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ALBERT AUSTER
The author examined how Saving Private Ryan and its evocation of a victorious America in World War II are used to exalt American arms and the American spirit in the contemporary era. Thus, Saving Private Ryan, which came after the low-key American victories in the Cold War and the Gulf War, was a perfect anodyne for the somewhat equivocal glory of those triumphs.
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Key words: American victories, Emerson/''War'' lecture, Lincoln/Bixby letter, post--Cold War, Saving Private Ryan, World War II
The war is now away back in the past, and you can tell what books cannot.
--General William T. Sherman (1880)
One notable cultural theme that emerged in American society as it entered the twenty-first century was the glorification of the generation that had endured the Great Depression and heroically sacrificed to win World War II. That sanctification occurred in best-selling books, such as television news anchorman Tom Brokaw's The Greatest Generation and The Greatest Generation Speaks; James Bradley's story of his father, John Bradley, one of the celebrated Marine flag raisers on Iwo Jima, in Flag of Our Fathers; and historian Stephen E. Ambrose's World War II historical series D-Day, Citizen Soldiers, Band of Brothers, and The Victors. It was also seen in the controversial decision to build a $100 million World War II memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C., to honor the 400,000 men and women who died in that war as well as the 16 million Americans who served in uniform.
This glorification comes as a complete reversal from the 1980s and even the late 1990s when no war, not even World War II, was safe from revisionists, who, like the literary-critics-turned-war-memoirists Paul Fussell (Wartime) and Samuel Hynes (A Soldier's Tale), emphasized the war's absurdities and atrocities. These World War II revisionists were undoubtedly influenced by America's involvement and defeat in Vietnam and by the need to deflate the orthodoxy that World War II was the ''Good War.''
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