An American Lion

Why is he smiling? Because, during WWII, women paid for sex in this country

It's not all bad being part of a lost generation. I'm a member of a "lost generation" myself. I was born during the Second World War because my Father was a wealthy defense industrialist in his forties who had sex with a lot of different women and tried to marry as many of them as he could. (Take that Father! What's it like to suck on the truth? No, I don't have issues.)

This made me part of a rather small group of children who were alive only because so many men shirked their responsibilities and didn't go fight in the war. Oh, didn't know that, did you? Thought it was a Greatest Generation, eh? Well, it certainly was a generation, and a lot of men went and fought, but quite a few stayed at home, came up with excuses not to go into the Army, and did some serious Tomcatting up and down the East Coast. Imagine a country with tens of millions of women who aren't getting sex but have money--that was what World War II was in this country. Women had to pay top dollar for sex for the first time in human history. Please note that we haven't had a world war since.

It was not uncommon for me to have a friend at school who looked nothing like his own father, and who, in fact, looked like the son of a shady, underfed tramp. Polite families didn't notice such things. Having an older brother who was swarthy and given over to rickets wasn't unusual. This is anecdotal, but because everyone ate better and had a slightly higher standard of living after the war, it also meant that many of us born before or during the war were smaller in stature than our younger brothers. My older brother Chetley is a little smaller than myself but my younger brother Chase is a full three inches taller than myself, and I'm six foot two. Diedre favors Father, and is barely five foot four, which is five inches taller than Father.

My generation was too old to play in the summer of love. Certainly, there were a few who didn't want to act their age. Immaturity was king in the 1960s. People who were old enough to know better tried to get in on the act. It was a disgrace, top to bottom.

But, never forget this--I went to Vietnam three times.

Three times.

Granted, they were all business trips where I was able to sell the South Vietnamese government riot control vehicles, but still. I never got to see "Charlie," but I did get to run over a bunch of tackling dummies and road cones in front of some very somber-looking bigwigs. How many men in my generation can claim to have been to Vietnam three times? Not very many. And my commissions were fabulous.

Every lost generation produces a wave of great art and literature, the discombobulated, disillusioned kind that they make you study in college. The World War I generation gave us some of the best stuff. The Civil War generation gave us Ambrose Bierce, and if you have no inkling as to what bleak and hopeless reads like, well, get yourself some Bierce. This particular generation is going to produce some form of bleak and hopeless literature, and I hope it has nothing to do with emo:

Bright, eager — and unwanted. While unemployment is ravaging just about every part of the global workforce, the most enduring harm is being done to young people who can't grab onto the first rung of the career ladder.

Affected are a range of young people, from high school dropouts to college grads to newly minted lawyers and MBAs across the developed world from Britain to Japan. One indication: In the U.S., the unemployment rate for 16- to 24-year-olds has climbed to more than 18 percent, from 13 percent a year ago.

For people just starting their careers, the damage may be deep and long-lasting, potentially creating a kind of "lost generation." Studies suggest that an extended period of youthful joblessness can significantly depress lifetime income as people get stuck in jobs that are beneath their capabilities, or come to be seen by employers as damaged goods.

Equally important, employers are likely to suffer from the scarring of a generation. The freshness and vitality young people bring to the workplace is missing. Tomorrow's would-be star employees are on the sidelines, deprived of experience and losing motivation. In Japan, which has been down this road since the early 1990s, workers who started their careers a decade or more ago and are now in their 30s account for 6 in 10 reported cases of depression, stress, and work-related mental disabilities, according to the Japan Productivity Center for Socio-Economic Development.

When today's unemployed finally do get jobs in the recovery, many may be dissatisfied to be slotted below people who worked all along — especially if the newcomers spent their downtime getting more education, says Richard Thompson, vice-president for talent development at Adecco Group North America, which employs more than 300,000 people in temporary positions. Says Thompson: "You're going to have multiple generations fighting for the jobs that are going to come back in the recovery."

I agree with most of that, except for the misguided notion that young people bring "freshness and vitality" into the workplace. That's a clear expression of bias.

All things young are notwonderful. That's just phony nostalgia. You need hardened middle-aged men around to straighten things out when all of the dingbats fold up and go for cheesecake. You need crazy graybeards who hold on to secrets so that only a select few need to be kept around when layoffs are necessary. Young people bring nothing to the table, except a measurable amount of ambition which needs to be fed into busywork tasks. They bring inexperience, confusion, bad manners and incompetence. Molding them is what a good manager learns to do. Young people must be broken down, broken in, and used to plug the gaps when things go south. The ones who survive a few years of systematic abuse and neglect might be worth something some day. The ones who break and run and go start emo bands or tattoo parlors--those are the ones you don't want in the American business workforce.

I can't wait to see the art that they come up with. Too bad I'll be dead by the time they get it off Twitter and sell it on boxes of corn flakes.