This passage from a story I just read in the Washington Post, on the American media's reaction to the high journalistic death toll in the Iraq War, encapsulates (unintentionally, I imagine) one of the forces that is driving the current enthusiasm for war in the news media, politics, and many other quadrants of U.S. culture. Having already become the hottest journalistic status symbol going -- note the participation of such decided non-specialists in war reporting as Dr. Bob Arnot, rising anchorman David Bloom, and (in my area) the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's longtime statehouse reporter -- the popularity of the "embedding" program has not flagged a bit now that it has proved to be rather dangerous:

Indeed, the depressing news about fallen colleagues doesn't seem to have deterred many newshounds.

"Despite the danger, we have so many more people who want to go than we can put in," said ABC's Slavin. "It's an incredible story. For people who grew up watching war, it's time to live out the fantasy." 

Here's what I make of this: the baby boomers now run the world we live in, and most especially they dominate the media, as both producers and consumers. Having moved beyond their youthful enthusiasms for world peace, long hair, free love, and disco, the baby boomers have now finally discovered what was missing from their lives: a nice, cleansing war, maybe even a bunch of them. 

Wars (World War II, the Cold War, and Vietnam) defined the baby boomers' early lives -- the very existence of this generational cohort/concept stems from a war -- but educated baby boomers largely avoided direct participation in warfare themselves. (Just check out the various boomer age chickenhawks now holding down positions of power.) In many cases, their war-experienced parents and grandparents had the good sense to help them avoid the war zones. Yet growing up with a popular culture soaked with military imagery and righteous violence, the boomers developed a deep aesthetic and emotional appreciation for war. Inveterate experience shoppers that they are, many aging boomers seem to feel that the world of ordnance and air strikes, especially in the service of a global crusade like the one they believe ennobled their fathers, offers the most truly authentic experience available. For much of the last decade, it was book publishers and pseudo-educational television channels who supplied (and encouraged) the baby boomers' romance with war, which at first looked like a product of nothing more sinister than sentimentality towards aging parents. 

Now we are finding differently. For many boomers in the media and politics, the Iraq War and its prequels and sequels is, as the ABC executive said, an irresistible chance to live out a fantasy, to finally have a "good war" of their own. They got their Pearl Harbor on 9/11/01, and while it was frustrating that no world-domination-bent empires were behind that attack, the neocons had their own mini-Hitler waiting on the shelf. Very mini, in terms of the real threat he posed to the rest of the world, and certainly not worth trashing the international system the baby boomers' fathers fought to build, but nasty and awful enough nonetheless to let the Washington boomers don their fatigues with a beautiful feeling of, as they say, moral clarity.