A few weeks ago Roger L. Simon announced The Death of Cool and remembered his first encounter with the sexy idol:
Back when I was a kid, I desperately wanted to be cool. I endlessly played my Miles Davis Birth of the Cool LP and devoured Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti — not to mention Kerouac whom I saw when I was fifteen reading from The Subterraneans at Hunter College auditorium while swigging from a bottle of Scotch he had brought with him. (I thought that was cool.)
It was fifth grade and the new elementary school in Indiana where I’d just enrolled was having a ’50s dance. Everyone was supposed to come in ’50s style clothes and then we’d take off our shoes and have a “sock hop.” Most girls were to wear poodle skirts and boys were expected to sport the greaser look a la John Travolta. My Boomer Dad had other plans, though. He pulled his vintage copy of Howl off the shelf, read a few lines from it, and suggested I go as a beatnik. I don’t remember if I took his suggestion. I think I did. Or at least at some point I put on the black sweat pants, black turtle neck, black beret, dark sunglasses, and brown sandals costume. Of course it was exciting as an 11 year old to have adult-sanctioned F-WORDs. I could say the F-WORD if it was followed by “yourself with your atom bomb.” Game on.
Rule for Baby Boomers: Your counterculture icons can either be cool or costumes for your children, but they cannot be both.
Additional Rule for Gen Xers: It’s way too soon for Kurt Cobain Halloween costumes for your toddlers. Please. And no it won’t be hip and ironic if you include a little toy shotgun along with the flannel. Your Gen Y siblings and co-workers still think Nirvana is cool.
Come as you are, as you were, as I want you to be / As a friend, as a friend, as an old Enemy / Take your time, hurry up, choice is yours, don't be late / Take a rest, as a friend, as an old memory.
Categories: Uncategorized
My definition of “cool”?
General Anthony McAuliffe, 101st Airborne, at Bastogne.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_McAuliffe
Case closed.
clear ether
eon
Hunter Thompson was worse than you can possibly imagine. He was also into snuff films. His name has popped up in the Franklin scandal (a plundered savings & loan that led to a child-porn ring). His fans claimed “He was investigating the snuff film underground.” Uh-huh. For 20 years? How much investigation did he need? Is that like Pete Townshend’s child-porn excuse of “I was doing research”?
Thompson wouldn’t be the first informant who was so into his work that there was little difference between him and the crazies he was supposedly monitoring. I know a long list of such people.
Just to clarify, Townshend at least had a known project in progress (an essay on his website) at the time to back up his claim. He was investigated thoroughly and found not to be in possession of any images. Given the evidence, I think it’s fair to say that Mr. Townshend was perfectly guilty of extremely bad judgement (to which he openly admits) but not of the crime to which you associate him.
I’m a diehard fan, though, of the man and his music, so I won’t say I’m not biased. All we can do is give people a fair shake and look at what evidence there is before making a judgement.
David, this is a brilliant essay and I loved it. My only question is…yes, I agree it’s way cool to be worth 17 billion bucks when you’re still in college after inventing such a thing as FB…but what explains Zuckerburg’s apparent socialist leanings? Friend of the WH and all that? I have to shake my head at the capitali$ts (ha) who seem to want to cozy up to the beast. Do they not know the fate that is in store for them when the beast gets done devouring the present carcass of the last successful business? Or…is it worse and darker? Is the WH-rubbing simply foreplay for getting in on the rampant crony capitalism going on en mass in these days of watching Atlas Shrugged play out in reality? Is it the only outlet for a capitalist desperate to survive…to join the murder of all the others and hope to be spared in the end?
Hey Megan,
Thanks for your encouragement.
“Or…is it worse and darker?”
We Millennials are here to give you Xers permission to lighten up and be happier.
Zuckerberg’s ideology isn’t standard, run of the mill leftism. His approach is influenced by what’s known as the “hacker ethos,” a tech-centric computer programmer utopianism that is ultimately an incoherent mishmash with leftist, anarchist, and libertarian strains. I’ll make a point to write about it more in depth when I study it more. It’s on the to-do list.
And I really don’t blame Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs for cozying up to the cool icons the so-called liberal popular culture. It’s better for their businesses if they look cool.
Actually he is only doing what others like him have done in the past. Rockefeller, Carnegie, Pullman (look up Pullmans utopian workers community in Chicago and all the kudos he received, until it imploded under similar economic circumstances that we are dealing with today)the list of Capitalists that embraced America’s version of socialism are large. I believe it is a bit guilt for having so much when so many have little, I also believe it is a way to ensure no competition against you, Rockefeller in fact, was a master at it. Call it crony capitalism if you wish, it is actually nothing more than corporatism done up as social justice. It was born in the Progressive era early on and found its true calling during the great depression, the fact that it is making such a strong comeback in similar economic times and under a President who is sure he is the second coming of FDR should not surprise any of us.
Great, thoughtful piece, Dave. As a GenXer who was awakened to our place in the world by Strauss & Howe’s The Fourth Turning, however, I don’t reckon you’re going to see us lighten up. (OTOH, happiness is relative, and I consider myself a pretty happy guy.)
In fact, based on my understanding of Strauss and Howe, I think you should be relieved that we’re cranky. The worst (not all) of the Boomers and Silents left a flaming bag of dog-doo on our collective doorstep, and we’re the only ones mean enough, and who don’t care enough about what people think of us, to deal with it. We’ll go out cranky and cantankerous, because that’s what we were meant to be.
Thanks Jake. I still need to read Fourth Turning. I suppose I should if I’m going to keep writing about their generational theory. I’ve only read Generations and Millennials Rising.
Ha, Generations and Millennials Rising are in my reading list, so you’re actually 1 up on me. Glad to have run across this essay, and will be interested to read your further ruminations.
Perhaps he’ll grow up.
I expect he will. I anticipate most of my generation growing up really quickly over the course of the next decade as the economic chickens come home to roost.
Although the cult of cool is indeed a problematic one, the adventurer/icon/star/hero/lonewolf has been with us for a long time and is not the source of the ills you speak of.
You are confusing the ideology of political correctness with cool and PC does indeed look at our Constitution as a suicide pact; take away the PC and Annette and Frankie are still harmless, no matter how dressed up a vampires nowadays.
PC blames things on entities and traits that either don’t exist or are off target. Look for example at the idea that whites are endemic racists: look at all the American films from 1930 to 1960, practically the height of Jim Crow, and there is not a whiff of racialism. Look at any mostly black made film in the last 20 years and they are rife with race. And yet the biggest complaint among black Americans is, generally speaking, white Americans and that white are hyper-aware of race and infused with supremacy ideas – it is nonsense.
PC morons project their own nonsense onto others as if it is real and then act on it; this is the source of the self-immolation of America today and not cool. Hendrix and Joplin weren’t commies or in favor of the wholesale transportation of the Third World and its failed cultures to America – maybe they would’ve been PC but we’ll never know.
Cool is based on childhood fantasies, PC is a self-destructive, race-based ideology that grew, almost by accident, into a nearly full-fledged Terror. It is a combination of tea drinking, yoga, crystal gazing, yuppie, hippie liberals and Marxist Critical Pedagogy.
Obama is nearly the perfect sum total of this creed and so also the perfect, America-hating fool, born of Jim Cone, Rev. Wright and his own depraved obsession with race and whites.
The problem is: when the culture plops into the chamber pot nothing at all is “the source of the ills.” That’s the problem with garbage like “Family Guy” and “South Park” and hideous movies like “Human Caterpillar” (go look it up): they can all shrug and say, “I didn’t CAUSE the decline of Western Civilization.” It’s a million factors and a million perpetrators egging each other on; each shoving things just an inch closer to the drop-off.
So we’ve always had the “lone wolf anti-hero”? Every problem we have now is something “we’ve always had.”
When things finally collapse, it won’t be due to any new factor at all; just the same old stuff heaped up in a culture-crushing mound.
I heard a quote that sums up what you are saying RK “No single raindrop can ever be held responsible for a flood”
Brilliant!
I picture it as a vote. If a guy wins an election by a single vote, was it the last vote cast that was the deciding vote? No. Every single vote was the deciding vote.
Respectfully disagree. Cool is an expression of personal strength, security and wealth, that doesn’t need the assistance, or is indebted too, others. Single people are cool, dads who are locked into jobs, social and religious groups, and kid responsibilities are not.
To go a bit further, “Cool” is merely a data point in the long philosophical decoupling of people from the social structures and responsibilities that give their lives purpose and meaning. From Descartes thru Hobbes thru Rousseau thru Beethoven thru Keroac thru John Lennon, the stripping all of society from the social creature, man.
So uncoupled, a cool person is “wealthy” with untapped, unencumbered potential. But if persistently remains unengaged, “cool” is just a midpoint on the way to a wasted life.
I was born in 1957. I’m a “boomer” and I spent 30 years as a United States Soldier. I served in two wars, saw the world, and earned a college degree. I held positions in communications, intel analysis, and counter terrorism. I was privileged to serve with some of the finest Soldiers ever to wear the uniform and the sacrifices we made, made a real difference.
That’s “cool” enough for me.
SFC MAC: You’re a “statistical outlier” that doesn’t fit the “Baby Boom” mould. And God bless you for it. Personally, I hate being associated with the “Me Generation”. I wasn’t even in kindergarten when Woodstock happened.
MOST of the Baby Boom generation are fine upstanding citizens who never did heroin or any other illegal drugs, who had families and mortgages and did all kinds of good things from being Boy Scout Leaders to inventing cool new stuff. The rich elites were the ones who went off the deep end as a slight majority, and took a lot of poor kids with them. But I reckon not more than 5 or 6% of Baby Boomers fit the stereotype.
I’m on the leading edge of Gen-X myself, and one of my parents is a Boomer. Most of the adults I have known in my life were Boomers. They get no representation because they’re too busy doing real work. They left the fluff to the elitists. Just think of any other time in history when the richest people of a culture all want to be journalists, or artists, or musicians. It’s just Romanticism gone wild. And as always, Romanticism ends with a thud, and reality returns. Just ask the Germans how they felt after the Nazi fairy-tale mask was torn off.
If there’s any blame to lay at the feet of non-elite Baby Boomers, it’s that they didn’t do more to stop their contemporaries from wrecking everything. The little platoons did their best–but it’s big battalions that win battles. Those who did well in their little platoons–who didn’t get divorced for nothing, who didn’t give their children an amoral, rudderless worldview, who worked and struggled hard–they did the best they could, and honor to them. The reason why there’s such a thing as the TEA Party right now is because of Rush Limbaugh and others like him. The decent Baby Boomers felt lost and isolated, as the culture constantly told them how odd and out of it they were, and when Rush came along it was like a sudden realization: I’m not alone after all. They knew it already, to a degree–their church, or community, etc, might be like them, but each felt like an island in a sea of wickedness. Mass media painted it that way, and still does, but now there are other voices and all the islands are finding that a mighty archipelago of a million isles is bigger than on loud and obnoxious jumbo-size island.
I tried to be cool for a few months of my senior year in HS, and then gave up and decided I liked being a nerd better anyway. I haven’t been bored since. The world is a fascinating place filled with so much to see and learn that it’s impossible get tired of it. That bored, world-weary pose of the ‘cool’–they can have it. It’s no more real than the fake cynical pose that makes up the other half of cool.
I hate to break it to the whacko wing of the Boomers but the youngest of them is 45 years old. That’s on the downhill side of middle age, even if the life expectancy were 90. The mania for cool is really embarrassing in a geezer. So shudderingly pathetic to see a 60-year-old desperate for the approval of a 14-year-old. Have a little dignity, please!!
Being born on the edges of generations causes people to have certain characteristics of both. For for boomers born in ’57 they have some of Generation X’s qualities. And for Gen Xers born in the early 60s they have certain Boomer qualities. For me as a Millennial born just at the beginning of the cohort I have a particularly strong Gen X influence. My style of humor in the piece (or feeble attempt at such) and my willingness to have somewhat sharp edges and reference difficult subject matter are examples of the impression that my Gen X peers and cultural icons have made.
I always thought it was hip to be square. Never quite understood what cool was. But I do know one thing. The gals I saw in college thought that “cool” was some of the guys that came from rich families and looked like they just walked off of a men’s underwear ad. The women my age today think “cool” is a husband who comes to them in a driving rain to jump start their cars. I guess time has a way of re-defining what “cool” is. And I also know that even though thin is in, fat is where it’s at.
What always gets me about the Boomers is that the real Boomers, those born before 1955, always seem to get away with it.
When they were kids, they got the nice metal wagons and trikes with vivid lead based paint, and then moved on before the metal wagons had to be painted in crappy safe colors and before the kids couldn’t have metal wagons because they were dangerous, and before the kids couldn’t have metal wagons because all the good ones were now antique collectibles that cost too much for their parents to buy.
When they were teens, they did drugs. Lots and lots of drugs. Some died, but not many. Most stopped before there were things like Cartels and crack.
When they were older, they did disco and unprotected sex, and too much of both. Ruining music, radio, and going out for the next generation all in one fell-swoop. They changed the course of a disease. In 1960, the CDC thought they could eradicate gonorrhea from North America as there were only 10,000 cases in the US and Canada. By 1970, it was the second most common bacterial infection in adults. Now, we have multidrug resistant GC. They have moved on.
Next, it was parenthood. The super-mom. The have it all mom. The divorced mom. Yeah, it WAS a lot of fun to be able to play with the neighbor kids all summer. Now kids have “play dates” when it fits into super mom’s blackberry calendar. Instead of a real father, the kids of “divorced mom” get a series of “mom’s boyfriends”. Yeah, that’s better.
Next, it was vacations. No more family in the car off to some close by spot for a week of relaxation, or a trip to grandma’s house. No the boomers wanted to go for “self actualization” and now we feel like we have failed our kids if we don’t send them to Europe in high school or take them to some overpriced Mouse-eared resort to stand in lines. Yeah, that’s so much better than playing in the creek at grandpa’s farm.
The Boomers have not been good on our country, and you want to know the worst of it? They will die off before they can pay the tab. My generation and those following will have to do so. Thanks Boomers! Now, you’ve done enough and please just go away quietly.
Love and kisses,
The birth cohort of ’59
On target.
A+
I know a couple of “Boomers” who break the mould- both were in Vietnam. (One U.S. Army Logistics at Cam Ranh Bay, the other USMC Force Recon.) And neither one appreciates being called a “Boomer”.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence.
cheers (from a 1958 issue)
eon
Elsewhere in PJM, I read an article describing the traits of a narcissist. It described Boomers, as a collective, to a T. As a ’61er, I always felt as BRM does, that the “true boomers” cleaned out the popcorn bowl and left us the old maids. I think what disgusts me most, is how proud most of them are for all the damage they’ve done to our society.
I’ve always thought a generation should be judged by what it leaves behind. Look at them when they’re old (today that would be the WW2 vets) and see how big a buck they’re passing.
That’s why it drives me crazy how we have to idolize the so-called “greatest generation.” Yes, they were beautiful in 30s and 40s, but then they came home and were they TRUE fathers of the sex-drugs-rocknroll era. I like to point out that for every Billy Graham there’s a Timothy Leary.
Steve, your comment was the essence of the boomer generation. In fact, the WWII deserves the respect to be called the “greatest generation”. They grew up in a depression, saved the world from evil in WWIi, sent a man to the moon in less than 9 years and did it with slide rules. Todays 20-ish generation will be another great generation. Growing up in a depression. Saving the world from evil. And they will save our Republic from the absolute shameful financial ruin and delusional marxist seeds you boomers left behind.
And the “Greatest” left us all the New Deal, the Great Society, no fault divorce, the birth control pill, abortion on demand,Playboy and its progeny, affirmative action, public employee unions, and I can go on. You all love to blame ‘Boomers, but most of the professors were marxists when we got to college and the left had a firm control of entertainment and academia by the ’30s. The first election ANY ‘Boomer could vote in was ’64, and then only the oldest of the cohort and residing in KY and GA, the only states with 18 yr. olds voting. The two elections held at the heighth of ‘Boomers surging into the electorate were won by that Nixon fellow, a well-known leftist. There is a cohort of ‘Boomers that went on to academia, entertainment, government, or the non-profit or third sectors and could and largely have kept the same dumba$$ ideas they had smoking dope in college dorms in ’69. The rest of us got a job, got married, sometimes even in that order, raised kids and started homes and families in the teeth of first hyperinflation then stagnation. That’ll give you a pretty good mugging by reality.
One Helluva lot more ‘Boomers went to Vietnam than to Woodstock or to demonstrations on The Mall. One Helluva lot more ‘Boomers volunteered or accepted the draft than dodged the draft, though I’ll admit that lots stayed in school as long as possible to keep the deferment.
Modern mythology even has the soundtrack of the ’60s wrong. None of those SF psychedlic bands ever had a number one hit. The Archies, The Monkeys, and other “bubble gum” bands sold many multiples of what the hip bands sold. I was a musician in the late ’60s doing mostly high school and college dances and a little club work, club work was hard to get if any of your group was under 21. If you played “hippie music” the crowd left. About the closest you’d dare get to San Franciso was The Doors’ “Light My Fire” and you’d catch Hell from the chaperones, yes they still had them, at High School dances for the sexual nature of Light My Fire. The only place that The Sixties looked like the mythical Sixties was in very small areas of the bigger cities and a small minority on some, I repeat some, college campuses. At the heighth of the anti-war movement, button-down collar, locker-looped, oxford cloth shirts and khakis were a whole helluva lot more common on college campuses than were beads and bellbottoms. And though there were illicit drugs on campuses, the drug of choice was beer. I think about the only remotely realistic movie depiction of ‘Sixties college age culture was “The Big Chill.” But, since the media was and is centered on NYC and LA, they saw freaks and then as now saw the whole country through their personal lens.
The New Deal was not the Greatest Generation’s fault; that was their parents. Most of the Greatest Generation wasn’t old enough to vote in 1932. Many of them weren’t old enough to vote in 1944.
@myth buster – Strauss and Howe’s “G.I. Generation” considers the cohort to be those born between 1901 and 1924 with the determinant to be that they came of age during the Great Depression and before the end of WWII. Significant numbers of this cohort would have been able to vote for FDR in ’32, ’36, 40, and ’44 as well as in the Democrat dominated Congressional elections in that period. To their credit many of them would have also voted for the Republican Congress of ’48 that stemmed some of the excesses of the New Deal, but nobody wants to give any ‘Boomers credit for having been a part of electing any of the several Republicans who’ve been President since the first ‘Boomers could vote in ’64.
There was a generation between the WW2 and boomer generations. The leading edge boomers (I am one) started entering college in 1964, or so. The “intellectual” and “moral” leadership which set the direction for the 60s and 70s comprised older folks who influenced the impressionable boomers. The “cool” “hippy” types were in place before the boomers were a factor. My generational cohort was the first to experience mass prosperity and complacency. The WW2 generation who were our parents thought (in general) that they should try to make “us” happy by giving us things. “We” grew up thinking that, while the world may not exactly owe us a living, one would just naturally be provided somehow. (I put “us” and “we” in quotes because my parents somehow missed this trend, so I grew up slightly resentful of my over-privileged cohort.) The boomers provided the massed formations of the cultural revolution, but the instigators preceded us.
Not that it matters any more. When the legend beats the facts, print the legend.
Do your demographic homework before you tar an entire generation. There are millions of us who recognize what’s been wrought in their name, and they don’t like it. They’re voting for Herman Cain and other anti-p.c. candidates, abandoning the MSM and trying to reach succeeding generations with warnings only experience can teach. Sure, huge mistakes were made: allowing the Long March, failing to confront blatant and vicious attacks on all the traditional mores — marriage, work, saving, sacrificing — that made this country unique.
Some elements of Boomers are responsible for indoctrination over education, gender warfare, a badly damaged judicial system and a corrupt and incompetent government. No doubt about it. But there are others who have seen, and more who are seeing, the destructiveness of the culture that has taken grip, and they’re trying to do something about. How we fare depends on how many younger ones can put aside their self-esteem ideology and gain the ability and willingness to listen.
Occupy Wall Streeters are lost. I can only hope there are enough others who are strong enough to cancel them out.
We all did some crazy things. I smoked grass, but never got into LSD or any of the hard crap. I still party on occasion. I grew up with some great music and I saw a lot of history being made. But I can say that I spent my life in a noble profession and I don’t regret a bit of it, good or bad.
My stock answer to the youth:
Let’s see what kind of world you leave behind before you criticize the last generation.
“… born before 1955, always seem to get away with it”
Not so much. I’m a few years earlier than 1955 and I assure you that the leading edge of the Boomers had already fouled the pathways before I got there. I’m not saying that you folks closer to 1960 didn’t have even more of a mess, but it was no picnic for a lot of us.
The Boomer’s won the Cold War. Perhaps when you live with the constant threat of nuclear armageddon, you tend to live for the moment.
The Boomers won the Cold War? That would be news to Harry Truman (B: 1884), Ike (1890), JFK (1917) LBJ (1908), and especially to Ronald Reagan (1911).
Well gee Ed, I guess I burst your little bubble of a theory of how bad the Boomers were/are.
You see, I’m a Boomer and I got a Cold War Certificate of Recognition (USN 23 Years), signed by SECDEF that states:
Quote:
In recognition of your service during the period of the Cold War (02 Sept 1945 – 26 Dec 1991) in promoting peace and stability for this Nation , the people of this Nation are forever grateful.
Unquote:
You see while those Presidents whose birth dates you cite were most assuredly not Boomers, the foot soldiers of the Cold War were. You should thank them, you are Free today because of them.
“You should thank them, you are Free today because of them.” I most assuredly do — along with my late father, who served in WWII.
“You should thank them [Boomers], you are Free today because of them.”
Tommy, with no disrespect, but it was capitalism that won the cold war. The Boomers were just in the right place at the right time. If during the period of the Cold War, the US was populated by the sorts of people now known as the Great Generation, the war would have been won sooner. During the Boomer age, technology was progressing by leaps and bounds. And the USSR would never have been able to compete against today’s cell phones, computer technology and internet.
And just how do you think those sea-lines of communication were kept open? By magic? No, that was the US Navy making capitalism possible.
Excuse me, but I don’t remember making detergent patrols during the cold war with Harry, Ike, LBJ, Dick, Jerry, Jimmy or Ronnie. As I recall, they were on the beach, waving goodbye.(Well, not Harry and Ike. They were gone by the time I went to my first submarine)
Leaders. Sure. Cold War warriors, not so much. It was a bunch of boomer era volunteers from 1960 on that saw that thing through.
Having said that, I never was cool. Ever.
Excuse me Ed but it wasn’t Harry Truman, Ike, JFK, LBJ and Ronald Reagan that fought, died and had their lives thrown away in the jungles of Southeast Asia in the 60′s and 70′s. And speaking of LBJ have we ever had a president that was more of a duplicitous liar than he was?
No disrespect to the honorable servicemen who fought, died, and were permanently scarred by combat in Vietnam. Tragically their sacrifice was in vain. Vietnam did nothing to win the Cold War.
Thanks to a new media that decided to push an agenda rather than report it, coupled with a generation that thought honor, duty, and responsibility were old-fashioned ideas, we lost that war. In fact, our defeat lead to a resurgence of Marxist activity throughout the world.
Hel-lo? I’m right here!
Ha ha you so funny! Most of we boomers sat on the sidelines winging about the efforts to win the cold war, cashed in on the bennies asap and still won’t give RWR credit. I despise my generation.
As I recall, most of us Boomers were making big splashy protests about “No Nukes” and how the US needed to reduce our nuclear arsenal by 90%, so that the Soviets would reduce theirs by 30% (my math may be a little fuzzy, but that was the gist of 1980′s disarmament movement).
That old fool Ronnie Raygun was trying to blow up the world with Star Wars and an uncontrolled arms race. That was the prevalent Boomer belief. I know because I was in college at the time and heard that crap everyday from peers and professors.
The Boomers as a group sure as hell DID NOT win the Cold War (exceptions to our fine servicemen on duty at the time). It was won in spite of them.
You recall incorrectly. What were the biggest anti-nuke protests, maybe 100K people, most were at most a few dozen. The already leftist media that hated Reagan from his CA days gave the protests more publicity than they deserved but they never were significant in this Country and even in Europe didn’t much deter US policy. The ‘Boomer cohort is some 80 Million people, 100K is hardly a significant sample. And since there are so many, some of them had to have voted for RWR – twice.
The leftist media likes a particular image of the ‘Sixties, the leftist image and frankly that image is a much less accurate portrayal of ‘Boomers than is the image of under 30s today as pierced and tatted slackers in baggy pants.
When you say “Boomer,” you’re talking about a demographic cohort of almost 80 Million people. If you believe the numbers there might have been 500,000 people at the very biggest “music festivals” or demonstrations. When you look at Haight-Ashbury or Greenwich Village at the heighth of the “hippie” era, there were at most a few tens of thousands there and at most a few thousand living something like the hippy lifestyle in the other larger cities.
Sure there were drugs in the colleges and the beginnings of drug use in the high schools, but most of those people managed to get diplomas or degrees and get jobs and do all that other adult stuff. You X’ers and Y’ers, and “millenials” or whatever want to make 80 Million people into a bunch of indolent dopers drifting from quickie to quickie. Somebody bought all those houses and cars around you, and most those somebodies were ‘Boomers. And sorry, as much as you hate us, you’re still going to be working for us for awhile longer; ain’t ready to give up the corner office and the pretty secretary yet, kid.
The boomers didn’t win the Cold War, you idiot! It was Ronald Reagan, Maggie Thatcher and John Paul II, the last dying act of the Greatest Generation. May they never, never, never be forgotten.
The cold war was not won by the West….it was lost by the Soviet Union. There is a big difference.
The Soviet Union competed themselves into bankruptcy only to see the result burnt out of the skies by Israeli fighter jets in the early 80s. All that money and effort and training and they realized that if they ever actually went toe-to-toe with America it’d be a debacle. They went belly up and gave up.
Putin has resurrected a vampire with make-up. The Chinese will get a similar rude awakening if they ever attempt a blue water navy like the Japanese did.
The ‘greatest generation’ had common sense and a sense of duty and responsibility and discipline. It’s written all over their work as engineers, writers, commercial illustrators, filmmakers, etc.
The ‘boomers’, me, mid-50s born, have taken a step back along the evolutionary path that has resulted in the demographic destruction of the very culture everyone loves to hate but can’t stay away from because we made this country, not Latinos, (look at Latin America) not Muslims, (look at the middle east), not Indians, (look at India) and not black folks, (look at Africa). That is their Orwellian truth they cannot abide intellectually and will not separate themselves from physically.
That essentially means all the vitriol is aimed at the most productive and all the compassion ladled out to failure. Good luck with those diminishing returns. It is a form of genuine madness and a suicide pact that puts us at the service, beck and call of the greatest morons in the world.
Said it before. Cool is the baboon with the shiniest red butt.
Bugs, you said it all.
Not to get off on a rant, but , Bill, Hillary and Jane Fonda, sold out, got naked, smoked dope, and talked bad about their country, while better people than them were keeping the faith in a rice paddy. In short, you can kiss my Irish-Cherokee-American axx. If the Americans who won WWII were the greatest generation, the sorry, worthless, baby-boomers lames are hands-down the worst. My generation (post baby boom) kicked the living daylights out of anybody who looked sideways at America since 1990 – in Iraq, Panama, Afghanistan, and Iraq again (and yes, I was along for the ride in most of them). Bill, just live with your shame – I don’t support the war in Vietnam = I’m a totally worthless limp-dixk pusxy looking for any kind of kind of lame excuse for being a totally worthless limp-dixk pusxy (I would rather share a foxhole your wife BTW, at least she is more of a man). Face it, history has already marked you losers down as a sad freaking embarrassment. In short, fuxk you, and do American a favor and hurry up and die.
“Cool” is the pop culture term for “sacred”. It is an inescapable quality of our anthropology that something must be the sacred which centres the shared scenes on which our lives interact. Those centres are more and more the countless centres of (endlessly distracted) attention forged by the “decentralized” interactions and iconography of relatively free people in social networks. What will rise next? The cool by another name, likely many many other names….
I think the focus in this piece on the suicidal is important. So many still want to resist real freedom with all the risks it entails and want a nanny state to take care of them. But she seems to be inescapably bankrupt in many places today which is another way of saying what many still want is suicidal, in the modern context. I imagine that what comes next will be a continuing interest in the human freedom that makes our market economy work, that allows us to maintain our consuming desires without destroying our productivity. So there will be threads on freedom that connect us back to earlier romantics and cools; but we will become, hopefully, increasingly adept at separating the self-destructive from the newly “cool” by another name. There was a time in my youth when we liked to say, “righteousss!…” Maybe some such will come in fashion again. Though I’d vote for “Humble! and Useful!”
Fonzie was a very sacred guy.
He was.
You’re right. Notice how no one on Happy Days was allowed to speak his true name. Well, except Mrs. C – and she may have been some sort of mother-goddess archetype now that I come to think of it. The Fonz, pbuh, usually treated her with great deference.
Thank you for these reflections. I think you’ll appreciate some of my future commentaries on these subjects. You’re on to something with noting cool’s relation to the sacred.
Whaahh! The Boomers ruined everything. It’s all their fault. PJM has become Boomer-Hate (and Boomer Self-Loathing) Central. Give it a rest.
“Get over yourself,” the tried-and-true Boomer put-down. Of COURSE nobody else is as important as you guys, lol. The Boomers INVENTED “generational warfare:” it’s a bit thin-skinned to cry foul now that the shoe is on the other foot and YOUR dirty laundry’s flapping around.
I’ll take Elon Musk over Steve Jobs any day: cool is what cool ACHIEVES, not a set of flashy logos.
(realizes he’s misread the comment but can’t edit his reply. Mea culpa.)
C’mon…give Jimi Hendrix a break. He was an innovative
musician who was a patriotic, anti-Communist Army vet.
Just ’cause the Boomers thought he was cool doesn’t mean
that we need to throw out the baby with the bathwater…
I’m not throwing out the baby with bathwater. I love Hendrix’s music. Just pointing out the correlation between artistic greatness and the need to self destruct.
It’s a pity we haven’t been able to turn Steve Jobs celebrity into an admiration for those who build, in general.
Working on it.
Somebody once made the useful distinction, in American movies, between the wide, unselfconscious, small-town smiles of pre-WW II movie stars, and the knowing, in-on-the-con-game, big-city grins of the “cool” stars of the second half of the 20th century. “Cool” became an element of knowledge, a seeing-through the wool which society was trying to pull over your eyes.
One important situation that the Baby Boomers were in was how many they were. Schools got overcrowded. It was a much bigger population than that of the Depression Babies who had preceded them.
As for the war in Vietnam: it was started by JFK in order to work out how to defeat guerilla warfare.(General Douglas MacArthur warned against getting into a land war in Asia, but JFK wanted to prove how brave he was.) LBJ continued it because it had been the policy of JFK, but LBJ continued it as a person opposed to war. He micromanaged it to avoid killing civilians. In 1964, Senator Barry Goldwater ran as the Republican candidate for President. He advocated mining the harbor of Haiphong, a sensible military tactic – and LBJ campaigned against him as a warmonger, in the middle of a war! It could have been won in a year if it had been waged properly – Richard Nixon did so when he became President.
“Ginsberg and Burroughs used four letter words and printed heroin-induced fantasies of a “talking asshole.””
And in 2008, we elected him president.
My icons were/are William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater.
Loved most of the essay- what I’ve always said about “cool” was that the coolest kid in my high school became a coke addict and shot himself about two years after graduating.
Bipolar disorder certainly seems to be a central theme of art and literature- lets face it- these people have too much drama in their lives. Its not genius- its a chemical imbalance. We act as if reading books about them or watching art house movies made about them is deeper than an episode of Jersey Shore. It isn’t.
Lost me on Facebook- sure its “free”- like those three day getaways to a condo complex is “free”. I like to share photos with my friends- as in actual friends- people when you call up are happy to hear from you. Not every creep I knew in high school that has a keyboard. If Facebook was honest and clear about privacy settings- OK- but they are not- they intentionally make them confusing or change them through “upgrades” that expose your stuff.
“Ginsberg, Burroughs, Kerouac, Cobain, Thompson, and Hendrix didn’t build anything. We writers and artists are an over-glorified, over-praised lot. We cast our little literary spells, throw up our paint, and dance across the stage. But in the scheme of the global village we’re only the tribe’s witch doctor.”
You got carried away here. Otherwise, a fine rant.
Artists – genuine artists – are woefully under-appreciated, and under-paid. My favorite way to illustrate this is to take a single work of art and point out the MILLIONS OF DOLLARS it has generated over the years. My favorite symphony, Beethoven’s Ninth, will do nicely.
How many times do you suppose that The Ninth has been performed? Hundreds, certainly, but it could easily be over a thousand. Well, guess what: Tickets were sold for each of those performances – unless a pure benefit – and the owners of the venues were paid, the musician-performers were paid, and the conductor was paid. Hundreds, if not over a thousand times.
Now, how many times do you suppose that The Ninth has been recorded? Probably over a hundred. Recording studios were paid, sound engineers were paid, musicians were paid – you get the idea: Beethoven’s Ninth has created or saved infinitely more jobs than all of Obama’s stimulus plans combined.
Finally, how much is Beethoven getting out of this? Zip, zero, zilch. Bupkis. Beethoven lived an existence we comfy Americans would consider abject. Meanwhile, countless meaningless contemporaries of Beethoven lived comfortably.
Far from being an aberration, Beethoven’s abject life is the norm for artists, so give me a break… and a modicum of respect.
Thank you. And a fair point to offset my literary hyperbole.
But I’ll point out that Beethoven is not the one responsible for his symphonies being the gigantic cultural success they are. The fact that a work is good in some objective sense doesn’t mean that it will generate money like Beethoven’s 9th. More valuable to your and my enjoyment of a little bit of the Ludwig Van are the capitalists who realized they could make a buck off of it.
‘Just pointing out the correlation between artistic greatness and the need to self destruct.’
Right. Like that’s new. Ever heard of a guy named Edgar Allen Poe? Oh yeah, boomers read Poe in high school. Let’s find some blame to lay on the boomers there, too. Waaaahh.
Strawmen and stereotypes. Useless POS essay.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man
It’s easy to condemn a whole generation by only focusing on the negative.
To take one of your examples, Jimi Hendrix BUILT a very valuable record catalog and a beautiful recording studio in Greenwich Village that is still in business today. He wore himself out accomplishing that in 4 years, and managed despite being raised in an abusive household and getting very little education. It’s sad that he did himself in, but seeing his life as negative and nihilistic is an exaggeration, and his songs were much more balanced than you suggest.
-Kirk
I haven’t condemned a generation at all in the slightest by pointing out its excesses.
http://bighollywood.breitbart.com/dswindle/2011/07/06/the-hollywood-revolt-part-3-boomer-david-mamet-discovers-the-secret-knowledge/
I always liked the definition of “cool” as someone unburdened by any debilitating convictions.
Good point. Except there is one debilitating conviction: their own ego and self-hatred.
Boomer’s too broad of a term, it includes those who fought their asses off in Vietnam. Maybe they are a minority, but that minority’s important enough to me to avoid bismirching the name where they might read or hear. Target hippies and beatnicks and their idolizers instead.
For a better definition and empirical justification of the idea, see:
http://www.amazon.com/Generations-History-Americas-Future-1584/dp/0688119123
Edgar Allan Poe. Fixing my typo before somebody flames me.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thaP_5d8ZpQ
and devoured Norman Mailer, Allen Ginsberg, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti
So That’s what happened to those guys.
Did you have them with fava beans and a nice Chianti?
I hope the author is right and the pendulum swings back. But I’m not so sure. The natural condition of man is tyranny with crushing poverty for the masses. The beliefs and values of our Judeo/Christian heritage that made Western Civilization possible have been rejected by many. It remains to be seen if Western Civilization can exist without them.
You’re being entirely too hard on the boomers. Remember, they brought us the finest pornography industry the world has ever known …
There weren’t a whole lot of hippies. Hippy excess cannot be laid at the feet of boomers.
The plush lives boomers purportedly led as children were functions of parents–not children.
Many of the foundations that make boomers so loathed by their following generations were not of their making–they were conditions they had to adapt to.
This is not to say that those adaptations were not without problems. Overindulgent childhoods led to absentee parenting labeled as something ‘better’ than what they’d had. Because many had accepted the narrative–set forth by preceding generations–that their childhoods had been confining.
Boomers are the first media generation. They accept the guidance of media far more than those who came before or followed them. As such their generational experience was subject to external influence–and they were heavily influenced.
As are we.
Inter-generational strife is a backup for class struggle. Look at the literature. If you are part of ‘Generation X’ you were inundated–just as the middle of the generation started hitting 18–with tales of woe. You were told that you wouldn’t live as well as your boomer parents(now, somehow boomers give birth to milennials or Gens Y and Z). You had scads of media pitting you against boomers.
And most of us bought it, at least a bit.
But it’s ersatz class struggle. In the US, getting ‘classes’ at each others throats is hard because there is no class fixity. The usual suspects have to find a different angle. They tried race, they try, periodically, intellectualism, urban vs. rural–and all manner of others. Anything to start the Revolution.
And age is easy–the Xers reading the tales of woe aren’t(or weren’t) in their prime earning years, so they were encouraged to see their ‘poverty’ as something that would continue–because the boomers were taking all the pie and are therefore encouraged to adopt the notion that wealth creation is a zero-sum game–a stance all to obvious when stated so baldly.
The boomers aren’t the enemy. The left is. Most boomers don’t fit the stereotype. The stereotype was created to foment envy. Understand that you’ve been manipulated.
And stop.
We boomers lived as kids in households with one phone plus an extension, very often just one car, and a 3-bedroom house, meaning that many of us kids doubled up. We were the first generation to get color TV, and only by the time we were in high school. Some cushy life.
Compared to our parents we had a better, safer childhood with more material comforts, but nothing compared to the #OWS kids with their $5500 Macs and smart phones. We didn’t create the Aquarian age of the late 60′s, elements of the older “Beat Generation” did that for us, as we were too young to have that much effect; we merely embraced what was handed to us. A majority were never actual “hippies,” who, by the way, called themselves “Freaks;” “Hippies” was an appellation given to them by others.
And some of us came up in wood-heated farm houses with cold water only and in families that had never owned a piece of new equipment. I remember the first new tractor in ’54 and the first new truck in ’57 and the first new car waited until ’66 – after we quit farming and started subdividing old cotton fields. The first TV was used and black and white in ’58; we had one channel. We never had a color TV while I was still at home but we did get a rotor for the antenna and then we had three channels. The phone was on a party line and had a four digit number – 3366 – and we answered on three rings but eavesdropped lots too. I had a graduating class of 128 and all but one of the people I started 9th Grade with graduated, the one was a girl who had to go visit her aunt in Montana and who graduated the next year. Some of us went to college, some to the military, some to work but waiting for the “greetings and salutations you are hereby ordered to report…” There’s quite a few holes in the graduation picture now; Vietnam, fast cars, rural roads, yeah, drugs, a little, and now all too often cancer, heart attacks and such. During our top earning years there were only three from my graduating class still in the county, and they all had heriditery money, now there are more as people begin to retire and move back to the rural area. I see most of them every 10 year reunion; they’re all b.1949-50 ‘Boomers but they all look and act amazingly normal and thoroughly middle class and even the ones who were snobby because daddy had money back in the day have mellowed a bit now that they’ve had to do some things on their own.
“The stereotype was created to foment envy. Understand that you’ve been manipulated.”
Well said. Sometimes I feel like such a sad little voice in the wilderness, so it is nice to hear an occasional chorus.
It is the culture of blame that is to blame for our woes. The finger pointers, the finger waggers, the ones who blame the ______ group. Some people have ideas, and some people like to spend their time blaming and shaming. Doesn’t matter who you are or what group you belong to, if you are busy blaming and shaming others for any type of woe, YOU are the problem. When you want to solve a problem by pointing your finger at the source of the problem, get out a mirror.
Blame, blame, blame. Who is to blame? Anytime anyone tells you who is to blame, walk, no RUN away and find someone who has something constructive to offer.
Well, I don’t think the retrenchment looks like the fifties, or any conservative nirvana. Like, that odd film with the soviets going into colorado? And the true americans in a log cabin wearing homespun? not seeing that happen.
However, summit studios went from being a meagre little shop to a powerful, large studio by retailing films about devotion, marriage, eternity, bka Twilight. Even their franchise hit before that- American Pie- ended up celebrating loyalty, friendship, and marriage.
and maybe the boomers are upset b/c they kept getting called too large. What’s a few suicides between “too large” friends? anna quindlen remembers shortages of shoes, and crowded classrooms. I think it’s an emotional climate of too crowded? I don’t get the abortion and suicide and divorce tangle, I don’t get the dismantle everything. Or maybe I’m seeing the rebuilding? If you don’t have an “I” but only a “we” maybe you see things differently? B/c any boomer story I hear, it always starts with “we” even when the “we” doesn’t apply. Dawn Steel’s biography- each chapter starts with “we” boomers, even though she, herself, wasn’t participating in any of the high-jinks. She was working.
Good article. Have to disagree with predictions of enhanced life span. Socialized medicine will throttle medical innovation within the decade. That’s if the coming economic collapses doesn’t kill medical innovation first.
Thanks.
The exponential rate of technological growth proceeds in spite of economic downturns. And why are you still worried about socialized medicine now that it’s pretty obvious that Obamacare is likely to be overturned by the Supreme Court? Dan Miller wrote about it here at PJM a few weeks ago. http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/obamacare-is-likely-to-die-a-painful-death/
I disagree about not being forced to use Facebook. If I’m desperate enough, I’ll have to use it for job search/networking. It’s the same thing with mobile phones. I might have to get one because using a landline is like using a rotary phone when everyone else has moved on to touchtone. And if that’s the case, it’s perfectly legitimate to bitch about FB until they make it more tolerable. Because that’s capitalism, too.
Strictly speaking, the people you mention in you first paragraph, the leading lights of “boomer culture,” are not “boomers” but “Beats.” In fact, most all of the accepted movers and shakers of what you term “boomer culture” were not boomers, defined as people born after 1946. It was those non-boomers of the New Left that came to define the ideas that subsequently were attached to the boomers. Seems to me you would be better off asking the question: What replaces the dark underside of the “Greatest Generation”?
I know they weren’t boomers. They were Silent Generation and their culture was embraced by the boomers. Which is my on my boomer parents’ book shelf they had Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Saul Alinsky.
@Renaissance Nerd (#5)
Well put. Thanks very much for that post.
“o/~ Talkin’ ’bout my generation … o/~”
Hey David! Used to read you at NewsReal Blogs. Glad to find you again! Do you always write for PJM? Its awesome here.
Hi Gareeth,
Yes, PJM is my new online home and I’m planning on writing regularly again. Keep your eye out for other NewsReal Blog writers too here at PJM.
Fixing blame for all of America’s cultural and political maladies on the Boomers, or any other single generation, is unthinking, uncritical, over-emoting rubbish. If you’re compelled to identify a single malefactor, look in the mirror. You have as much to do with How Things Are as anybody else.
My respect for the World War 2 generation is second to nobody’s. It was not, however, America’s Greatest Generation. That label is reserved for the nation’s founders, who converted a hostile wilderness into a nation, in the face of more resistance than support from their fellows, against the world’s mightiest military force. No American generation since comes close.
As for the Boomers, blame them for what they did or didn’t do, but not for anything else, and certainly not for the context in which those acts occurred; they had as much to do with it as your grandchildren will have about the legacy you leave them. And what was the context in which the Boomers, the all-purpose whipping-boy generation, performed their nefarious, self-absorbed magic? Consider:
- the Reconstruction laws after the War Between the States, that put the nation firmly on the path that took it so far from its Constitutional roots, were passed 80 years before the first Boomer was born
- the 16th amendment – the taproot of the federal Leviathan – was ratified in 1913, by the Boomers’ grandparents. Much of what plagues the nation today originates from this amendment and the parasitic superstructure governent has erected on it
- FICA was adopted in 1934. No Boomers were around yet, but that generation’s contributions into this federal Ponzi-scheme eclipse every other generation’s, and it’s highly unlikely they’ll ever realize anything like the same value from it before it collapses. (A dollar “contributed” in 1963, the first year a Boomer could contribute to social security, was worth $7.41 in 2011 dollars, and this does not even consider the economic opportunity cost, which could easily be several times greater than the difference in time-value.)
- FDR’s New Deal occurred before the first Boomer drew a breath, but became the blue-print for virtually all of the numerous entitlement programs that followed it
- payroll withholding began as a temporary expedient in WW2, but, like any government boondoggle that delivers the goods to Our Federal Family, it’s still with us. And Boomers weren’t even a twinkle in their parent’s eyes when some government stooge thought it up
All this happened before Boomers were born, but absolutely set most of the boundaries of what anybody, including Boomers, could do afterward. WHATEVER they did was constrained by what came before them, and this is true of all succeeding generations. There were a few notable things that happened while Boomers were alive, but before they had an appreciable political voice:
- education, which had been an at-home or purely local phenomenon up until the 1920s, fell more and more under the government’s influence. Government involvement is the primary reason that the knowledge a prospective student had to demonstrate to get INTO a 1920s-vintage university exceeds that which a contemporary student has to demonstrate to be graduated from one today
- the Cold War was a prominent factor in most people’s lives, and a determining factor in most political decisions. Its influence reached its peak about the same time that Boomers began reaching voting age
- American males were still subject to the military draft, which claimed a minimum of two years of their lives. This was reality until 1973, and had a profound impact on all Boomers’ lives, directly or indirectly
- Boomers were involved in the ’60s Civil Rights movement, although they were still too young to have been influential in defining or shaping it
- congressional history before 1966 – when the first Boomers got the vote – is mostly one of Democrat control, and stands as eloquent testament that plenty of Americans embraced socialist claptrap before the Boomers came along
- the vast majority of personnel who fought and died in Vietnam were Boomers who served their country as honorably as their predecessors had; a relative handful, like Bill Clinton, protested and resisted it. To paint all Boomers with the Clinton-brush is grossly unfair. And it’s worth noting that no Boomers were invoved in the Vietnam war’s gross mismanagement
- the Supreme Court that magically created a “right to privacy” out of heretofore unsuspected emanations of penumbras associated with words in the Constitution did not have a single Boomer sitting on it. The word “privacy” never appears in the Constitution or Declaration of Independence, but the legal decisions that have been based on it are manifold and have been profoundly influential on everybodys’ lives, including Boomers (e.g., right to abortion)
From this point on Boomers were reflected in increasing numbers in the nation’s political bodies and most had attained voting age. So what did these self-centered bastards ever do for anybody else:
- considering the number of voting age Boomers, the conservative political victories of the ’80s could not have happened without their support. If Boomers hadn’t rejected Carter, Mondale, and Dukakis, they wouldn’t have been rejected
- without Boomers’ support there would have been no Reagan presidency, and without a Reagan presidency, the west would not have won the Cold War. The Cold War’s end entirely changed the political landscape
- much of the stock market’s growth, and small investors’ participation in it, could not have happened without there being so many wealth-producing Boomers
- the first Republican house majority in 40 years could not have been elected and re-elected without Boomers voting for it
- Boomers resurrected the whole concept of home-schooling, which is clear evidence of their concern about the nation’s cultural decline. They were the origin of this very effective resistance to government influenced public education. Boomers were the first to push for education vouchers – stakes through the heart of America’s appallingly ineffective public education system
- many of the politicians who pressed the case for Bill Clinton’s impeachment were Boomers. It took the likes of Robert Byrd and Ted Kennedy to acquit him, not Boomers. The senate that thereby moved the nation perceptibly away from the bedrock principle of equal justice did not have a preponderance of Boomers in it
It may be politically convenient, or even trendy, to blame the Boomers for whatever storm clouds appear on your cultural radar screen. Doing that, however, requires adopting a hopelessly simplistic view of events that are simply beyond any one generation’s direct influence. A considerable array of facts render it intellectually dishonest to hold such a view. Boomers’ culpability for our nation’s cultural and political quagmires is no greater than that of any other generation. That the Boomers are frequently given that mantle is more a reflection of people’s need for a scapegoat than of Boomers’ actual shortcomings.
OTOH, it’s fair to say that EVERY generation in living memory has dropped the ball, including the Boomers. That our nation is in its current straits is nothing more than the logical conclusion of our collective action, and inaction, in addressing problems that have taken many decades to develop and, in many cases, to metastasize. If they returned today our nation’s founders would upbraid all of us for perverting their vision, and then they’d get about fomenting the second American Revolution, only it wouldn’t be against the British this time.
So, blame the Boomers for their share of the culpability. They deserve that share. As for the convenient, perhaps even seductive, excuse that Boomers are to blame for whatever ails us, take that and stick it where the sun don’t shine, pal.
Good points. I think the author does mention the Lost and Silent Generation people who actually came up with a lot of the wacky ideas that the young Boomers embraced. Most of the counterculture leaders in the 60s were not Boomers but older people like Abbie Hoffman, Timothy Leary, William S. Burroughs, and Andy Warhol, etc. Oh, and let’s not forget Charles Manson – one of the more obviously malign “gurus” who preyed on the young and stupid back then.
“Fixing blame for all of America’s cultural and political maladies on the Boomers, or any other single generation, is unthinking, uncritical, over-emoting rubbish.”
It’s hard for me to get the motivation to take the time and energy to read through a long comment that’s allegedly a response to my article when the very first sentence ascribes to me sentiments I have not made.
One of the follow up pieces I’m planning is about Tea Party boomers (who I of course have a great deal of affection for and have worked with for years now.) Also, very significant: during the peak of secular crises it’s always been idealist generations as the elder leader who guides America through the storm. Herman Cain, Rick Perry, or even Mitt Romney could fill that role.
You say you did not “make” the sentiments which were the substance of my objections. Let’s see, why might someone think you were impugning Boomers in your article:
- its title begins “When Boomer Culture Finishes Its Suicide…”
- you assert that Boomers misconstrued the essence of “cool” as self-destruction, before going on to demonstrate that you haven’t decided or don’t really know what “cool” is, either. But you’re sure that Boomers’ self-loathing and self-hate drive their definition of it, as they drive most things Boomer. So not only are Boomers wrong, they’re also monolithic; one Boomer is the same an another Boomer
- you quote Andrew Klavan, presumably because you agree with him as you don’t challenge any of his assertions: Boomers “ruined the culture…, threw away the untold riches…, betrayed and undermined centuries of wisdom, spread the use of drugs, legitimized divorce and abortion, and even managed to screw up the civil rights movement…”
- you present a sequence of fallen, false, or hollow Boomer “icons” in deriding the soundness of Boomers’ judgment, before emitting a string of rhetorical questions that undermine or completely reverse Boomers’ causal inferences concerning important issues
- you refer to your Boomer parents as “supposed ‘grown-ups’” in the process of berating the basis for their fears of continued cultural decline
- you assert that social networks’ “consensual healing and mutual benefit of others” is the inverse of Boomers’ dominant self-destructive impulse
In short, your article was just another entry in a cosmic warehouse-full of accusations unfairly laying blame on Boomers. And not a particularly big or heavy entry, either. I was moved to respond after having read other posters’ comments, not before. My post was not directed solely to you, but also to them. On its own your article wouldn’t have precipitated a post; It was disjointed, illogical, and subjective.
You stated that what’s un-cool now will become cool when the pendulum swings back in the opposite direction. If someone ran a competition to generate a statement combining the two most common social observations in human history, that one would be among the finalists. Charting over time the rise and fall of any given dimension of “cool” would reliably describe a sine wave, as it fell in and out of favor. The phenomenon is the stuff of prose and poetry over many centuries and societies. The only more trite observation might be that a pendulum swings back in the opposite direction, since it’s incapable of swinging back any other way. The real trick is identifying the variable over which it’s swinging, and when it changes direction. Of course, these are just examples of poor writing. Other statements you made were far more disturbing.
“Reaching into people’s souls to transform them from within?” “Fixing a broken world at the root?” Whoa. Stop and take a pill. For a self-described member of a profession that’s “over-glorified” and “over-praised,” the central function of which can be performed by “any jackass,” you don’t seem to be hearing your own advice about not taking them too seriously.
You also seem to believe that Zuckerberg’s $17.5 billion is self-evident validation of whatever he did to generate it. What’s coolest of all is an idea that “works,” which apparently means that it produces a lot of wealth for its originator, and makes everybody else jealous. You could do worse than to take a cue from judgment-impaired Boomers here: the end does not necessarily justify the means. Facebook is a good case in point. It is consensual; nobody has to use it. And it does provide benefits to its users. However, it’s hardly the happy win-all-around phenomenon you depict it to be. According to its terms of service Facebook holds perpetual title to anything that ever traverses it servers. Take a moment to savor the meaning of those words. Whatever else Facebook’s ToS might be, they are accurately described by your friend van der Galien as Stalinesque, and they constitute a very stiff price for Facebook’s benefits. For most users those costs have not come due and are not an issue; and for most, they may never become manifest. Should that happen, however, users will come to realize that they’re effectively powerless as individuals. Whatever Zuckerberg wants to do with your posted comments, conversations, pictures, video, or audio is his business, not yours. If his using it is uncomfortable for you, embarrasses you, costs you a job or life opportunity, causes you personal or financial harm, well, that’s just tough. By using Facebook you agreed to its ToS. It’s foolish beyond words to use Facebook without realizing the costs being incurred. I recognize them, and am therefore a statistical outlier, who has a single Facebook entry consisting solely of alternate contact information. While I greatly appreciate Facebook’s value in making that contact information available to anyone who seeks it, I easily live without any of Facebook’s other “benefits.” So I’m not a creature of Facebook, and can’t count 500 people as “Facebook-friends,” let alone 500 million. I also don’t tweet about it when I floss my teeth.
And I decide what’s cool and what’s not. Nobody else can do it for me.
You’re still arguing with your imaginary version of what you think I’ve said, not with me. You’re unwilling to consider that perhaps you’ve made a misinterpretation of the views I actually hold. Further, your comment is more your monologue (I’ve wounded your ego) than an attempt to actually sincerely dialogue with me. (If you genuinely wanted me to listen to you you wouldn’t be insulting and rude to me.) Your verbosity and inability to make a coherent point are traits that I’ve seen before. It’s representative of the self-destructive, bipolar tendencies that I talk about in the article. People who can’t control their bipolar often have minds that swing from thought to thought and narcissistically take up much more time/space than they need to make their points.)
You take all that time to write a comment but you haven’t really inspired me to bother considering your ideas. As long as you continue misrepresenting my ideas, talking down to me, and replacing my arguments with strawmen then I’ll just ignore your comments. When you want to specifically address some argument I’ve actually made then I might take an interest.
As a possible boomer “45, I think that after experiencing so many people,
places and things it may be time to reflect and wind down for and end
that may be unexpected with the to fast changes in todays world. I could
not begin to fix on the mental chatter evoked by this article and the
awakening of so much history but sufice it to say, “stimulating, thought
provoking and good insight”. I will though make and assertion for my
generation, “Yabba Dabba Doo”, Yogi Bear, what a role model……….William
Guess what you guys. There never was and never will be any glorious generation in the US or any nation. We each make a mess of things in our own way. We each contribute a certain amount of goodness, too.
Social Marxists have dominated the boomer generation in power (Universities, government and business) and this has been our major fault. We permitted them to culturally cleanse the country of it’s memory and understanding of freedom’s culture and constitutional ideology. They had a million excuses for the “change” boomers permitted them to force upon our society; but most of the cleansing was accepted by boomers in the name of racial and sexual equality.
What replaces the boomers will be something devoid of the memory of American freedom.
To be sure Boomers are leaving a questionable legacy. However, I think in some ways it was inevitable.
Boomers came of age during the most incredible economic expansion in history. It was as if much of that generation had been born into the aristocracy and were free to live for whatever they wanted, not under the gun of working for a living or fitting into strict social hierarchies. Not surprisingly, many Boomers did not handle that freedom well and lived destructive lives — like many very rich people.
Assuming we get past the current financial crises and the standard of living continues to rise, this problem of freedom will re-emerge and perhaps people can learn from the Boomers.
You have a hold of grandma’s moldy cheese block. That would be my metaphor for the day for the boomers. No one in their right mind would touch that hunk of crap much less eat it. Grandma knew some things. She would peel the mold and serve really good cheese. She didn’t get stuck on the outside, most visible, icky, foul part. It was only a skin deep flaw in an otherwise perfectly normal block. The whole reason moldy cheese blocks and boomers attracted so much attention was that the part made visible was atrocious. Only the wise cut below the surface to reveal the good parts and can also explain the experience.
Everybody knows boomers changed the culture and in ways that were destructive. Virtually nobody knows why; as if the phenomena occurred in a cultural vacuum without impetus or purpose other than narcissicm. That is bullshit, too.
I think we know what that “something” is Ernest.
Born 1951, US Army 23 years as an Infantryman, first enlisted, then NCO, then officer. RVN-101st Retired, became high school teacher, trying to teach unmotivated kids the beauty of the free market and the wonder that was our Constitution.
If you want to blame me, OK, but I tried, and so did many of my friends, many of who are no longer with us. Time to retire again, I’m tired.