The Most Self-Absorbed Generation

My gullible mother and her bigoted church friends (who spent most of their adult lives gossiping about the social lives of teenagers who weren't even related to them) never comprehended why people were reasonably embarrassed by their profound ignorance and naive bigotry.  It was astounding even for her given that people with common sense being appalled by being forced to associate with such stupidity has traditionally been one of the most common tropes in US history and literature.

For example, Ted Williams, paragon of the Greatest Generation for his military service and ability to hit a baseball, was always embarrassed as a kid that his mother was an evangelist and soldier for the Salvation Army who spent the vast majority of her time trying to save souls on San Diego's skid row.  According to Wikipedia, "Williams resented his mother's long hours working in the Salvation Army,^[8] and Williams and his brother cringed when she took them to the Army's street-corner revivals.^[9]" 

Then again, the protagonist of Dreiser's An American Tragedy had the exact same experience when his poor but devout evangelical parents forced him to join them in their humiliating mission work of distributing tracts and singing hymns in Kansas City's version of the Tenderloin .

"... he seemed more keenly observant than most of the others - appeared indeed to resent and even to suffer from the position in which he found himself....  During all this time Clyde was saying to himself that he did not wish to do this any more, that he and his parents looked foolish and less than normal - "cheap" was the word he would have used if he could have brought himself to express his full measure of resentment at being compelled to participate in this way - and that he would not do it any more if he could help."