I want to order a time machine and send you back to have a conversation with your great-grandparents, for whom you seem to have so little respect.
Sure, the "list" isn't real. People wouldn't have been passing it around in the '70s if it hadn't reflected the actual experience of living in the '40s, which many, many people at that time remembered well.
A time machine is not actually available. Your great-grandparents are probably dead. But you can still go read a bunch of books from the amazing, wonderful, astoundingly different, and yes -- not at all perfect -- world that they lived in. Chronological chauvinism is not a healthy emotion.
My great-grandparents were crossing the Atlantic to flee pogroms. My grandfather did similar, but lost the rest of his family who didn't leave Europe in the 1910s and 1920s when the 1930s and 1940s set in. There was this little thing while my grandmother was young called, "the Holocaust".
Fuck the violence, authoritarianism, and chauvinisms of the past. Today is far better.
A bit later in the article, Krauthammer really succinctly sums up a major flaw in his own argument:
> As part of this project of moral leveling, whole new areas of deviancy–such as date rape and politically incorrect speech–have been discovered. And old areas–such as child abuse–have been amplified by endless reiteration in the public presses and validated by learned reports of their astonishing frequency.
Yes, perhaps the reason rape seems so much more common is that people in the 1940s didn't understand what rape is. Apparently some people still don't.