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Boomers – the spoiledest generation?
Fully aware of stepping into a hornet’s nest, let me give you some (voluntarily provocative) thoughts on the baby-boom generation. Please note that I have tried to list items that are true in most Western countries, and which should not be completely made false by local histories or circumstances.
Do not complain that this is an exageration, of course it is! But can you point to opposite items? Do you want to?
– they have grown up in a time of major growth, thus living their childhood in ever-improving prosperity and in an atmosphere of progress and economic optimism.
They were thus the first generation to have the luxury to revolt against the materialistic preoccupations of their parents while fully benefiting from these material advantages (and not having lived through the Depression and war like their parents)
– they had the incredible chance of living their 20s after the pill and before AIDS, thus being the first generation (and only one so far) able te enjoy sex without limitation and almost without consequences;
– after having experimented with abandon every kind of ideology and -isms, made divorce, single-parent families and criminality grow exponentially, and been generally irresponsible for most of their life, they have lately become “born-again” and are trying to push back medieval morality on the rest of the population (“family values”, “war on drugs”, welfare reform)
– after having sent their black or poor neighbors fight the Vietnam War, they discredited their military until a few terrorists smacked them in the face, and it suddenly became fashionable – and necessary – for them, fully in power, to use the full force (and more) of the US military to kick Arab ass indiscriminately
– in Europe at least, the social net overwhelmingly favors them, by makingtheir jobs almost untouchable while putting all the needs for flexibility of the economy on the young (who cannot find a stable job easily) and the old (who were kicked out into early retirement or irremediable unemployment).
– they are the first generation to live at a time when (i) there is a retirement age (ii) people live longer than that age and (iii) the system is able to fund their pensions by contributions by those following them – and they could well be the last, as they are keen to let other generations pay – again – for their old age.
– after having been pampered anti-capitalist lefties in their youth, they became ruthless corporate overachievers, and were in charger of the large scale rightist attempt to push back the social net they benefited from but want to deny to others. The massive stock market and housing bubbles this has created have allowed them to capture a huge portion of the wealth (overvalued stocks and houses), at the expense of the young who cannot afford to buy housing or save with a perpective of decent returns
In a word, they are spoiled kids who had everything handed to them on a platter and do not want to share with others.
Please rebut!
it doesn’t seem that simple to me.
for one thing, a lot of the rightwing impulse in the US is and has always been among the young. College and highschool Young Republicans are a significant force, were a significant force in the 60’s as well. it is by no means true that the boomers were generally a lot of “pampered anticapitalist lefties” [methinks Jerome is displaying an uncharacteristic disrespect here for ideological challengers — a fair chunk of the left impulse of the 60’s came from working class thinkers and activists]. there was a core activist group to the left and a core activist group to the right, and a great woolly mass of shallow thinkers and trend-watchers in between — and the debacle of the Vietnam War greatly strengthened the leftist challenge to state institutions, at the expense of the right which was (correctly imho) associated with the failed criminal endeavour in VN. w/o the galvanising high crime of the VN war, the rest of the social “revolution” (more like a reform movement) of the 60’s imho would have taken place far more slowly.
I also question the bland assumption of increased individual (as opposed to State) criminality, which is cited repeatedly without substantiating evidence in rightwing rants everywhere. iirc crime rates in the US have been steady or declining. though US mass media talk up “crime danger” as if most US cities were Baghdad, in reality the average American is at far more risk of becoming roadkill than being murdered by human hand. admittedly, violent crime is far more common in the US than elsewhere but this is a national/cultural problem not a generational one imho. and the association between “lax morals” as in boomers, and physical crime, is a very questionable one. are we then to believe that we would be better off with “strict morals” (as in Dominionists or Shari’a law) and that this would suppress crime? only if we fail to diagnose as crime the stonings, beheadings, imprisonments, whippings, beatings, lynchings and so on that are tolerated and encouraged in “strict morals” cultures adhering to a revealed divine order 🙂 we should recall that the “good old days” of “strict morals” America in the 50’s (the “state of grace” from which we allegedly fell into moral decline) included: forcible psychoactive medication of women who were not sufficiently subservient to their husbands, forcible medication, electroshock and even lobotomy for gays and lesbians, commonplace violence against people of colour up to and including lynching, bans on mixed-race marriage, both cold and hot antiSemitism, and brutal Statist repression of freedom of speech and press (the McCarthy horrorshow). our sogenannte “decline” into moral laxitude was imho an ascent into better public morality, since it meant the abolition (or mostly abolition) of these abuses and many more.
therefore I question the reflex assumption that a rejection of patriarchal tradition — the father-dominant nuclear family, anti-divorce laws, compulsory pregnancy, legalised child-beating, anti-gay laws and the like — somehow implies “irreponsibility”. irresponsibility is to me far more powerfully expressed in the “devil take the consequences” theories of the neoliberal economists and the unchecked liquidation of resources (this latter has no generational ID tag on it, but has been proceeding at an accelerated pace from Sumer on, in the name of both left and right ideologies).
OTOH I do agree that the boomers, like many other generations before ’em, inherited the fruits of hard work and suffering from their parents’ generation and then failed to guard and keep them. they inherited labour rights won at the cost of life and blood by organisers in the violent teens, 20’s and 30’s. they inherited social programs which were only constructed hastily, post facto, to ameliorate the pain of the last great capitalist crash cycle. and they (we) learned to accept these safety nets and civilising influences as “just the way things are,” forgetting that eternal vigilance is the price not only of freedom, but of decency. civil rights that were won at enormous personal risk, costing lives and careers, are taken for granted; workplace rights that were won by similar heroic struggle are taken for granted; freedoms of speech and the press that were wrested back from the US government (after the McCarthy Era) by concerted, long-term effort were taken for granted. and as a result, all can be taken away again by the American Contra while the boomers stand around with their mouths open muttering “They can’t do that!” they/we have forgotten that the institutions of power and control yield nothing without a struggle.
not all the Talibornagains are ex-liberals or lefties. there are notable flip-floppers, who managed the (not all that magical) transformation from authoritarian Trots to authoritarian Randists. but many were angry Young Republicans already in the 60’s, now seeing an opportunity to wreak revenge at last for being on the losing side of US politics for 40 years. and so on. I think maybe you had to have been there (the US in the years in question) to have a grasp of the fractal complexity of politics and identity — same true of any country, of course, I am aware that I have in my head only a cartoon version of ’68 in France 🙂
what is undeniably true is that materialism and capitalist consumerism have been very successfully deployed to defuse the impulse of a generation towards social reform. the “infinite growth” mantra of the neolibs defuses any urgent desire for wealth-sharing, as it soothingly suggests that the poor will surely get their share as the pie gets infinitely bigger. and human nature being what it is, a large chunk of the “alternative culture” generation is now quite happy to feed its alternative impulses by purchasing “alternative culture merchandise” by catalogue shopping, while otherwise integrating fully into the finance/capital system it once desired earnestly to challenge. the decline of Utne Reader into a sort of altie shopping mag probably exemplifies this trend, as does the number of shiny SUVs seen arriving at “lefty” and altie political events.
but if the boomers are selfish, they have certainly been encouraged to be so by more than their own innate human flaws: I dunno if y’all recall Bill McKibben’s experiment. he spent a year of his life watching the content of 24 hours of American cable TV and taking notes, to see what US mass media was telling its viewers every day. as I recall his overwhelming impression was that the message was “You, You, You, it’s All About You.” from talk shows to ads, the message was “you deserve,” “get yours,” “you owe it to yourself,” “it’s just for you,” “you need” — an endless litany, both subliminal and flagrant, of entitlement.
if we want to talk about morally deficient education, perhaps we can talk about why we permit broadcast media, much of it aimed at children and teens, to send such a relentless message of solipsistic selfishness, 24 hours a day — a deliberate education in moral deficiency if ever there was one. do we really expect human beings to manifest a complete immunity to this kind of mass indoctrination, by some kind of mysterious innate moral fibre? any immunity I myself have enjoyed from this propaganda blitz has been won by simply not watching the stuff. you have to visit the US and watch its media to understand the kind of alternative reality that American media consumers live in, and have lived in for decades.
in sum, and apologies for my usual longwindedness — I don’t think we can understand contemporary political phenomena by blaming the personality flaws of a generation. much of what Jerome laments above can be summed up as “decadence,” a quality that affects every society when some advantage (be it material wealth, safety, or personal liberty) is won and starts to be taken for granted. it is natural to humans to relax and lower their guard when they feel they are safe, and to indulge in trivial and amusing activities when their primary needs are met. a whole generation may do this if they are fortunate enough to live at a high point of affluence or liberty in their cultural history. their frivolity and inattentiveness to serious issues then make them vulnerable to the next group of predators to invade their local system — whether arising from within or without.
I grant that the Boomers have been lulled into an enormous complacency, selfishness, solipsism and (tip to rgiap) happy mutual infantilism, by the post-WWII period of engineered economic growth, engineered cheap housing, and relative peace. their consciousness of many things, from class to physics to basic math, has atrophied as compared to their parents’ generation. but I see this as the inevitable consequence of the arc of the history they lived through, not as some peculiar moral rot unique to their generation.
Posted by: DeAnander | Jan 9 2005 19:11 utc | 4
DeAnanders cement mixer reading list was a little exhaustive tonight — but well worth it. The Walter Davis paper — seemless, from the particular to the general, showing among other things, that that old phenomenology tree still bears edible fruit, as does Freud — and what remgiap has been calling (for ever here) infantilism, in the religious right, is fleshed out in some detail. The Bageant piece was a real visceral response to the above.
And so, will confess to being of the bb (b.48) generation, and I suppose the “counter- culture” as well, and with the exception of never actually finding the “sexual freedom league” I have no regrets of pretty much diving right in, anyway. Coming of age in Ohio, in the 60’s, the product of (in retrospect) a rather pathetic educational system, the Vietnam war gearing up, along with the draft, my hormones said “fuck all that”, so I chased the girls, chased other guys at my high schools first cross country team (all the way to state), was a first generation skateboarder, got expelled from high school for not wearing socks, and finally graduating with a smirk, in the lower 1/4 of my class. The councilor told my mom — don’t waste any money sending that boy to college.
After graduating, with a couple friends, we took to the road in my old 56 Ford convertable, to escape the dreaded oh, oh, Ohio (Chrissy Hynde of the Pretenders (whom I met later in Cleveland) — and all roads then, led to San Francisco. Found a little dump a block from the Avalone Ballroom, tried that LSD, and sucked in all that culture, all that culture that was being made, everywhere by people like me — and that was a revelation. Looking back, there was this flourish, both a celebration of the of our own power and a rejection of how our destiny had been laid out by that other power. Sure, it was in the conventional sense, irresponsible, but as Richie Havens said often “responsibility is nothing but the ability to respond” and respond we did, with image, word and music — much of which remains potent today. In many ways it was, what it still is, a spontanious cultural rift that not only created a populist reaction to government, but also awakened a sleeping cultural potential with a novel sense of solidarity and community. Along with an awarness of governmental controls, and war making, there immerged also an awarness of the plight of native americans, african americans, womens rights, immigrant workers, and the enviroment, most of which were brought forth into mainstream culture for the first time. And to think much of this happened outside the Democratic norm, politically speaking, is instructive with the current dilemma in that culture, is the precurser of the political.
3:00AM cont.
Posted by: anna missed | Jan 10 2005 10:52 utc | 30
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