I believe it’s related to pensions, Medicare, and the whole Social Security scam. Boomers paid into these funds with the naive but innocent understanding that their money would be returned. Instead, the government spent it on other frivolities such as wars for Israel and keeping the Federal Reserve happy, so there’s no money left, and naturally the younger generations will have to pay. I believe that the elites want to get the younger generations so angry at the Boomers that they cut off what was promised to them — so angry, they dream of the day that Boomers get murdered in nursing homes.
OK, Zoomer. Two can play this game. Keep in mind that the little magic trick I’m about to perform here does not mean I’m blaming your generation for any of these things, because I’m not a Generational Astrologist. I’m merely taking what you do and flipping the script:
Yours is the generation of “woke culture” and Antifa. As much as you yabber about how the Boomers let the culture slide into liberalism, atheism, and degeneracy, your generation is far less religious than the Boomers. You lean heavily socialist and encourage “punishment” for Halloween costumes you deem “offensive”. While the world is burning, the Zoomers’ top three voting issues are emotionally laden trifles such as “mass shootings, racial equality, and … treatment of immigrants”. You are far more anti-racist, anti-“hate”, and pro-LGBT than any generation that preceded you. This is not my opinion — it’s a statistical fact supported by every survey and poll I’ve ever seen.
Therefore, every Zoomer is personally responsible for Drag Queen Story Time and the fact that there’s no wall on the border, because you just sat there and LET it happen. Three trillion dollars have been added to the national debt since Trump’s inauguration, and you Millennials and Zoomers just sat there and LET it happen. The tech giants are doing purges of people for thoughtcrimes, while your generation hides behind goofy fake names and clown avatars and LETS it happen.
That’s because every member of every generation is 100% responsible for what happens on its watch. Get down on your knees and APOLOGIZE!
And if you don’t repent immediately and bend to my shaming tactics, you fucking deserve all the righteous pain the generations after you will rain down on your selfish head.
See how stupid that sounds when it’s applied to you?
People hate to admit they’ve been brainwashed. But sorry — you’ve been brainwashed.
Politicians enjoy a little generational warfare if it suits their needs. They’ll even instigate it. And as far as I can tell, this sudden emergence of a generational identity-politics civil war is a divide-and-conquer tactic that has worked wonderfully.
Jom Goad, “The Myth of Boomer Privilege”, Taki’s Magazine, 2019-11-03.
April 18, 2024
QotD: The intergenerational blame game
March 25, 2024
QotD: Generational politics
I’ve been making this point for years, but you’ve all been too busy projecting your guilt onto others and blaming them for all your problems to listen to me.
The reason I get fixated on certain topics is because they in some way powerfully reflect this theme of misplaced blame. This may burst quite a few of your bubbles, but the fact that I’ve focused on the endless bashing of whites for years is not a sign of how deeply in love I am with white people but rather a fascination with the fact they’re getting blamed for many things that demonstrably aren’t their fault. It’s the same reason I focus on the gender wars — men nearly aren’t as awful as they’re being depicted, and women are nowhere near as innocent as the current narrative says they are.
If you haven’t been paying attention, there’s been escalating intergenerational hostility across our fair land, and people are increasingly identifying with dumb, media-manufactured generational names — AKA Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z — as if they were scientific categories that are predictive of human behavior rather than arbitrary designations along the lines of Virgo, Capricorn, Scorpio, and Leo.
It’s some weird new metastasized form of identity politics. And, since it comes with the turf, these groups are blaming each other for all that ails the world.
It’s dumber than astrology […] but this intensely stupid way of framing the world refuses to die.
Jom Goad, “The Myth of Boomer Privilege”, Taki’s Magazine, 2019-11-03.
February 24, 2024
Never mind the unfunded liability … money printer go brrrr!
Kulak at Anarchonomicon points out that the US government’s debt situation — which was alarming 20 years ago — has continued to get worse every year:
Libertarian Economists have been predicting this collapse of the federal system would happen “By About 2030” since before 2008. I remember in high school in the early 2010s listening to Ron Paul lectures and visiting USDebtClock.com, this was a hot button issue after 2008 … (then of course there was no political will to do anything and everyone just stopped talking about it)
I honestly forget that everyone around me doesn’t already know this, this is so common and accepted in libertarian and economic circles, and everyone who knows it got bored of eyes glossing over when they tried to explain it (in an autistic panic) decades ago.
US Unfunded liabilities:
Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, US Debt, and Federal employee benefits and pensions, are all basically intergenerational ponzi schemes that require constant 1950s level population growth amongst the productive tax paying middle-class to maintain. By 2000 it was obvious this population growth was not happening, that population was beginning to age and collapse, and NO, the illegals at the border weren’t adequate replacements … (they weren’t adequate to prop up federal expenses in 2000 when they were still Mexican, now that they’re Guatemalan, Haitian, and Senegalese they’re almost certainly a net drain).
The Specter of Mass Boomer retirements with few to no children and grandchildren to replace them and pay for all the costs of their retirements and healthcare was maybe the slowest but most assured crisis ever to be seen in human history … Demographics is destiny.
This was a foreseen problem in 2000 when US Debt to GDP (just the portion that’s already been spent and interest has to be paid on) was 59% of GDP. Today the US Debt to GDP ratio is 122% of GDP whilst just in the past 24 years. Absolute US Federal Debt (not including state or local) has grown from 5.6 trillion dollars to 34 trillion dollars (102k per citizen: man, woman, and child). just the interest that has to be paid out of your tax dollars on that debt is set to eclipse ALL US Military spending sometime this year … And by 2028 Debt to GDP will be 150% (46.4 Trillion, 132k per citizen, 12 trillion more in 4 years, with no additional spending bills) and the Interest (at current estimates) will be over 2.5 trillion dollars, over a third of all Tax Dollars brought in will be spent on just interest, because dollar confidence has collapsed and the only way to keep inflation from destroying the dollar has been to radically raise the interest rates the Federal Reserve offers.
Now all that, That catastrophic state of things, is just the debt, the money that’s been spent … The real crisis is the Unfunded liabilities, all the promises the US has made to Boomers (who dominate the vote) and others about money they’re GOING to spend.
As of now total Unfunded liabilities stand at 213 trillion dollars, $633,000 per US Citizen (Man woman, and newborn babe)… These are all dollars the US has promised to pay to someone somewhere at some point: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Federal pensions, VA Benefits, etc. And cannot in any politically feasible way restructure or get out of.
If no one ever contributed another dime to social security, and in so doing was promised in turn significantly more than that dime (it’s a Ponzi scheme, it loses money in proportion to and at a greater rate than the money being contributed to it (every dollar you contribute you’re promised multiple dollars in return, and your dollar is not invested, it just pays off previous contributors)) … If everything froze and every young person was locked out of ever receiving Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid, the Unfunded Liability would be $633k per every man, woman, and child … that’d be the debt a newborn American would be born with.
However because it is NOT frozen and it will not be, by 2028 that number will Rise to $837k and an ordinary household of 4 will have seen their, politically unavoidable, family obligation in future tax payments to the federal government increase by $804,000 in just 4 years.
If your response is that your family doesn’t even make 804k in 4 years and there’s no way you could ever pay that much in 4 years given its just going to increase at a faster rate the next 4 years … CONGRATULATIONS! 90% of families don’t make that much, and less than 1% of families could ever afford to pay that much in taxes in a 4 year time.
This has been slowly growing for decades, and in the late 2000s and 2010s Ron Paul types were screaming that those Benefits needed to be reformed NOW (in 2008) or they’d drown America. But of course, cutting benefits is political Anathema to boomers, so nothing was done …
The Course of Empire – Destruction by Thomas Cole, 1836.
From the New York Historical Society collection via Wikimedia Commons.
January 24, 2024
QotD: Boomer hypocrisy
Severian, “Hoist on Their Own Petard”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-04-19.
August 21, 2023
Baby Boomers – “a marketing category is not an age group”
Sarah Hoyt (who’s a few years younger than me) tackles the generational conflict that always seems to flare up on social media, if not so much in real life:
I’m going to write about boomers, why a lot of us blame them for … almost everything, why my generation (roughly 55 to 64) not only are not boomers, but tend to be the most vociferous in “D*mn it, I’m not a boomer.” Why I’m vaguely amused that millennials call everyone older than them “boomer”. And why I find it bizarre that my kids both hate millennials and identify as millennials, though they both are d*mn close to z and closer to z in attitudes. (And the younger one in date of birth, I think.) And why all this is unfair, because a marketing category is not an age group, and yet, perfectly fair in aggregate, because demographics is not destiny, but it sure as heck is economy. And economics shapes your life in a way you probably can’t think about too deeply without becoming enraged.
So, yeah, friends, in-betweeners, X, millenials and Zers, lend me your ears. I come not to bury the boomers and not to praise them, but to explain to everyone, including the sane boomers in the audience why the fractiousness exists, and to give — under the heading of giving perspective on the lives of others that we normally keep quiet about — an idea of how my non-generation (We certainly are not Jones. We don’t jones for anything that the boomers had. We just aren’t them) has gone through. Without blaming the boomers, because an accident of birth is not their fault.
First of all, and taking in account that I’m the one who says the population is not booming out of control, let me dismiss the idea the baby boom wasn’t real. That’s goofy. (To put it mildly.) You can argue the causes, but for about ten years — no, not the twenty five claimed. Marketing generations are not demographic generations — after World War II, families grew. Blame it on prosperity, which allowed one parent to stay home and raise the sprogs. Blame it on tax credits (it has been argued if the comparable applied today, people would have families of five or six too.) Sure, blame it on the move rural to city, which was tied to prosperity too, and the fact that the newly independent nuclear families didn’t have to put up with grandma’s critique of their child bearing or raising. Or blame it on the men having been away and the relief of the long war being over.
Blame it on whatever you want, but even without looking at the numbers, just by looking at family histories, families of five or six weren’t rare. And three was about average, I think. Four not anything to remark on.
But, you’ll say, that’s fairly normal for the past period. Sure. My mom, who was almost a boomer comes from a family of five (should be six, one lost in infancy) and dad from a family of four. And I’m almost sixty, and both dad and I were very late children. So, yeah “But that was normal before.”
Yes, it was, but now throw in prosperity, moves to the cities and … It’s not the babies who were born, you see, it’s the ones who survived. Even mom who was raised, for brevity of explanation, in a slum where going to your playfriend’s funeral, or more likely his infant sibling’s funeral was absolutely normal, had more of her friends survive than was normal for her parent’s generation.
To put it another way. Up until the late 19th century, women routinely bore 10 children and didn’t get to raise a single one to adulthood.
Even in the nineteenth century, women at the upper class level Jane Austen wrote about, routinely made two or three baby shrouds as part of their trousseau. Because that many deaths were expected. By my parent’s time that had improved — no, not medicine, sanitation. Better drains, a weekly bath, and washing your clothes more than twice a year — to the point that you would regularly raise about half of what you bore. (My family, having steel constitutions rarely lost a child. To compensate, we were always relatively low fertility.)
The improvement brought on by rudimentary sanitation and washing up was such that in the nineteenth century Europe burst at the seams with kids, which led to rapid invention, expansion, and yes, the adoption of a lot of half baked ideas. Because that’s the result of a lot of kids suddenly in a society. Baby busts … well, most of the Middle Ages, lead to slow innovation, a tendency to ossify the social structures, laws and regulations increasingly made by old men, for a world they only imagine exists. Stop me when this sounds familiar.
The baby boom happened at the intersection of the discovery of antibiotics and their popularization and also inoculation of school aged kids, both of which meant an unexpected number of children surviving childhood and surviving it in good health. And people having about the number of children their parents had. BUT — and this is very important — those children grew to adulthood and did so without any significant physical impairment.
What it caused was the same effect as if everyone alive had decided to have double or more the number of children. It was a massive demographic elephant moving through the societal snake.
March 15, 2023
QotD: The coming generation isn’t the Millennials … it’s Gen X
That’s your next layer of political and social control. The youngest of us are in their late 30s (again, using the broadest definition); most of us are well into middle age, and some of us are plunging headfirst into late middle age. The chiefs of police, the military’s senior staff officers (including, by now, some general and flag officers), the CEOs and CFOs … they’re not Millennials, they’re Xers.
Admittedly we’re a forgettable bunch. We didn’t get a chance at natural, healthy teenage rebellion, because our parents, the goddamn Boomers, claimed a monopoly on rebellion, so we had to be all, you know, like, whatever about it. The Boomers thought Andy Warhol was a serious artist and Bob Dylan a talented musician; is it any wonder that Kurt Cobain’s godawful caterwauling was the best we could do?
All of that is water under the bridge, of course. But here’s where it gets really, really meta: This great social upheaval is, for us, a copy of a copy. It’s people who were actually alive in the 1960s cosplaying The Sixties™ — just like they did the entire time we were growing up. Just as we had no template for teenage rebellion, we don’t really have a template for riots and whatnot either. Some of us have decided to crank it up to eleven — all of the most obnoxious Karens are Gen Xers — but lots of us … haven’t. I really have no idea just what the majority of my generational cohort is doing right now while our most vocal idiots are out Karening, in much the same way I have no idea what the majority of Silents were doing while the Chicago Seven were out doing their thing.
All I know is, there’s an entire layer of political power between AOC and Pelosi. We haven’t really seen it up until now, but it’s there. Is Gen X finally, at long last, going to get its shit together? I suspect that the real drama is still waiting in the wings.
Severian, “Talkin’ ’bout My Generation!”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-06-11.
January 18, 2023
Our western gerontocracy
In The Free Press, Katherine Boyle outlines the death-grip that elderly boomers retain on so many of the levers of our shared society, from government to business to (of course) the legacy media:
“Millennials” by EpicTop10.com is licensed under CC BY 2.0
The tens of millions of Americans that are, like me, millennials or members of the generation just younger, Gen Z, have been treated as hapless children our entire lives. We have been coded as “young” in business, in politics, and in culture. All of which is why we shouldn’t be surprised that millennials are the most childless and least home-owning generation in modern American history. One can’t play house with a spouse or have their own children when they’ve moved back into mom’s, as 17 percent of millennials have.
Aside from the technology sector — which prizes outliers, disagreeableness, creativity and encourages people in their twenties to take on the founder title and to build things that they own — most other sectors of American life are geriatric.
The question is why.
There are many theories — and many would-be culprits. Some believe it’s the fault of the Boomers, who have relentlessly coddled their children, perhaps subconsciously, because they don’t want to pass the baton. Others put the blame on the young, who are either too lazy, too demoralized or too neurotic to have beaten down the doors of power to demand their turn.
Then again, life expectancy is growing among the healthy and elite in industrialized nations, so perhaps this is all just progress and 70 is the new 40. But one can take little solace in the growing life expectancy of the last 200 years when comparing ourselves to more productive generations that didn’t waste decades on extended adolescence.
Every Independence Day, we’re reminded that on July 4, 1776, the most famous founders of this country were in their early 20s (Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr) and early 30s (Thomas Jefferson). Even grandfatherly George Washington was a mere 44. These days much of our political class, from Bill Clinton (elected president 30 years ago at age 46) to financial leaders like Warren Buffett (92), and Bill Gates (67) who launched Microsoft 48 years ago, are still dominant three and four decades after seizing the reins of power. CEOs of companies listed on the S&P 500 are getting older and staying in their jobs longer, with the average CEO now 58 years old and staying in his or her role 10.8 years versus 7.2 a decade ago. And our political culture looks even more gray: Twenty-five percent of Congress is now over the age of 70 giving us the oldest Congress of any in American history.
The Boomer ascendancy in America and industrialized nations has left us with a global gerontocracy and a languishing generation waiting in the wings. Not only does extended adolescence — what psychologist Erik Erikson first referred to as a “psychosocial moratorium” or the interim years between childhood and adulthood — affect the public life of younger generations, but their private lives as well.
In 1990, the average age of first marriage in the U.S. was 23 for women and 26 for men, up from 20 for women and 22 for men in 1960. By 2021, that number had risen to 28.6 years for women and 30.4 years for men, according to the Census Bureau, with 44 percent of U.S. women between the ages of 25 and 44 expected to be single in 2030. Delayed adulthood has had disastrous consequences for procreation in industrialized nations and is at the root of declining fertility and all-but-certain population collapse in dozens of countries, many of which expect the halving of their populations by the end of the century.
“Twenty-five is the new 18,” said The Scientific American in 2017, pointing to research that extended adolescence is a byproduct of affluence and progress in society. Which is why the finiteness of a mid-thirties half-life is such a surprise to those in their 20s and 30s. It runs counter to every meme and piece of advice young people receive about building a career, a family, a company and in turn, a country.
The prevailing wisdom in Western nations is that the ages of 18-29 are a time for extreme exploration — the collecting of memories, friends, partners and most importantly, self-identity. A full twelve years of you! Self-discovery aided by platforms built for broadcasting photos of artisanal cocktails and brunch. And with no expectation for leadership because there will be time for that, a generation can absolve oneself of responsibility for their actions. (Tragically, that was never true for half of the population, which is why we have a generation of extremely accomplished older women, who weren’t really aware how difficult it is to become pregnant at 39.)
December 23, 2022
QotD: Wokeness as a lifestyle
For Gen X, think of my personal candidate for “everything that’s wrong with the 90s, all in one place,” the 1994 movie Reality Bites. Don’t rent it unless you’re current on your blood pressure meds. It’s four of the 1990s’ most insufferable people (Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke, Ben Stiller, Janeane Garofalo) quipping about being slackers. Well, except Stiller (also the director), who plays the grasping, uptight, sold-his-soul-to-The-Man yuppie foil to the other three. Stiller is the Gen Xer who chose to compete in the oversaturated career arena; he’s cartoonishly evil. The rest of them hang out in coffee houses, polishing their image. They’re lifestyle competitors.
For Millennials, and whatever we’re calling the upcoming generation (“The Lobotomized Snowflake Posse” is my suggestion, brevity be damned), well, just look at social media. Even lounging-around-Starbucks lifestyle competition is out of reach for people who went $100K in the hole for a Gender Studies degree. The only currency they’ve got is effort — hey, didn’t Karl Marx say something about that? — so Twitter becomes their full time job. Xzhe with the most followers wins.
Severian, “Why So #Woke?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-01-07.
October 2, 2022
“We are governed by a transnational criminal enterprise”
Elizabeth Nickson on the deliberately created web of disasters the entire western world faces thanks to our governments’ allegiance to philosophies promulgated by organizations like the WEF:
We are governed by a transnational criminal enterprise.
What are you doing about it?
One sentence caught my attention in Giorgia Meloni’s speeches this week. She said that most insulting thing for her and other Italians, was the EU’s order to erase all references to Christianity, Christmas and Christ from all government documents by Christmas (ironic) of 2022.
This is another of those blows from the One Worlders that feels like someone is stepping on your heart and pressing down. I may not be a church-going Christian, but it defines me like almost nothing else. It is my history, my literature, my culture, my ethical standards, my everything. Christianity defines the western world, it is an activist faith, it orders a congregant to spread goodness wherever he or she goes. Erasing it is a crime similar in effect as the death camps of which our leaders dream. It destroys the ground of our being.
And then I think of my father. Look at this photograph. As a teen, he was very much like the kids of today, self-involved, vain, a girl magnet like his great grandson, Bryson, who never sees a girl who doesn’t interest him. But he was one of the few fully adult men I have known. I want to say only, but I’ve met thousands of men and know few of them as well as I knew him.
It wasn’t until long after my father’s death that I discovered that he was at the tip of the spear of the British Army as they landed at D-Day, pressed forward into France and then into Germany. The Canadian Army, the fourth largest standing army in the world in 1945, had a reputation of brutalism like no other army, famous for it in WW1. This was in part because it was built – as was Canada – by some of the fiercest medieval clans in Europe. Just before James 1 murdered the British border clan heads, Elizabeth I said that with 10,000 such men, James could topple any throne in Europe. Canada attracted those clans, the climate, the terrain was the roughest in the world, and only they could conquer it. And in 1943, they formed an army like none other.
Being his child, I can grope myself into what he was feeling during those two years under remorseless fire, on the ground, buried into caves on the Rhine that last winter, responsible for hundreds of men. He woke up every day for two years, with death certain. I have his Book of Common Prayer. It is swollen with use, especially the prayers for the dead he read over the bodies of his friends. After the war he was put in charge of a Nazi camp and told to “sort those people out”. Kind of like a desert in hell, I would think.
His faith carried him through those years. He was welded to it by the time it was over, although he never proselytized, it was just part of him. Christianity acts, with good men, as spur and comfort. It informed every ethical decision he made. After the war, he came home and worked, fighting unions that destroyed the textile industry in Quebec, trying to keep his factory going in the face of actual bags of burning shit thrown at our house. He retired at 55 with a non-compete clause and spent the rest of his life in charity, working for free. He ran in succession one enterprise after another. His entire life, all of it, he used his spare time to work in the community. Three meetings a week, no matter what. He knew where every sparrow fell in the country village I grew up in, and in the city to which he retired. And if he missed one, his uncles, aunts or cousins picked them up and set them right. It was how they lived.
That used to be a requirement for adulthood. He learned it from his family who came to the New World in 1630, and who all, to a man or woman, worked for free in whatever village or county they found themselves in, making sure everyone was all right. In the towns and cities they settled, across the US and Canada from 1600 to 1945, you were only considered an adult if you rolled up your sleeves and worked for other people in the place that you lived, without being paid, and without expecting praise.
If you didn’t do that work, you were considered a baby that everyone else had to carry. You were made to feel that.
It was that above every single other thing, that made the US and Canada the magnet it is for every other race and country in the world. Self-government by adults. And by the way, for the race-hustlers, they were officers on the Underground Railroad, when it wasn’t popular to be on the side of people of color. They married into Indian bands when it was absolutely beyond the pale.
The boomer generation abandoned that task, and the devolution of the culture was swift. The left creates jobs by creating bureaucrats and the responsibilities that used to be held in common, solved in common, done for goodness alone, are now done for money and benefits by people who generally do not live in the regions they supervise. They have screwed up everything because they can’t make decisions because they have no courage. And they have no courage because they have no ethical standards. Their only standard is whether it increases their own comfort. And that of maybe two other people. To whom they are related.
The only thing they create is debt and obstacles to growth. Aside from technical/engineering standards, (which are being broken) everything they do, can be done by citizens acting in concert.
Our disengagement led to our current economic catastrophe, like nothing else. It is the reason the globalist criminals were able to take over. It is why we now sit in danger of nuclear war.
September 19, 2022
There’s a difference between “caring what kids think” and “pandering for kids’ attention and affection”
Rob Henderson wonders why so many adults these days are clearly desperate for the approval of young people:
During my recent re-watch of the entirety of Mad Men, which takes place in the 1960s, a recurring thought entered my mind: This was the last generation where young adults behaved like they were older than their real age. Don Draper is around thirty-five at the start of the series, and carries himself in a more adult manner than many 45 year olds today.
Recently, Abigail Shrier quoted a physician and psychologist who stated that “Fifty years ago, boys wanted to be men. But today, many American men want to be boys”.
Until the early 1960s, young people acted older than their actual age. Now, older adults pretend to be younger than their actual age.
Which is perhaps one reason why boomers are so easy to mock. They don’t act their age.
[…]
About two years later, I was at a breakfast gathering with some other students on campus. Our guest was a former governor and presidential candidate. He was gracious, and spent most of the time answering questions from students.
And in his answers, he continually returned to variations of the same response: “We screwed up, and it’s up to you guys to fix it. I’m so happy to see how bright you all are and how sharp your questions have been, because you will fix the mistakes my generation made.”
This mystified me. This guy was well into his sixties, with a lifetime of unique experiences in leadership roles, was telling a bunch of 20-year-olds (though I was a little older) that older adults are relying on them.
In the military, we thought of those senior to us as the leaders. It was okay to give feedback, of course. Commanding officers would regularly consult lower ranking and enlisted members to see what was working and what could be improved. But that happens only after getting through the filter of the initial training endeavors.
I remember in the first week of basic training, our instructor declared, “I don’t want any of you [expletive] thinking you are doing anyone a favor being here. I could get rid of all of you clowns and have your replacements here within the hour.” (This was 2007, well before the recruitment crisis).
My 17-year-old brain heard that thought, yeah, he’s probably right. I thought of the bus loads of other ungainly young guys I saw stepping off and being confronted with “Pick ’em up, and put ’em down” and other mind games from the instructors while waiting in the endless in-processing lines.
So then I got to college and learned that even though any seat, at least at selective schools, can be filled immediately with a bright applicant (top colleges reject thousands of them each year), students are never ejected for disrespecting professors or anyone else. In the military the first message was, you are a peon and less than nothing and we can easily have you replaced (this changes as you advance in rank, of course — at least to some degree). In college, the first message was, you are amazing and privileged and a future leader (and marginalized and erased) and you will never lose your position here among the future ruling class. That feeling of whiplash will forever linger in my mind.
[…]
Older adults crave validation from the youth, which is one reason they are mocked. Young people sense their desire to be seen as cool and deprive them of this by taunting them.
This desire for esteem may be why older adults won’t exert any authority in response to energetic young conflict entrepreneurs who yell at them or threaten them.
Older adults want to be on the side of youth. So desperate to pencil themselves out of the “old” category. Every parent wants to be the “cool parent”, every professor wants to be the “cool” professor. You can be cool and still be an authority figure. Maybe decades of imbibing the worst of U.S. pop culture made everyone forget this.
June 4, 2022
QotD: A smidgen of forgiveness for the Boomers
That has to mess with your head a bit.
In the same way, no previous generation had ever seen their youth commercialized and sold back to them in middle age, and that’s what messed with our heads. The passing fancies of those ordinary suburban kids in 1963 all involved sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. We — Gen X — wanted those things too, but since by definition nothing is lamer than your parents, we had to be all, like, you know, whatever about it.
If you can grok the concept of a 45 year old telling you — with complete, almost heartbreaking sincerity — not to trust anyone over 30, you can grok the 1990s.
If you can’t, I don’t recommend trying. It’s like an anti-koan — if you solve it, you’ll achieve a lower consciousness. But if you’re determined to experience it, get really, really, really drunk and watch Forrest Gump a few times back to back. Really experience it as a work of art … because it is. It’s meticulously constructed. Forrest Gump is a mildly retarded man who stumbles, through dumb fucking luck, into fame and fortune through every significant event of the last half century. (He even has a huge dick, although that’s a detail from the source novel that got left on the cutting room floor).
Is there any more perfect metaphor for My G-G-Generation than that?
That’s what we grew up with. That whole generation was what some wag said about George Bush the First: Born on third base, thinking he hit a triple. And, of course, by merciless application of cold logic: that was also us. The only difference was that while the Boomers were congenitally incapable of seeing it, we were congenitally incapable of getting over it. So, you know, like, whatever.
Severian, “A Meta-Review”, Founding Questions, 2022-02-24.
April 18, 2022
Jen Gerson raises the banner of revolution against the Boomergeoisie
In the free-to-read portion of last week’s weekend post from The Line, Jen Gerson channels the anger and frustration of the Millennial sans-culottes (or should that be the sans-maisons?) who are being systematically locked out of the housing market in Canada to protect the paper investments of the Boomer generation:
“Green suburbs” by Pierre Metivier is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
It’s come to the attention of several of the editors at The Line that some of you Boomers are mad at us. Or, more specifically, you’re mad at co-founder Jen Gerson who popped up a particularly scathing screed about the housing market earlier this week.
To wit:
Our Boomer got his and that’s what matters. We have an entire government apparatus set up to protect that guy. The guy with the money and the guy who votes. The rich-on-paper people are happy, and as long as everybody gets a seat somewhere on this pyramid, then everybody else should be happy too.
We will admit that Gerson didn’t intend this column to come across as an anti-Boomer harangue. She intended it as an anti-government-housing-policy-that-favours-boomers-over-young-people rant, but we can understand why some of our more mature readers took umbrage. We would say we were sorry but … we’re mostly not. A few points:
Firstly, when we talk about macroeconomics and intergenerational equity issues, we are emphatically not talking about individuals. Nobody born between the years 1946 and 1964 is personally, individually morally culpable for the state of the housing market, or the economy, or climate change or any other tragedy of the commons.
[Otherwise, we’d be adopting the tactics of the CRT movement and talking about “Boomer Fragility” and other similar kafkatraps where denial is proof of guilt.]
If you bought a $40,000 house in the ’80s, you couldn’t possibly have known that that purchase would eventually lead to a six-figure real estate portfolio by 2020: you took a risk on the economy as it existed at the time, even struggling through a rough patch of high interest rates, and that risk paid off. No Millennial would have done any differently had we been in your position.
But, let’s be honest, if you are a Canadian Boomer, you were probably born in a country that hadn’t been bombed to the ground just before an historic economic boom so grand that it allowed unprecedented investment in your health, education, development and well being.
That doesn’t mean you didn’t also work hard, and suffer setbacks, as all humans must do over the course of a lifetime. Some of you made bad decisions, and some of you were unlucky, certainly. The bell curve tolls for us all. But you did get to play the game of life during a particularly fortuitous period of history. That period is now ending and the currents of history aren’t going to be as kind to your kids as they were to you (although let’s not kid ourselves. Canadian Millennials and Zers don’t have it so bad in the greater scheme of things, either.) Recognizing this — let’s call it Boomer privilege — doesn’t cost you anything. It doesn’t hurt you. It’s not a personal attack.
What we do find fascinating is the Boomers among our readership who take discussions about intergenerational equity and demographic advantage very, very personally. Forgive us for playing pop psychologist, but it almost feels like some of you park so much of your worth as human beings into your ability to earn wealth that to have someone point out that this wealth accumulation was helped by macroeconomic factors over which you had no control — luck, essentially — seems to be read as an attack on your sense of self, purpose, and identity. (Is this why so many of you struggle to retire? Is there a frisson of guilty conscience at play?)
That is … your issue. Being lucky isn’t an indictment of your character. We assume all of our Line subscribers are genuinely good people who knit little paw mittens for orphaned cats, okay? Otherwise, why else would you be here?
November 23, 2021
QotD: Generation X and the 1990s
I’m referring, of course, to Gen X’s patented brand of “irony”. We’ve talked about this before, but here’s a quick recap: Every middle-class kid born after about 1965 was raised to believe that Authenticity was the thing, the only thing. Just do what you feel. Question authority. Don’t listen to The Man!
The problem, of course, is that we were told this by The Man.
It had a weird, telescoping effect. On campus, you were surrounded by people who actually were hippies, plus a whole bunch of wild-eyed fanatics who were sure they would’ve made truly excellent hippies if they hadn’t been in elementary school at the time, plus a bunch of kids — these would be your classmates — who thought of “Woodstock” as a brand name, a kind of backpacking-through-Europe, taking-a-year-off-to-find-myself experience that everyone has as a matter of course before settling down to the serious business of making partner at the law firm.
In short: Our parents were stuck in adolescence, and, being adolescents ourselves, we didn’t understand that “Rebellion” wasn’t something the hippies invented. We wanted to experience sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll, too, but since the Baby Boomers treated those as their exclusive property instead of what they actually are — i.e. the natural impulses of teenagers in all times and places — we had to be all, like, you know, whatever about it. […]
That was the 1990s. Faced with a paradox that everything your parents say, do, and believe is lame — according to your parents! — the only safe way is to make sure nobody can figure out exactly what your attitude is at any given instant. You might end up working 90 hour weeks at the office to pay the nut on the McMansion and the Volvo the same way they did, but at least you’d be, you know, ironic about it. The ketman of the suburbs.
See what happens when you listen to your elders, kids?
Severian, “The Virtue of Hypocrisy”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-01-19.
June 14, 2021
Movies based on “classic literature”
Severian considers the relative glut of movies more-or-less based on the classics of literature from his formative years:
When I was a young buck, there was a fad for making movies out of “classic literature”. Scads of chick flicks, of course — Jane Austen’s complete works, the Brontës, and so on — but they also took a stab at Shakespeare. Mostly they stuck to the comedies — and trust me, watching Keanu Reeves trying to handle Much Ado About Nothing is hilarious, in all the wrong ways — but they’d occasionally give the tragedies a shot. Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet is pretty good despite all the distracting cameos, his Othello is at least sincere (ye gods, imagine trying to make that today!), I think I’m forgetting a few. Mel Gibson gave Hamlet a go back in the early 1990s, and so on. Again, I’m pretty sure I’m forgetting a few.
It always struck me as odd. Unless they timed the theatrical releases to midterm and finals week, hoping to hoover up the dollars of desperate sophomores who didn’t do the homework, it didn’t make much sense, marketing-wise. We were a much more culturally literate people once, it’s true*, but there’s just not much of an audience for the Bard anymore. Nor was it a case of SJWs trying to destroy something good just on general principles. I’m sure Gwyneth Paltrow was bad as Emma, but the idea of retconning every single female in the Western Canon into a Strong, Confident Woman(TM) was still in its infancy. My only other guess was that, since college enrollments were skyrocketing, maybe the parents of all those first-gen college kids were feeling mal-educated and trying to catch up …? Lame, I know, but it was the best I could do.
Looking back on it now, I see my problem: I was looking at it from the demand side. Silly and naive as I was, I assumed that Hollywood’s primary concern was making money, so they went out and found what the people wanted to see, then gave it to them. For instance, I thought Titanic was going to be a huge flop. I mean, the boat sinks. We know that. How do you squeeze any dramatic tension out of it? I should’ve realized they’d be playing it as a doomed-lovers tragedy — girls love that shit, what with the big flouncy costumes and all. Once I realized that, I thought I had it all figured out — every girl I, personally, knew found the works of Jane Austen tedious, but that’s because (I reasoned) you have to supply the images for yourself. Put Hunky McBeef up there in breeches and a peruke, Waify Beecup in a Regency dress, and it’s chick crack …
Or so I thought. Looking back on it now, that’s as dumb as my opinion that Titanic would bomb. Hollywood doesn’t care what you want. I doubt if Hollywood has ever cared what you want, but if they ever did, that time probably ended in tandem with Clara Bow’s career. Hollywood wants what they want, and so will you, because whaddaya gonna do, not watch it? The reason they made all those “classic literature” films in the 1990s, then, wasn’t because they thought we wanted (or needed) some cultural uplift.
No, the reason was: By the 1990s, the last of the old guard in Hollywood was dying off, replaced by the new guard, the Baby Boomers. As we know, it’s not enough for Boomers to control everything while making a shitload of money. No no, for them everything has to be deep and meaningful. They thought of themselves as artistes, not entertainers, so they had to put out a bunch of highbrow stuff, and we had to watch it. This is the sole reason goofy-looking Kenneth Branagh and his horse-faced wife (at the time) were a big cultural force. They made Shakespeare sexy, by which I mean, they allowed the studio heads to think of themselves as the arbiters of culture, not the carny trash they were and are. That some decent movies got made because of it, is entirely incidental.**
*Last summer, during the worst of lockdown mania, I introduced my little nephews to Bugs Bunny. The real ones, from the 40s and 50s, not the crap they put out ten, twenty years ago. I am an educated man by modern standards, but a lot of that stuff flew over my head … and they used to show these in front of popular movies, on military bases, etc.! There’s the classic Wagner one, of course — kill da wabbit!! — but another one involves The Barber of Seville, which I haven’t seen performed and had to look up. Even the “throwaway” music was classical — they could assume, in other words, that your average workaday guy or GI had a fairly large repertoire of classical pieces in his head, enough to recognize bits from Strauss, Chopin, Schumann, etc.
**I do kinda regret bashing Sir Kenneth, as wiki tells me he now is. I enjoyed Hamlet (again, despite the annoying cameos), and some of his other work was pretty entertaining, even, in a limited way, visionary — a quirky little picture like Dead Again didn’t do much in 1991, but it would clean up now (a PoMo costume drama!). I’m one of the few people who liked Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which again despite terrible casting (Robert De Niro? Seriously?) was loads of fun. Shelley’s novel as written is ludicrous, therefore unfilmable, but Branagh admirably captured the spirit of it. It’s as Goth as can be, in the original sense of “Gothic”. Wonderful stuff.
March 15, 2021
QotD: The “Greatest Generation”‘s expectations of the Boomers
I get this dance very well. First comes the sacrifice, then the deification.
Did the World War II generation rise to the challenge? Yes, they did. But in a way they’d been brought up for it: a generation grown to continue Europe’s long war, because the previous generation had been eaten in the fields of WWI.
And can anyone blame the veterans, coming back from yet another European abattoir for wanting to put an end to the cycle?
Obviously something had gone wrong in Western civilization and it needed to be stopped. The next generation were going to be a brand new beginning. They were going to make it all better.
Did I mention the serpent in the garden? You can’t make the garden without the serpent.
A lot of the crazy of the sixties, and the unmaking of society was what the boomers were explicitly raised to do. A lot of the poison in our cultural waters was the rebellion of the veterans of WWII. An understandable rebellion, but one that threw the baby out with the bath water nonetheless.
However, even the boomers who weren’t raised on utopian ideals, who weren’t told the world was theirs to remake, even the ones who didn’t protest (or fought in) the war, even the ones who were and are decent human beings were raised with the idea that it was theirs to change Western Civ to be more … humane. Or at least not to self-destruct in battlefields.
This created an ur-programming, a back brain thing. Even responsible boomers who cut their hair, got jobs and raised families had the idea that they were supposed to transform everything.
Sarah Hoyt, “Business From The Wrong End”, According to Hoyt, 2018-09-27.
