been doing that for years in high school," she said. Twenty years later, perhaps the most totemic program on TV is "Sex and the City," often funny but always about narcissistic self-absorption.
But for all the seeming knowingness and sophistication, this is a culture that at its heart is puerile. It's the world of Peter Pan, a kind of Neverland where one never ever has to grow up. It's just about this time every year that MTV cranks out "Spring Break" from Florida's beach, beer and boob utopias. Yes, it was ever thus and probably harmless, but this is the aspect of younger life in America that now seems to carry the most peer weight. And so some escape into the armed forces, and end up fighting for the U.S. in Iraq.
This is a culture, for instance, that just now is determined to turn Jessica Lynch into a celebrity. Last week she was a 19-year-old from West Virginia who'd volunteered for the Army and was doing her job on a maintenance crew. But you know for a fact that Larry King, Katie Couric and many others are moving heaven and earth to get her on TV to talk about, what else, herself.
But the long-running infatuation with celebrity, now manifesting itself in the everyman celebritydom of reality-TV shows, is the inverse of the military's values on display this week--a world in which it's considered attractive to subordinate one's inner needs long enough for some common good to prevail. We're not talking about mindless military robots, either. The Rangers who rescued Jessica may subordinate self to a cause or plan, but success also depends crucially on initiative, improvisation and individual courage. Together, these are the attributes of young adulthood. For a few weeks, anyway, it's nice to see them being celebrated in prime time. ---------------------
My son spent 7 years in the Army, and is a much better person because of it.