Thank you, Hon. I missed you too.
I found an interesting article in today's New York Times, about the ugly side of the Baby Boom generation. Having been born in the tail end of it, I find myself disagreeing with some of the assertions, but I'm not sure how defensive I'm being. Any thoughts?
August 6, 2001
A Caustic Look in the Mirror From
Boomers
By ALEX KUCZYNSKI
oe Queenan is 50 years old and sorely
ashamed of it.
"I loathe my generation," he said last week.
"We became culturally frozen in time at a
very early age and continue to think of
ourselves as trailblazers. It's completely
pathetic."
A writer who contributes frequently to GQ
and Forbes, Mr. Queenan's latest book, "Balsamic Dreams: A Short but
Self-Important History of the Baby Boomer Generation" (Henry Holt),
chronicles the cultural irrelevance of his generation, which is — at least to
Mr. Queenan — a whiny, narcissistic bunch of paunchy, corporatized losers.
And he is not alone in his distaste.
A body of literature — call it boomer bashing — has emerged from the
trenches of American popular writing. As the 80 million Americans born
from 1945 to 1963 have begun to slip en masse over the dreaded
benchmark known as the big five- oh, a squadron of journalists, editors and
authors have begun to question the abilities and point out the failures of the
Woodstock Generation. Because most of those churning out the criticism are
boomers themselves, the bashing also has the distinct whiff of boomer
self-loathing.
Along with Mr. Queenan's book, this year also saw the publication of "What
if Boomers Can't Retire? How to Build Real Security, Not Phantom
Wealth," by Thornton Parker (Berrett-Koehler Publishers), which criticized
their reliance on the stock market as a kind of phantom wealth that could
eventually derail the entire American economy. Pow!
David Brooks's excoriation of yuppie boomers, "Bobos in Paradise: The
New Upper Class and How They Got There" (Simon & Schuster, 2000),
stayed on best- seller lists last year for four months, urging boomers to
recognize themselves as hypocritical sellouts. Blam!
There was Marty Asher's darkly comic novel, "The Boomer" (Knopf, 2000),
which opens with the birth of a baby boomer on a Friday and after a lifetime
of excruciating banality ends in "a small, tidy cemetery with a view of the
ocean." Ooof!
In June of last year, Time magazine published an article called "Twilight of the
Boomers" in which Daniel Okrent described the boomers as preening,
self-congratulatory, cavilling solipsists. Sock-o!
And that was the nice part. He then slammed his readers. "If you're like the
overwhelming majority of boomers, your career has hit a brick wall, you
haven't saved enough, your pension is underfunded, your health is
deteriorating, even the medical advances that will probably extend your life
will, in an especially cruel paradox, probably mean that later life will be
meaner and more spartan."
Mr. Okrent, 53, said that boomers were pretty much fatuous, self-important
and lazy, and that's why they arouse so much resentment from Americans in
their 20's and 30's.
"There is so, so much to loathe about the boomers," Mr. Okrent said, as he
spoke by telephone from his vacation home in sunny Cape Cod, doing his
own boomer duty to arouse resentment. "And there is this sudden spate of
attention to boomers because they have finally reached real age. They used
to think they would be young forever, and now they know they will not."
"My loathing is not for the fact of being a boomer," he said. "It is for the
boomers' self-involvement, and for my generation's belief that we were
special. It was just another generation."
Really? Even with the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Kent State?
"We were powerful in numbers, and we had something to react against," he
said. "That was the virtue of the Vietnam War. It gave us direction."
While the boomer-bashers are happy to skewer "their desperate and
pathetic cult of the self," to use Mr. Queenan's words, there are also boomer
apologists to prop up their ever-jowlier self-esteem and explain away their
sins.
Priscilla Painton, an assistant managing editor at Time magazine who
oversaw last week's Time cover story, "Do Kids Have Too Much Power?",
said that Time's boomer readers were always hungry for more information
about whether they are raising their kids to be spoiled brats. Last week, the
answer — according to Time — was no.
"The story really looked at the criticism leveled at baby boomers, that they
have given their children too much power," Ms. Painton said. "And we came
to the conclusion that these kids are turning out to be one of the healthiest
generations, so maybe there is no blame to lay on the boomers."
Susan Faludi's last book, "Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man"
(William Morrow, 1999), advanced the theory that the male boomers,
especially those born immediately after World War II, were emotionally
disfigured by their fathers, cold and patriarchal men who taught their sons
that power — not the nurturing of family or community — was the only goal
worthy of male aspiration. So for that set of male boomers, their stunted
self-absorption was not their fault, but that of their Archie Bunker- esque
fathers.
Betsy Carter, the editor in chief of My Generation, the boomer magazine
published by AARP, said that boomer-bashing literature was the outgrowth
of unprecedented navel- gazing.
"You have never had a group that is so primed to be analytical and examine
themselves," she said. "And we're also the first generation to be so vocal and
so public about our failures and our misgivings."
Ms. Carter, 56, said that boomers' eagerness to talk about themselves may
also be why other generations — or other boomers — tire of the ceaseless
boomer meditations.
"We tell everybody everything," she said. "We can yack and yack and yack.
If you're not one of us, it probably gets really boring."
Mr. Queenan said that it was precisely that endless yacking and the parading
of bad taste as good taste that inspired him to write "Balsamic Dreams."
"When soft rock hit in the early 1970's, I think people just thought the
generation was taking a nap," he said. "In reality, we were going to sleep.
We never woke up again."
That soporific cultural stupor is why Sylvester Stallone is a highly paid movie
star, Mr. Queenan said, and why Andrea Bocelli has become a cultural
staple masquerading as high art when he should really be accorded the status
of, say, Zamfir, master of the pan flute.
"I am still amazed that it is my generation that actually supported Sylvester
Stallone's career and watched those movies," Mr. Queenan said. "That
wasn't the way it was supposed to play out. We weren't all supposed to buy
the same foods, watch the same movies, listen to the same music. I mean,
does everyone have to listen to Andrea Bocelli? Does every boomer have to
go to the same four towns in Northern Italy? Has any boomer ever gone to
Southern Italy? Say, Sicily? There's a tremendous pack mentality."
David Brooks, the author of "Bobos in Paradise," said there was only more
to come.
"Boomers have to exhaust all varieties of narcissistic experience, and having
run through self-adoration and self-love and all the other self- somethings,
now they have to do self- loathing," he said. "They have just begun to tap
into it." |
