Thursday, August 04, 2005
Boomers
When I was a little kid I heard that I was a "baby boom" baby. There's a demographic "baby boom" that started just after World War II and went on through about nineteen sixty-five. Just ask anyone born after nineteen sixty if they're a "boomer" though and be prepared for an energetic denial. I think, and this isn't my original idea, that if you feel like you belong to a generation, then you do. The cultural "boomers" actually started getting born in the early 1940's and the last of them began breathing the air in 1960. This is based on a cyclical theory of history as put forth most succinctly by a couple of Boomers named Strauss and Howe in a book titled Generations. There's my credit, now back to my rant, I mean thesis.
There are a couple of large groups of Boomers loose in the world. The first group, to which I belong, is less pathological than the younger and larger group that followed us. Unfortunately, the whole world seems to judge my generation by that second group. As an example, when I attended my high school reunion a while back, the disk jockey played tons of seventies music. Boomer stuff, right? Well, no. We graduated in nineteen sixty-seven. There was a lot of music around in the sixties, most of it nothing like what people think of as sixties music. There were dozens of "British Invasion" bands, for instance, besides the Beatles and Stones. There was folk music, Dean Martin, Tennessee Ernie Ford, just all sorts of stuff that the larger Boomer group, who can be identified by their actually liking seventies music, has no idea ever existed. If you'd like an accurate look at the sixties, check out the Tom Hanks movie That Thing You Do. It was so accurate I thought maybe he'd invented a time machine and actually filmed the thing in nineteen sixty-five.
So, about those younger Boomers. Every generation starts out relatively benign and gets more pathological as it goes along (in birth order I mean.) This is the theory, and my generation seems to bear it out. For example, several years after I graduated the campus demonstration business was booming (no pun intended.) One such demonstration was held in Bowling Green Ohio when a gang of students decided to protest something or other, eventually breaking the glass on a door at the Administration Building. A friend of mine asked the group, after they'd congregated in front of his house, which was across from the courthouse, where the organizer was. The reply was that he couldn't be here because he might get busted. (?!?) Ghandi went out and tried to get arrested, as did the freedom marchers, and quite a few antiwar demonstrators in the earlier days of the movement. These guys, these younger boomers, were playing at a demonstration. Heck, you wouldn't want to get arrested: that might mess with your scheduled toga party.
Now, I wondered at first how our current Administration got away with selling the apparently unnecessary invasion of Iraq. Well, the answer is simple: most of his base of support is within those same younger boomers, who leapt at the chance to play at fighting a war. Well, goody for them, except of course they're no more fighting this war than they did Vietnam (only two percent of my generation ever saw the place, and most of them were in my older group.) These, not to put too fine a point on it, idiots who disrespected the very idea of public action for social reform were more than happy to put their weight behind this wonderful new thing! Boy, you just gotta love 'em, dontcha, because otherwise you'd have to try to kill them all, and there are just too many of them for you to pull it off.
That seventies music I mentioned? With notable exceptions, it tends to be derivative and not terribly creative. Boomer politics? Pretty much the same thing. In the words of a popular figure from the sixties, "Wunnerful, wunnerful, wunnerful!"
There are a couple of large groups of Boomers loose in the world. The first group, to which I belong, is less pathological than the younger and larger group that followed us. Unfortunately, the whole world seems to judge my generation by that second group. As an example, when I attended my high school reunion a while back, the disk jockey played tons of seventies music. Boomer stuff, right? Well, no. We graduated in nineteen sixty-seven. There was a lot of music around in the sixties, most of it nothing like what people think of as sixties music. There were dozens of "British Invasion" bands, for instance, besides the Beatles and Stones. There was folk music, Dean Martin, Tennessee Ernie Ford, just all sorts of stuff that the larger Boomer group, who can be identified by their actually liking seventies music, has no idea ever existed. If you'd like an accurate look at the sixties, check out the Tom Hanks movie That Thing You Do. It was so accurate I thought maybe he'd invented a time machine and actually filmed the thing in nineteen sixty-five.
So, about those younger Boomers. Every generation starts out relatively benign and gets more pathological as it goes along (in birth order I mean.) This is the theory, and my generation seems to bear it out. For example, several years after I graduated the campus demonstration business was booming (no pun intended.) One such demonstration was held in Bowling Green Ohio when a gang of students decided to protest something or other, eventually breaking the glass on a door at the Administration Building. A friend of mine asked the group, after they'd congregated in front of his house, which was across from the courthouse, where the organizer was. The reply was that he couldn't be here because he might get busted. (?!?) Ghandi went out and tried to get arrested, as did the freedom marchers, and quite a few antiwar demonstrators in the earlier days of the movement. These guys, these younger boomers, were playing at a demonstration. Heck, you wouldn't want to get arrested: that might mess with your scheduled toga party.
Now, I wondered at first how our current Administration got away with selling the apparently unnecessary invasion of Iraq. Well, the answer is simple: most of his base of support is within those same younger boomers, who leapt at the chance to play at fighting a war. Well, goody for them, except of course they're no more fighting this war than they did Vietnam (only two percent of my generation ever saw the place, and most of them were in my older group.) These, not to put too fine a point on it, idiots who disrespected the very idea of public action for social reform were more than happy to put their weight behind this wonderful new thing! Boy, you just gotta love 'em, dontcha, because otherwise you'd have to try to kill them all, and there are just too many of them for you to pull it off.
That seventies music I mentioned? With notable exceptions, it tends to be derivative and not terribly creative. Boomer politics? Pretty much the same thing. In the words of a popular figure from the sixties, "Wunnerful, wunnerful, wunnerful!"
