I was born in late ’62. I never considered myself a boomer. And before you scream that boomers go to ’64, let me explain: I swear to you they didn’t use to. My brother, born in early ’54 was considered one of the youngest boomers. And if you look at the ethos of the generation and what formed it, and how its public image was created and also when they came of age, you’ll understand that makes a ton more sense.
The boomers were the baby boom after WWII. By the time I hit school, the classrooms were half empty, the trailers that they’d added the decade before were being used for craft classes or gym or something that required tons of space.
It would take a long time to come home if you were still being born in ’62. (And I’d been due in ’63.)
This is important simply because I want to make it clear when I came of age it wasn’t with the boomer ethos of “each generation is going to be bigger than the last and we’re going to remake the world in our image.” That expectation is still obvious in books of the fifties and sixties, as well as the attached Malthusian panic.
The boomers, like now the millenials, are a much maligned generation. The public image is almost not at all that of the people in the generation I actually know, with a very few exceptions.
The people the media chose to highlight were the ones they wanted the boomers to be, not who they were.
But something about the boomers is true — ironically the reason that caused them to hate my generation before they decided to aggregate us, because it gave them more power to still be considered young and marketable-to — and that is that they were raised in the expectation they would make the world a better place, and that they could because of sheer numbers, and because they’d been brought up to be better than their parents.
Sarah Hoyt, “Business From The Wrong End”, According to Hoyt, 2018-09-27.
February 15, 2021
QotD: Tail-end boomers aren’t really Baby Boomers at all
February 7, 2021
QotD: The greatest sin of the Baby Boomers
If that’s harsh on the Boomers, well, sorry, Moonbeam — History don’t care about your feelings. But “the Sixties” isn’t the gravest charge History can lay against you. This is: After all that, you gave the world us, Gen X, the Dumbest Generation of Narcissists in the History of the World. Yes, you guys are responsible for both “Rocky Raccoon” and “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
Severian, “The Look”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-10-09.
September 23, 2020
QotD: Don’t blame the Boomers for the “Summer of Love” … most of ’em were too young to participate
Now, I’m all for bashing the goddamn Boomers, but let’s be fair (since it matters for historical analysis). There’s a common misconception about the Baby Boom. Here, see if you can spot it:
Did you see it? Look closer, and you’ll see that while 1947(-ish) appears to be the peak year in terms of total births, the vast majority of what we call “Boomers” were born after 1950. Let’s do some simple math. The very oldest Boomers were born in 1946. The Summer of Love was 1967. Even if we assume the Summer of Love came out of nowhere — which is impossible, of course, any movement that large had antecedents going back years, probably decades, but let’s assume — that means that any “Boomers” participating were, at most, barely 22 years old. They were just barely 24 when Woodstock came around. Granted that the youngest are the dumbest, and thus can have outsize influence, they still can’t have been largely, let alone solely, responsible for the idiocy of the hippies.
That’s all on the older crowd, the so-called “Silent Generation” — the ones who were old enough to be aware of World War II, but unable to participate directly.
It’s easy to verify. The Port Huron Statement, the founding document of the New Left, was penned by coddled college kids in 1962 — meaning, by kids born, at latest, in about 1942 (its principal author, Tom Hayden, was born in 1939). Here are the Chicago Seven and their dates of birth: Abbie Hoffman (1936), Jerry Rubin (1938), David Dellinger (1915!), Hayden, Rennie Davis (1941),John Froines (1939), and Lee Weiner (1939).
Hoffman, especially, bears scrutiny. Though he’s best remembered as a Yippie — that is, the founder of an ostentatiously youth-oriented movement — he was 31 at its founding. Don’t trust anyone over thirty, right?
1936 to 1946 is only a decade, but it’s crucial. A kid born in 1936 would have vivid memories of World War II and its immediate aftermath — fathers, uncles, and older brothers (and, in more than a few cases, aunts and older sisters) coming home from the service. A kid born in 1946 would have a completely different experience — ask any combat veteran about the first year or two back in the world, versus being home for a decade. Those guys — the kids who saw firsthand the angry young strangers they were supposed to call “Dad” — were the ones who did the real damage in The Sixties(TM), just as it was the almost-but-not-quite frontsoldaten who did the real damage in the Third Reich.
With me? Now hang on to your hats, because here’s where it gets pretty meta: It was the “Silent Generation,” not the Boomers, who did the real damage in The Sixties(TM). That is, the guys who juuuust missed the giant social upheaval that was World War II. The Boomers have done all the damage since The Sixties(TM).
That — The Sixties(TM), which is why I’m using that obnoxious (TM) — is the great social upheaval they juuuust missed. [These people] aren’t old fossils from the flower power years, though many of those fossils are still alive and kicking (including four of the Chicago Seven: Hayden, Davis, Froines, and Weiner). Has anyone heard from Billy Ayers lately? How about Noam Chomsky (born 1928)? I’m sure they have plenty to say … but nobody cares.
It’s not retreads from The Sixties(TM) out there doing this stuff. It’s the people who wish they’d been around for the Summer of Love that are doing it. It’s the people who just know they would’ve ended the Vietnam War, if only they hadn’t been in junior high at the time. This is their Woodstock, not least because they only heard about the original when they arrived for freshman orientation in 1976.
Severian, “Talkin’ ’bout My Generation!”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-06-11.
March 19, 2020
“Millennial[s are] every bit as shallow, irresponsible, stupid, and smart-assed as” Baby Boomers
David Warren on the awful discovery that the kids not only aren’t all right, they’re just as bad as we are:
Unlike certain oldies, I have retained some awareness of the “young people.” Curiosity alone would drive me to this, although childbearing (not by me personally) has had the same effect. In my research, I have found the so-called Millennial generation to be every bit as shallow, irresponsible, stupid, and smart-assed as my own, and what is worse, younger. I thought we were the Peter-Pan generation that would never grow up, but the claim must now be shared with successive rounds of offspring. To be fair, the rewards for growing up have been sharply curtailed, through that part of history which anyone remembers, and those who never tried were never punished.
History itself has now so far receded — it certainly is not taught in schools — that by now the kids persist on pure theory. They do what seems necessary to them, in the absence of knowledge. I cannot reasonably blame them for lacking what they’ve never come in contact with, for no one can know about what he has never heard of. On religious questions, for example, what could “transubstantiation” mean? It was easier to explain this to a South Sea Islander, in the good old days of the missionaries, before the islanders got cell phones.
On the other hand, the Millennials are human. The instinct to be human, even when repressed, often returns. Several times I have been moved, almost to tears, by a native decency suddenly expressed, by the most unlikely subject in rings and tattoos. There will always be something to work with, there.
While Millennials appear even dumber than their elders, we must allow for the progressive slide. There are just as many smart people as there once were, and some abroad have benefited from improved nutrition. If caught young, and exposed to learning, they would learn. They simply haven’t been exposed to it yet.
January 6, 2020
Gerontophobia – “the most acceptable, widespread prejudice in society today”
In Spiked, Ella Whelan discusses one form of prejudice that is not only common, it’s practically proselytizing for new members:
Have you found yourself grimacing at Zimmer frames on the bus? Do you revel in checking the latest census data to see the average age of the nation? Do you retweet sarky comments about “youthquakes” shaking out the old fuddy-duddies? If so, you might be suffering from gerontophobia – the fear and loathing of old people – which is the most acceptable, widespread prejudice in society today.
Ageism is the one “ism” that is given a free pass. Hating on granny is all the rage. Recently, former US president Barack Obama made headlines by talking about “old people … not getting out of the way”.
The 58-year-old is not the only older politician to turn against his age group. Since the Brexit vote, 76-year-old Vince Cable has been railing against older Leave voters. On a panel with me at the How the Light Gets In festival last year, he drew laughs from a Hampstead crowd for mocking Brexit as a “Zimmer-frame revolution”. The author Ian McEwan also denounced his fellow septuagenarians when he delightedly predicted that by 2019, “1.5 million oldsters, mostly Brexiters, freshly in their graves” could swing public opinion towards remaining in the EU.
The phrase “OK Boomer” went viral last year after a young person posted a clip of herself reacting to a “baby boomer” complaining about “snowflakes” and overgrown teenagers. This derisory response of “OK Boomer”, used to shut down the so-called Baby Boomer generation, was also used by Netflix in one of its social-media posts. It was even used earnestly in the New Zealand parliament by Green politician Chlöe Swarbrick in response to an older colleague.
The instant popularity of the phrase signalled how normalised generational divides have become. There have always been tensions between younger and older generations, but never before has there been so much celebration of youngsters deriding their parents. Rather than rebelling against the old and changing the world, the OK Boomer phenomenon shows how little young people want to interact with older generations, instead preferring petulant put-downs.
Perhaps the most pronounced and sinister ageism came from the wave of interest in Extinction Rebellion (XR), Greta Thunberg and the climate-emergency panic. From Thunberg being named Time person of the year after blaming older generations for stealing “my dreams and my childhood” to XR Youth proclaiming that “adults need to be accountable to the young people”, climate activism isn’t very oldie friendly. Instead of asking questions about what political changes might be made to help the planet, and, more importantly, the people living on it, environmentalism has veered towards a cultish celebration of youth. Fawning adults have handed over all moral authority to schoolchildren.
Greta Thunberg at the EU Parliament, 16 April, 2019.
European Parliament photo via Wikimedia Commons.
December 19, 2019
Repost – “An ‘American tradition’ is anything that happened to a baby boomer twice”
Hard to refute xkcd on Christmas music:
December 17, 2019
QotD: The mass cowardice of the Baby Boomers
The mythical hippy-drippy boomer even gave birth to another myth that refuses to die, that of their conservative Millennial offspring. Considering this all started 20 years ago with a limp Michael J. Fox sitcom, it is time to retire the played out joke before it gets flipped onto the next generation. Holo-headline 2031: “Look! The conservatives have hippie kids!”
Yet history will show that, for all their organizing skill and moral sensitivities, the boomers took a pass on actually changing one hellish state policy rather than have a few uncomfortable conversations with their kids. Gotta have that moral high ground even at the kitchen table, it seems. Boomers have collaborated and shamelessly switched sides on the war on drugs with full knowledge of the repercussions. If the greatest generation had landed at Omaha Beach, pissed themselves, tossed their weapons into the sea, and begged to serve as Nazi slop-boys, then you might have an equivalent act of mass cowardice.
Jeff A. Taylor, “Boomer or Bust: Reflections of a generational refugee”, Reason, 2004-12-14.
October 16, 2019
QotD: Childhood fears of nuclear armageddon
It was 1968. On the night before the last day of camp, a counselor named Charlie Brown interrupted our sunset meeting by the shores of White Bear Lake to tell us the news: Russia had launched their missiles and they would destroy America before the night was out. It was time to get right with God.
Silence; crickets; small sobs. I’m sure no one thought much about Jesus right then. We thought about Mom and Dad and Spot and our room, where we really, really wanted to be right now, with the familiar smell of the goldfish bowl, and —
Charlie Brown guided us through some prayers. We all said Amen, and I’m sure for some it was the least heartfelt Amen we’d ever said. Then Charlie Brown said he had made up the story. Russia hadn’t launched the missiles. But what if they had? Were we right with Jesus?
Back at the barracks we were quiet and unnerved. No one wanted to go to sleep. No one wanted to talk, either. Finally John Larson, the bunkhouse bully, broke the silence. He was the mean kid. He was the one who tormented me at home, and had bothered me at camp. Nelson Muntz without the charm. John Larson expressed his simple wish to stab Charlie Brown in the stomach.
A dozen little Lutheran campers nodded in the dark: ya sure, you betcha.
James Lileks, The Bleat, 2003-09-11.
September 6, 2019
QotD: The horrors of war
An aside: I’ve long thought that prettifying World War II for domestic consumption contributed to both the media shock of Vietnam and the generation gap. WWII and Korea vets, who knew war first-hand, didn’t understand just how shocked their doted-on boomer kids were. “The Good War” wasn’t any more pleasant when you were experiencing it.
Virginia Postrel, “Horrors of War”, Dynamist.com, 2004-04-27.
May 27, 2019
A genuine, bona fide electrified, six-car Fisking!
Once upon a time, in the primordial early days of blogging, an artform was evolved that perfectly suited the ecological niche occupied by bloggers: the Fisking. Thanks to his great respect for the ways of the past, David Thompson is a highly skilled modern practitioner of that ancient artform:
Here’s an idea! Change your parents’ bad voting habits by refusing to breed.
In the pages of Slate, Christina Cauterucci, whose enthusiasms include “gender and feminism,” wishes to share her wisdom:
The prospect of harnessing one’s sexual and reproductive powers for social good is a tempting one. So, I’d like to present what I humbly consider a much better proposal: Instead of a sex strike, let’s try a grandkid strike.
It’s a “brilliant new weapon of progressivism,” says Ms Cauterucci, and “exactly the kind of radical response today’s radical threats to equity, justice, and humanity demand.” Specifically,
It’s time to demand that baby boomers and Gen Xers decide which they’d rather have: their vague attachments to policies that have poisoned the earth and will soon make it difficult for anyone but the obscenely wealthy to live healthy, happy lives, or a pack of adorable munchkins in itty-bitty suspenders ready for unlimited tickle fights and cookie-baking sessions.
This is followed almost immediately by,
I’ve already decided that I’m not having kids,
Which, for the purposes of Ms Cauterucci’s article, is somewhat convenient. This reproductive decision was, we’re told, arrived at because,
Child care is extravagantly expensive, and paid family leave is a rare luxury. Bringing a new set of chubby cheeks and wonderfully incomprehensible babblings into the world is the most destructive thing one couple can do to the planet. It seems certain that today’s babies will be tomorrow’s survivors of famine, water shortages, unprecedented natural disasters, and refugee crises.
And furthermore,
It’s unethical, what with climate change and all. And it’s too dangerous — you’ve seen the news reports on school shootings and know how easy it is for violent men to get their hands on guns.
Um, okay then. Apparently, the thought of becoming a parent immediately conjures mental images of famine, earthquakes, shootings and death. Proof, if more were needed, that the exquisitely woke are just like thee and me. Not unhinged in any way.
January 30, 2019
The past is a foreign country, part umpteen-and-one
At Rotten Chestnuts, Severian tries to gin up some sympathy for Millennial snowflakes, who feel cheated by fate (and their parents’ generation, but mostly their parents’ generation):
One of the toughest parts of looking at The Past (note capital letters) is grasping the pace of change. Oversimplifying (but not too much), you’d need to be a PhD-level specialist to determine if a given cultural production dated from the 11th century, or the 14th. The worldview of most people in most places didn’t change much from 1000 to 1300. Even in modern times, unless you really know what you’re looking for, a writer from 1830 sounds very much like a writer from 1890.*
Until you get to the 20th century. Then it’s obvious.
This isn’t “presentism” — the supposed cardinal sin of historical study, in which we project our values onto the past.** It really is obvious, and you can see it for yourself. Take Ford Madox Ford. A hot “Modernist” in his day — he was good friends with Ezra Pound, and promoted all the spastic incomprehensibles of the 1920s — he was nevertheless a man of his time… and his time was the High Victorian Era (born 1873). Though he served in the Great War, he was a full generation older than his men, and it shows. Compare his work to Robert Graves’s. Though both were the most Advanced of Advanced Thinkers — polygamy, Socialism, all that — Graves’s work is recognizably “modern,” while Ford’s reads like the writing of a man who really should’ve spent his life East of Suez, bringing the Bible and the Flag to the wogs. The world described in such loving detail in a work like Parade’s End — though of course Ford thought he was viciously criticizing it — might as well be Mars.
We’re in the same boat when it comes to those special, special Snowflakes, the Millennials. A Great War-level change really did hit them, right in their most vulnerable years. While we — Gen X and older — lived through the dawn of the Internet, we don’t live in the Internet Age (TM). Not like they do, anyway.
He does a bit of a Fisking (that’s an olde-tyme expression from when we used to knap our own flint, kiddies) of an article by a Millennial writer trying to make the case that the plight of the Millennials is comparable to that of the Lost Generation. But some actual sympathy is eventually located and delivered:
I titled this piece “Sympathy for Snowflakes,” and finally we’ve arrived. The days of life on the cul-de-sac with the white picket fence are indeed gone… but they’ve been gone for thirty years or more. They were in terminal decline since before Rush started singing about suburbs — that was 1982, if you’re keeping score at home — and what awful conformist hells they are. Ever heard the phrase “sour grapes?” I’m not going to say we invented that — after all, anything worth saying was already said by Dead White Males hundreds of years ago — but that’s why Gen X pop culture is full of rants against “conformism.” Slackers, Mallrats, all of it — sour grapes, buddy. If you in fact grew up on a cul-de-sac behind a white picket fence, your parents, who must’ve been early Gen Xers, were among the lucky few.
The difference between your generation and mine, Mr. Lafayette, isn’t what we wanted once we matured enough to start actually knowing what we wanted. It’s that my generation received rigorous-enough educations to figure out that the house on the cul-de-sac with the white picket fence is an aberration, just a flicker of static. Only one tiny group of people — middle class Americans, born roughly 1945-1965 — ever got to experience it. Young folks in the 1220s probably lived much as their parents did back in the 1180s, but modern life doesn’t work that way. These days, everyone makes do with what he has, gets on as best he can. Your generation, Mr. Lafayette, was taught to regard The Past as one long night of Oppression, and because of that, you never learned to take any lessons from it.
That’s why I’m sympathetic, even as I’m mocking you (but gently, lad, gently). That’s the real parallel between yourselves and the Lost Generation — it was done to you. You had no choice, and unlike the Lost Generation, you can’t even pin the blame anywhere. It just….kinda… happened. No wonder you feel adrift and powerless. No wonder “stand up straight” and “clean your room” seem like adages of life-altering wisdom.
So take an old guy’s advice, and READ. Read just about anything, so long as it’s published before 1950. Don’t think, don’t analyze, don’t snark, just read it. The change will come.
December 19, 2018
Repost – “An ‘American tradition’ is anything that happened to a baby boomer twice”
Hard to refute the latest xkcd take on Christmas music:
October 23, 2018
QotD: The boomers
How did my generation do? Well, we get blamed for being selfish and self-obsessed and soft and pushing up house prices and saddling the next generation with hideous debts and nowhere to live and I suppose that’s not entirely unfair.
We are ridiculously obsessed with food, buy too many things and have too many clothes. But we didn’t start a war. Well, not a big one. And we didn’t nuke anyone. We defused the Cold War. We believed in the collective good. Although we came to confuse gestures with actions and we think going on a march and writing a letter are the same as doing something, making the world better.
We were the generation that were relentlessly for civil rights, human rights, gay rights, disability rights, equality, fairness. We were implacably against racism and censorship. We defended freedom of speech, religion and expression. We will leave the world better fed and better off than when we arrived in it.
Britain is a far happier, richer and fairer place than it was 60 years ago. And if you think that’s wishful self-promotion, you have no idea how grim and threadbare Britain in the Fifties was. You weren’t there, you don’t remember.
A.A. Gill, “Life at 60”, Sunday Times, 2014-06-29.
October 17, 2018
QotD: “60 is the new 40”
… over the years I’ve watched people my age go from rarely mentioned as sportsmen and pop stars to more commonly as leading actors and television presenters and now ubiquitously I find myself in the thick of captains of industry, ennobled politicians, retired sportsmen and character actors. You only notice the accumulating years in relation to other people.
Last week an editor breezily mentioned that as I was coming up to a milestone decade would I perhaps like to write something about it? You know, is 60 the new 40? Why do you make those little noises when you get out of a chair? Am I considering getting a shed, or a cruise, or Velcro? And what about sex?
The only people who ask about significant birthdays are younger than you. No 70-year-olds are inquiring about my insights on being 60. Age is the great terra incognita. But then, all the people who tell me to do anything are younger than me now.
And please, can we stop this “60 is the new 40” thing? No one is saying 20 is the new 10. And who wants to be 40 anyway? An insipid, insecure age.
My generation, the postwar baby-boomers, are over the meridian of our vital parabolas. We’ve done our best and our worst, overachieved and underperformed, are either preparing to bask on the sun loungers of our success or suck our bruised fingers in the waiting rooms of failure. So 60 is both a personal summit from which to look back, breathing heavily, hands on my knees, and a generational one.
A.A. Gill, “Life at 60”, Sunday Times, 2014-06-29.
September 9, 2018
Hunter S. Thompson, Jann Wenner and Rolling Stone
Darcy Gerow on the sudden rise and long, long decline of Rolling Stone:
The suffocating media bias of the 1960s was difficult to escape. A lethargic gray specter of middle-class America was distributed with cunning sterility through the generic, bogus smiles of cable news networks and traditional print. Despite the election and assassination of Kennedy and the signing of the Civil Rights Act, if you had turned on a T.V. this was still Eisenhower’s America: regimented, religious, conservative. And the cultural vacuum created by the Eisenhower years had began to suck even harder with Lyndon Baines Johnson at the helm.
American media was out of touch with this new generation. Elitist authoritarians were preaching their moral superiority stamped with stars and stripes to a generation of cynics. These kids didn’t have a fucking clue what they wanted, but they wanted no part of what they were being given. So rose Rolling Stone, a counterculture bible for babyboomers, co-founded by Jann Wenner.[…]
Things were different in the 1960s. The anti-war movement and the civil rights movement were a just cause. The catalyst for a just movement of equal rights for women and gays and minorities was free speech, of which Jann Wenner was a huge proponent. When students at U.C. Berkley marched in the streets in the 1960s, it was an attack on the elitist, authoritarians and an establishment hellbent on keeping opposing viewpoints and the ideas of personal liberty stifled. The gang of “cruel faggots” kept the official narrative running but no one under 30 was listening.
The whole goddamn world had had enough of the travesty of war in Southeast Asia. There was no ignoring the ineptitude of American politics. The only reasonable thing to do in 1969 was to drive out to Altamont for the weekend, load up on heinous chemicals, hunker down and rethink your approach to the political process.
Thompson, the then-young, liberal anti-hero, could often be found gobbling LSD and firing his guns (he was a lifetime member of the NRA) at propane bottles for a crowd of jeering burnouts or Bay area bikers at his fortified compound, Owl Farm, in Woody Creek Colorado.
It was Jann Wenner’s idea to put Hunter, with all of his fear and loathing, on to the campaign trail in 1972. Why not get the guy who wrote Hell’s Angels? Hunter was someone with a penchant for dealing with vicious thugs and sick freaks gone crazy on power, someone who could draw a parallel between Richard Nixon and Sonny Barger.
Thompson’s openly-biased, subjective and wild account of the 1972 presidential election was the red Chevy convertible of campaign coverage. ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ on repeat and at full volume, barrelling across the country at 110 miles an hour or so and in search of an honest politician. In Hunter’s eyes, the only one that even came close was George McGovern, the senator from South Dakota.
McGovern’s non-interventionist platform focused on a complete withdrawal from Vietnam, amnesty for draft evaders and a Milton Freidman-inspired, negative income tax meant to replace the bureaucratic burden of social welfare programs and a complicated tax code. Thompson’s version of events is the story of an idealistic underdog fighting against the odds only to be crushed by postmodern Americanism and the establishment incumbent, “Tricky Dick Nixon.” McGovern might have owed a White House win, in part, to Thompson’s and Rolling Stone’s relentless support had he not owed his White House loss to the mental distress of his vice-presidential pick, Thomas Eagleton.
There’s no way to properly explain how great Rolling Stone was in those early years. How well the magazine represented the anti-establishment culture, individual liberty and equality for everyone. It can’t be compared to anything else because there was nothing else, only the traditional mainstream garbage and Rolling Stone.
