THE PARABOLA OF THIS transformation is sketched, curiously enough, in Flags of Our Fathers, the nonfiction blockbuster that movingly recounts the life stories of the flagraisers atop Iwo Jima's Mount Surabachi. At first glance, the book -- which flagraiser son James Bradley composed with the capable assistance of journalist and author Ron Powers -- seems just another entry in the Greatest Generation cottage industry, limning what Tom Carson called "the boomers' predictably startled recognition that their parents were about to die." But it's also something more complicated than that. For one thing, Bradley's father did die, in 1994, and it's the discovery of a neglected closetful of his father's war memorabilia -- including the Navy Cross he won for distinguished combat over his tour of duty at Iwo Jima -- that sets Bradley off on his obsessive quest to document the event that made his father famous.
It is by any measure a bracing tale. There are few annals in modern American warfare as genuinely heroic as the Marines' stand at Iwo Jima. It is, as Bradley notes, the most decorated theater of combat in the history of the U.S. military, as well as one of the bloodiest -- fully two-thirds of the 84,000 Marines who shipped out for the invasion were casualties. But as he unearths the life stories of the flagraisers, Bradley also learns that, for many Marines, Iwo Jima was anything but a rite of passage into a secure and stable manhood. Bradley discovers that of the six men who raised the flag on February 23, 1945, his father was the "only one... to live in peace into an advanced age." Three of the men in the photo (taken by AP photographer Joseph Rosenthal) were killed within days of the afternoon when the photo was taken; another, the Pima Indian PFC Ira Hayes, drank himself into oblivion at the age of thirty-two -- a tragic death that spawned a sort of counter-legend unto itself in a pair of Hollywood biopics and a Johnny Cash song. The only other hoister of the flag, a former runner for the Marines' E-company unit, Rene Gagnon, died of a sudden heart attack on the job as a janitor, at the age of fifty-four. Gagnon sought to parlay his momentary renown as a patriotic symbol into a life of celebrity wealth and ease, but died debt-ridden, disappointed, and trapped in a miserable marriage.
Gagnon was the only other member of the photo's retinue to father a child, which makes the title of Bradley's book either unwittingly misleading or bitterly ironic. Nor for that matter, had the Bradley clan been instructed in the mythology of the flag. Bradley's dad went to great lengths to assure that his own wartime experiences remained fastidiously closed off to public view. Anytime a reporter called with questions about the flagraising, the Bradley children were instructed to say their father was off fishing in Canada (even though John Bradley had never gone fishing in Canada). While the traumas of war left him weeping in his sleep for years afterward, John Bradley forbade any discussion of the subject in his home.


This self-abnegating reserve gathers a certain eerie force as one learns that John Bradley owned and directed a funeral home in his home town of Antigo, Wisconsin. Condolence and mourning were his business, and, as his son James reports, he practiced them with something approaching religious devotion: "Very often he would work until ten o'clock at night. He'd come home for dinner, take a short nap, and then go back. Nights were when the wakes occurred.... He would stand at the top of the stairs inside the entrance to the funeral home greeting the people who came to mourn.... People from out of town, people he hadn't seen in years, would brighten a little when he not only hailed them by name but inquired about personal details they'd forgotten they told him -- marriages, illnesses, newborn children. This must have required some effort on my father's part, but I'm sure it was never a strain. And it was never insincere. Ever."
There's nothing in Bradley's account to suggest that his father had been unduly remote or neglectful of his own family's emotional needs. But there is nonetheless something extremely suggestive about a man's extraordinary fidelity to public mourning, when he still more vigilantly harbors the story of his own painful past, and the deaths of his closest friends, from even the concerned curiosity of his own family. Bradley surmises that walling off his own memory from the details of his wartime life is what spared him from the grim, dissolute fate that enveloped Ira Hayes and Rene Gagnon. In his only interview with a TV reporter, Bradley writes, his father "offered an amazing number of inaccurate details: where he'd taken his training as a corpsman, the exact circumstances of his getting to the flagpole...." John Bradley seems to have kept himself, his family, and his life of service to his community a going proposition by becoming something of a stranger to himself.
Bradley's own generation, of course, understood this as an entirely proper response to the burden of memories that are often quite literally unspeakable -- and it would be presumptuous, to put things mildly, to second-guess that strategy. What's troubling about Flags of Our Fathers, however, is that it winds up, almost in spite of itself, substituting a new myth of wounded paternal reticence for the old one of upright, stoic paternal service. Like other artifacts of the Greatest Generation industry, Bradley's heroic, admirable dad comes to be something of a totem of remembrance purely for remembrance's sake, and as one sees his son reverently filling in the various blanks of his father's past, there's a mounting sense that Bradley père could not help but be horrified to see so much of his jealously guarded (and pointedly forgotten) private life offered up for display and instructional patriotic sentiment.
One leaves off reading Flags of Our Fathers  genuinely moved by John Bradley's sacrifices. Yet one is also left uneasily wondering why one has been told about them at all -- for pretty much the same reason that one is unsettled by the sight of the new statue depicting FDR as a wheelchair-bound polio victim now affixed to Washington's FDR memorial: A didactic artifact of healing has been minted from the willful neglect of the suffering subject's personal wishes.

PERSONAL WISHES, on the other hand, are what misguided dad celebrations like The Family Man are all about. But these are wishes of a dramatically different order: One can only imagine that John Bradley might have simply folded up his flag and shipped out on the next transporter home had he suspected he was clearing the ground for this sort of predatory vision of the American hearth. Indeed, the movie presents itself as an update of another fable of World War II era patriarchy, It's a Wonderful Life, but performs just about every imaginable sort of violence to Frank Capra's holiday tearjerker.
For starters, the plot of The Family Man is set in motion by nothing so fraught and momentous as a protagonist's bout of suicidal despair. Where George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart), a despairing, sacrifical dad, veers off course thanks to a financial calamity testing his faith in the New Deal's vision of the beloved community, Nicolas Cage's John Campbell plunges into his edifying counterlife by that prototypically yuppie flourish of moral vanity: He commits a random act of kindness. When the street punk who turns into his guardian angel (Don Cheadle) threatens, for obscure reasons, to knock over a neighborhood deli, Campbell intervenes with a timely two-hundred-dollar cash offer. When Cheadle's character offers to settle accounts with Campbell, the high-rolling arbitrageur announces "There's nothing I don't have."
Cut to didactic alternative reality. Campbell awakes the next morning as a tire-salesman in Teaneck, New Jersey, head of a four-bedroom household, married to the college sweetheart he threw over on his way up the corporate ladder, in thrall to both his in-laws and a pair of smelly, demanding toddlers. And since this is Hollywood's vision of the suburbs, Campbell's friends and family members eat bad food, use cutesy conversational expressions such as "anyhoo," and bowl without the aid of irony.


Campbell comes, of course, to adore the warm, fuzzy rounds of suburban nesting, but this being America in the full throttle of the Long Boom, he eventually connives his way into an offer of a mergers-and-acquisitions post at the Wall Street house that employed him in his former life. Trying to sell his fairy-tale wife Kate (Téa Leoni) on the new arrangement, he conducts her into the gloriously appointed interim Manhattan lodgings the firm has made available to new hires. "It's a perk," he announces in exuberant satisfaction, and in nearly the same breath assures her sententiously, "I need to do this as a man." It's the whole point of George Bailey's (and John Bradley's) world, of course, that you don't stake your birthright "as a man" on something so ephemeral as a perk. (That, indeed, was the undoing of Bradley's fellow flagraiser Rene Gagnon, who fatally misapprehended the fame of a random photo appearance as a permantently renewable meal ticket.)
However, the perks do not, by a longshot, end here. Campbell gets to have it all, and have all things both ways. When he is briefly restored to his solitary, soulless high-rolling life, he winds up turning his back on a humungous merger deal to win over his beloved Kate, but in this life, Kate is no dowdy attorney for a nonprofit law firm, as she is in the Teaneck version of reality. Instead, she's a corporate law partner, about to launch the Paris branch office of her firm. And since they're both childless Yuppies, Campbell is able to lure her out of the boarding line of her Paris flight by offering an extended description of the wholesome perfection of their Jersey spawn. Thus the couple can neatly skirt every sacrifice and disappointment they had to face in their counterlife. In that reality, their first child was an unplanned pregnancy, and other family exigencies mandated Jack's tire-store exile. Now, however, these messy considerations are no longer on the table.
Campbell is not so much pledging his troth as tendering an airtight bit of insider-trading. To aver one last time to the 1940s cinematic foil of The Family Man, the very forces that infiltrated and corrupted the greed-addled nightmare vision of a George-Bailey-less Pottersville have here burrowed into the very conception of the new millennial happy family. From the pit of despair, George Bailey had issued his wife a heartfelt challenge: "You say we're a happy family. What are we doing with all these kids, then?" The Family Man offers the perfect investment plan in response to Bailey's plaint: Write the kids off the books as an unrealized potential asset.

LEST THIS SEEM an overheated rhetorical exaggeration, ponder the wretched homilies that make up Robert Kiyosaki's runaway best-selling investment handbook, Rich Dad, Poor Dad (cowritten with with Sharon L. Lechter, C.P.A.). This bumptious collection of bromides flows from the slender conceit that Kiyosaki grew up under the tutelage of both his biological father -- a hapless former professor turned union bureaucrat -- and his best friend's dad, who presided over a sprawling retail and real-estate empire in Kiyosaki's native Hawaii.
Neither dad apparently schooled him in subtlety. Each of them is an unrelieved study in two-dimensional agitprop. His misguided biological dad is a near-operatic figure of lily-livered government dependence who "believed in a company or the government taking care of you and your needs... The idea of job protection for life and job benefits seemed more important, at times, than the job. He would often say, 'I've worked hard for the government, and I'm entitled to these benefits.'"
The poor time-serving sap. Kiyosaki tees off at such length on the follies of this reasoning -- which had, after all, formed the basis of the postwar American social contract -- that Rich Dad, Poor Dad is a much more fascinating Oedipal document than an investment manual. And it becomes that much more discomfitting when the reader is subjected mercilessly to the quips and aperçus of the heroic Rich Dad, who (it should come as no surprise) is a towering Zarathustra of financial genius. He preaches the virtues of the gold standard, the horrors of the rat race, the weakness and fear that prompt lesser creatures to long for pensions and government benefits. Ticking off the evils of taxation, he tells the nine-year-old Kiyosaki, "You're taxed when you earn. You're taxed when you spend. You're taxed when you save. You're taxed when you die." "Why do people let the government do that to them?" comes the ingenuous reply, a question perhaps forgivable coming from a nine-year-old. And then the lesson: "'The rich don't,' said rich dad with a smile. 'The poor and the middle class do. I'll bet you that I earn more in a year than your dad, yet he pays more in taxes.'"
Let me show you how easy it is to slay your father, Grasshopper. So resolute is this bipolar caricature that you wonder why Kiyosaki doesn't just jettison the whole dueling-dads routine and simply call his rich dad "Stock Market." After all, Kiyosaki's general recommendations for the personal investor are so pedestrian -- learn accounting, seek out undervalued real estate, shop carefully for small stock buys -- that there seems precious little call for the imprimatur of any father figure. (Kiyosaki claims that, like a disciplinary good dad of the old school, he's empowering the desperate middle class with "financial literacy" -- a claim that is considerably undercut by his repeated misspelling of the basic accounting term "principal.")
But as one stumbles through the supremely self-confident shadows and fog of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, a horrifying realization takes shape: Kiyosaki needs to mobilize the heavy artillery of fatherly cultural authority because his investment strategies are otherwise morally bankrupt. His rich dad routinely engages in remarkably fatuous pseudo-Darwinian apologetics: "Some people say I exploit people because I don't pay as much as the sugar plantation or the government. I say the people exploit themselves. It's their fear, not mine." For his part, Kiyosaki volunteers such incisive breakdowns of economic psychology as "Our spending habits reflect who we are. Poor people simply have poor spending habits" and (more curtly still) "Don't listen to poor or frightened people."
This is fairly standard fare in the genre of investment hortatory. At length, however, Kiyosaki discloses that he's made his fortune as a bottom feeder: He scours debt and recession-ravaged markets for foreclosed investments. Since so many of his investments are debt-leveraged, he's also looking to have buyers of his properties default: "Occasionally someone does not pay. And that is wonderful because there are late fees, or they move out and the property is sold again. The court system handles that." In other words, our narrator, schooled in shunning the tremulous dependence of the salaried worker and the retiree, relies on the creditor-friendly courts to profiteer off of others' misfortunes -- even as he continues to kite his own debt into new real-estate transactions.
We have clearly traversed a moral universe or so from the civic heroism that rescued George Bailey's Building and Loan when we espy Kiyosaki scouring for foreclosed properties, as he puts it, "at the bankruptcy attorney's office or on the courthouse steps." But the Darwinian boilerplate of Rich Dad, Poor Dad seems, in other ways, a felicitous commentary on the no less court-enabled dawning of the W. era. Here, too, we have a feckless kid of privilege pawning off the rewards of patrimony as the stuff of leadership. Here, too, fast talk of empowering the middle class adorns a government that will grant lavish tax cuts to the wealthy while naming the greatest number of former CEOs to cabinet posts in our nation's history. America, like Koyasaki's rich dad, now will live by the simple homily that "Taxes punish those who produce and reward those who don't produce," when of course much of our universally venerated investor class doesn't "produce" a thing, but, like Koyasaki, ruthlessly profiteers on a national consumer class racking up world-historic levels of personal debt. Needless to say, Koyasaki's rich dad adores Texas, and, more precisely, "a Texan's attitude toward risk, reward and failure... It's how they handle life. They live it big. Not like most of the people here, living like roaches when it comes to money. Roaches are terrified that someone will shine a light on them. Whimpering when the grocery clerk shortchanges them a quarter." Now that much of the rickety armature of paternal virtue -- the banished conceits of character, sacrifice, hard work, and whatnot -- stands exposed as a sucker's game, perhaps we should be grateful that at least one surrogate Rich Dad has the honesty to say what he really thinks of us.

Chris Lehmann is an editor at the Washington Post.

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forbade any discussion
"Reading a book on Iwo Jima at home would have been like reading a Playgirl magazine," one of Bradley's sisters recalls. "It would have been something I would have had to hide."

uneasily wondering
James Bradley writes persuasively and eloquently about the damage wrought in the lives of all the flagraisers and their surviving families in the orgy of mythmaking that followed hard on the photo's release. But the logic of Flags of Our Fathers is to erect another disquieting myth of the self's posthumous exposure and the confessional culture's mandate of intergenerational healing -- a social contract that seems to be sealed by Bradley's reproduction of a letter his then-fifteen-year-old daughter composed to her dead grandfather, one that inevitably sounds faintly ventriloquized, since it prominently features the questions that prompted James Bradley to write this book in the first place: "Why did you not tell about the Navy Cross? And how about the time that Congress stopped and the Senate lined up to shake your hand? Why did you never sit us on your knee and tell us these stories?"

recession-ravaged markets
Discussing the sagging early 1990s market in Phoenix real estate, Kiyosaki cannot contain his glee: "The economy was terrible. I could not pass up these small deals. Houses that were once going for $100,000 were now $75,000. But instead of shopping at the local real estate office, I began shopping at the bankruptcy attorney's office, or the courthouse steps." A few years later, when the American market for real estate took off in earnest, Kiyosaki pursued the main chance in other depressed markets abroad: "I began selling in 1996 and was now traveling to Peru, Norway, Malaysia and the Philippines."


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