Boomers: Fight the Real Enemy

"...a noted (Tory), who kept a tavern at Amboy, was standing at his door, with as pretty a child in his hand, about eight or nine years old, as I ever saw, and after speaking his mind as freely as he thought was prudent, finished with this unfatherly expression, "Well! give me peace in my day." ...a generous parent should have said, "If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace."

Thomas Paine, The Crisis #1

Like many of my peers (I'm 40), I grew up mourning the fact that I had not been born 15 or 20 years earlier. The late 70's and early 80's were, in so many ways, such a dead and sterile time, the era of Iranian hostages, Battle of the Network Stars and Mark David Chapman. And so my friends and I would sit at home, listening to Pepper or Forever Changes or Blonde on Blonde or Piper at the Gates of Dawn and bemoan the emptiness of our own time (Sad, no?). We imagined ourselves at Monterey, marching in Chicago, being street-fighting men, making a difference in the world. As the Reagan era began, we wondered if we had missed our chance completely. We idolized and envied that generation, ignoring the truth that the objects of our veneration had already begun the insidious process of turning their revolution into a marketing tool for their peers and their children. (Led Zep for Cadillac, anyone?).

The message was finally driven home for me back in 1992, when many of the Boomers' idols gathered at Madison Square Garden to pay tribute to Bob Dylan on the 30th anniversary of the start of his career. The mood was mellow, warm and nostalgic; all that was absent was Wavy Gravy announcing that there was some bad antacid going around. And then Sinead O'Connor took the stage. You will recall that a few weeks before the Dylan concert, she had ripped up a picture of the Pope on SNL, exclaiming,"Fight the real enemy!" after an a capella rendition of Bob Marley's "War." And how did the 20,000 assembled, whose answer was blowin' in the wind, whose times were a-changin', who apparently, like Judas Iscariot, had God on their side, respond? They booed Sinead off the stage in support of that counterculture icon, John Paul II. I had been a little slow on the uptake, but now I got it. That generation's message to me was, "We've had our revolution and it's the only one that matters; you can't have yours."

Now, with the publication of Leonard Steinhorn's The Greater Generation, the inevitable wave of nostalgic Boomer self-congratulation has officially begun. Steinhorn's argument is that while the Brokaw/Spielberg-anointed "Greatest Generation" won WWII and saved the world from tyrrany, they failed to carry through on the promises of freedom at home once they returned from battle, and were content to hunker down for the conformist '50's. Rather, it was their children who struggled to bring that promise to the disenfranchised; Steinhorn sees this struggle as an even greater one than the one their parents fought, because it was a fight that that they chose, rather that one that was foisted upon them. Here's the problem, though; while there are many Boomers out there today still working and struggling to live up to their ideals, it turns out that for much of that generation, social conscience was an outfit to be worn to occasions and then put in the closet, like those suits who'd put on Hippie clothes and head down to Washington Square Park to score with the chicks on weekends.

That the Boomers accomplished much in their day is beyond debate; the problem is that for all their rhetoric and passion, they have first supported and then presided over the backlash to end all backlashes. All I see is nearly three decades (minus the Man from Hope) of uninterrupted, disastrous drift to the trickle down Right. And while the Boomers can look forward to a comfortable retirement, it is their children who will be picking up the tab financially, in terms of resources and in terms of spiritual malaise. So, viewed in the light of Paine's judgement of his Tory drinking pal, the Boomers emerge as what they really are: self-righteous, self-indulgent narcissists more in love with the abstract concepts of how their "Revolution" helped "The People" than with bothering to leave the planet in any sort of decent shape for their kids. It don't take a weatherman to see that the world that the Boomers are leaving for their children looks a whole lot more like Altamont than Woodstock.