Thomas Frank: Goodbye to All That

A cheap cynicism has brought us to disaster. Let's try a little audacity.

By THOMAS FRANK

Yesterday was the 90th anniversary of the end of World War I and the beginning of our own time.

The world remembers the Great War for the supreme pointlessness with which it slaughtered an entire generation of British, French, German and other combatants. We remember its static, unmoving Western Front, a stationary death-mill into which brave men were fed for years without making any appreciable difference. We remember the poison gas, the moonscape of shattered trees and churned-up earth, the incompetent leadership that could imagine no way of conducting the war other than repeated frontal attacks. Above all we remember the catastrophic battles -- in the attack on the Somme in 1916 the British army walked forward in broad daylight toward entrenched German machine guns and suffered nearly 60,000 casualties in one day.