More and more you can see the writing on the wall.
When I started this blog it was hard to find anti-boomer news stories. There might be one or two news stories a week. Now they come fast and furious. There are more of them then I have time to comment on. (And for some strange reason you folks keep coming back to listen to me comment on them.)
It seems to me that Gen-x is getting it's collective slacker act together and slowly starting to roast the boomers.
Even the main stream media is getting in on the act. Here's some for you from the LA Times:
Anyone who believes that the cultural imperialism of baby boomers is limited to the generations that came after them need only see a recent documentary called "Young at Heart." Almost unanimously loved by critics (most of them baby boomers), the film depicts a Massachusetts senior citizens chorus (median year of birth 1929) that became an international touring act when its director (year of birth 1953) switched its repertoire from flapper-era ditties like "Yes, We Have No Bananas" to golden not-as-oldies by such artists as the Rolling Stones, James Brown and the Clash.
Let's start of with a chorus singing The Clash. I don't care what age you are that is just wrong. How would that even work? (It is probably on YouTube but I am not going to go look. You, however, are free to do what you wish.) Here's London Calling in three part harmony and sung as a fugue. Just the idea of it gives one the hebbies.
James Brown doesn't seem like it would lend itself to choral music either.
Many of the choristers seem to neither understand nor particularly like the material; their own preferences run toward opera or Rodgers and Hammerstein. But conditioned by cheering audiences of mostly younger people, these oldsters have been convinced that they are healthier, happier and sharper -- not to mention better traveled -- because of Mick Jagger and Mick Jones. Boomer-era classic rock is not just music but a life force.
Maybe they could do Dean Martin or Frank Sinatra. I would prefer Dean though. He always seemed cooler than Frank. At least to me.
Oh well... Next.
As a member of Generation X, I should know -- I've been strong-armed into an appreciation of '60s and '70s pop culture my whole life. There are an estimated 76 million boomers (10,000 babies a day on average, born between 1946 and 1964), while we Xers (born between 1965 and 1982) number a paltry 48 million. So boomers set the tone for everyone. Their tastes, needs and values are considered America's default setting. They turn 60, and it warrants magazine covers. They get a cold, and the world sneezes with them.
So privileged is this group, they've been allowed to change generational labels the way they changed their (always "groundbreaking") clothing styles. They've been known, in whole or in part, as the Dr. Spock Generation, the Free Love Generation, the Generation That Changed America, the Me Generation, Hippies, Yuppies, Bobos and, to certain members of Gen X, "moronic aging hippie posers." Despite having grown out of the category years ago, they remain, thanks to a certain iconic TV show, etched in the popular imagination as forever "thirtysomething."
Don't forget there is a new group of them now. They call themselves Generation Jones. They call themselves this because they are always Jonesin' for the good life. I'm not making this up. Do a Google search if you don't believe me.
So why does this stroll down memory lane feel more like a carjacking? Maybe because for every truly significant event of 1968, there are half a dozen not-necessarily-newsworthy happenings that we're goaded into remembering with just as much gusto. Amid the nods to King and Kennedy, we can expect this year to be replete with art house revivals of the films "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Yellow Submarine," innocuous if tiresome public radio features about Valerie Solanas' shooting of Andy Warhol, and, if there's a slow week in entertainment news, maybe even an E! special commemorating the marriage of Jackie Kennedy to Aristotle Onassis.
Even though I wasn't alive when any of this stuff happened, I sure feel like I was. Maybe that's because my generational cohorts and I have already endured five anniversaries of 1968 (one for each decade, plus the 25th thrown in for good measure) as well as four Woodstock revivals and countless Summer-of-Love-themed concerts. As though trapped at a reunion for a school we didn't attend, pre- and post-boomers can only nod in bored bewilderment while the no-longer-hippies get their retroactive groove on.
What is sad is that anyone in in America under the age of 40 has a better knowledge of 60's pop culture B.S. than they do of either the first two world wars. We've been inundated with more info about Woodstock (not the bird) than we have been about the Constitution of the United States. Believe me, we think that is just groovy.
It is, by now, a cliche for members of Generation X to complain about the excesses and hypocrisies of the hippie generation. (Gen Y has its grievances toward that generation too, but unlike Xers, nearly all of their parents are bona fide boomers, so their gripes may have their roots in bedtime or borrowing the car.) In the 1990s, when Gen Xers weren't busy thinking up synonyms for "alienated," we were carving out a collective identity largely concerned with our role as the victims of any number of boomer-imposed crimes (dwindling Social Security, fearsome divorce statistics, AIDS as the death rattle of the free-love party).That would be a heavily mortgage home filled with furniture that requires no payment until 2011. Even better, that home would have been purchased twenty years ago and now is mortgage for three or for times its original purchase price. Live for today. Right boomers?
It may be unoriginal to point out that the sanctimony of "getting back to the garden" in the late 1960s and early 1970s begat the equal and opposite sanctimony of the "greed is good" mantra of the 1980s. But one need only rent "The Big Chill" to be reminded that if there's anything boomers enjoy more than the music of Procol Harum and Three Dog Night, it's remembering the earnest piety of their college days. This reminiscing is even better if it can be done within the confines of an expensively furnished house.
Even a lot of boomers hate boomers, and not just the right-wing kind, who love to blame the half-life of hippie-era hedonism for everything from teen sex to homelessness. The Democratic political consultant Paul Begala (year of birth 1961) published a screed in Esquire in 2000 denouncing boomers as "the most self-centered, self-seeking, self-interested, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing generation in American history." Pointing out that key objects of boomer worship like the Beatles, Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin were all born before World War II ended, he suggests that (Bruce Springsteen excepted) "the truest [musical] expression of their generation" was actually disco.
When the boomers had the chance to make music first they gave us Disco. Then they went on to give us Hair Metal and New Wave. Both had the artistic depth of a wading pool. But, at least you could party to it.
In 2011, get ready to honor the death of Jim Morrison, the Concert for Bangladesh and Evel Knievel's record-setting motorcycle leap over 19 cars.
And on and on it will go until, say, 2050, when, if they're lucky, the last of the boomers will be living out their days in the Young at Heart Chorus. Something tells me they'll bring a little something extra to "Should I Stay or Should I Go?"
Well, that was most of it. I don't usually take that much of the story. But you can go read the rest of it yourself.
Until next time. Just for the chorus, here's Dean Martin.
2 comments:
My Gen-Y friends seem blissfully unaware and indifferent to anything that took place before 1990. I used to think this was an indication of their own self-indulgence and cultural illiteracy, but now I see it as the blessed result of not being so inundated by another generation's idea of the norm.
I could tolerate the demeaning of my own Gen-X culture if these Boomers, in their fading glory, would finally shut up. But they will wail their superiority until the last breath, sucking down every privilege along the way.
It seems like every teacher, camp counselor and preacher I had growing up was a guiter-playing arrogant boomer who really and truly thought that "Animal House" was the best film ever made. Now its like they all work for that tax-payer funded stump known as NPR.
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