Do We Still Have the Right Stuff?

Here’s a very thoughtful brief essay that features both Tom Wolfe and ME. It’s fairly pessimistic—but still postmodern conservative—because its nostalgia is not for porches and goats but for pilots and astronauts—the members of the Greatest Generation. Those men fought, drank, smoked, reproduced, and generally lived with a nobility, reckless abandon, and love of life that our bourgeois bohemians today find almost insanely irresponsible (see MAD MEN and REVOLUTIONARY ROAD). All the studies show that things have gotten more healthy and just, but at the expense of being men or women in full.