4/14/2009 4:41:51 PM
by Bennett Gordon
Tags: Politics, Baby Boomers, This Magazine, generations
The Baby Boomers were never bestowed the honor of being named the “Greatest Generation.” They got to witness the beginnings of the tech revolution, only to realize that an 11-year-old kid could do more with a computer than they would ever be able to. Now, in what should be their golden years, they’re being attacked.
Writing for This Magazine, RM Vaughan takes a shot at the increasingly helpless Baby Boomers. He writes:
While I don't condone violence, I can condone a reasonable, humane culling of the aging herd. They don't have to actually die, just virtually pass away. And here's how: if you are a boomer, stop. Just stop. Stop working, stop acquiring, stop micro-managing your (and my) universe, stop sucking the life out of popular culture, stop going outdoors in those ghastly Crocs and Tilley Endurable hats, and, please, stop talking about how you're eventually going to stop and, instead, stop. Now.
A similar point was made by Joseph Hart in the September-October issue of Utne Reader, when he wrote:
They promised a revolution and boy did they deliver. Safety net: shredded. Social Security: squandered. Liberalism: perished. Fairness: forgotten. Great Society: whatever. Do I even need to mention climate change? AIDS? The Monkees? So now they want to pass on their wisdom to the rest of us. Uh-huh.
Poor Boomers. They just can’t get no satisfaction.
Sources: This Magazine, Utne Reader
No country for old men
Baby boomers: drop the watercolours, back away slowly
RM Vaughan
In last spring's flimsy caper comedy Mad Money, an uneasy truth lingered beneath the slapstick thievery and rolling-in-greenbacks hijinks: the fabled baby boomers, now hitting their early 60s, have no idea how to deal with the diminishing returns of their impending senior citizenship. Pardon me if I gloat.
The film opens with Diane Keaton and Ted Danson, a greying upper-class couple with grown children, flitting around their vast, over-decorated home like panicked pelicans, wattles and all. Ted's character has lost his job, and Diane's has never worked. They contemplate getting jobs for which they are overqualified (or simply too self-important) to perform, but are so horrified by this prospect that when Diane finally does get a crappy job, her desperation and complete disbelief in her change of fortune leads her to go on a gluttonous crime spree.
Watching Mad Money, it occurred to me that, as a post-boomer, generation X-er, echo baby — choose your own term — I have performed many jobs "beneath" my education or class standing. And so has everybody I know.
In fact, I can't think of one person from my generation who has not spent at least half of his or her adult life gainfully underemployed — typically by boomers with a third, or less, of our education and credentials. For clarification, I am, according to most demographic standards, a near-boomer. I prefer the term "post-boomer," thank you, if the B-word must be used.
I was born in 1965, the year traditionally cited as the end of the post-WWII baby boom. But I have always considered this calendar system woefully imprecise. Boomers are a cultural phenomenon — as they like to tell us every single day — and not a demographic one.
A boomer is someone whose first "English Invasion" pop music crush was the Beatles. Mine was the Sex Pistols (and that's one hell of a telling gulf). A boomer fondly remembers his or her first colour television. A post-boomer remembers the day the cable was hooked up. Boomers were taken to Expo '67 to get their first taste of culture on a grand scale. Post-boomers were taken to ... well, nothing.
One of the first bitter lessons we postboomers learned about the adult world is that once a boomer has all the cake he or she wants (practically free university tuition, full universal health care, bountiful entry-level jobs with minimal qualifications, CUSO), they don't put the rest of the cake in the freezer for a future sweet tooth — they take a hammer to it and shove the mush down the garberator.
But now boomers are edging toward their golden years and you can see the fear steaming out of day spas and rumbling across golf courses like a charged purple haze.
Naturally, they've turned a timeless reality into a fresh business opportunity. Bookstores are packed with how-to-age books for boomers. The ever-resourceful Moses Znaimer has dubbed his own pre-walker days his "zoomer" years and created a magazine to sell the brand. Radio stations are converting to Age of Aquarius nap-time programming, and televisions are flooded with gardening and travel shows.
Sherry Cooper's bestselling The New Retirement: How It Will Change Our Future (the hubris of the boomers demands that everything they do be declared "new" — what next, The New Death?) attempts to counter boomer mortality anxiety with recipes for "wellness" management and, most important, investment profit maximization (one suspects the two goals are mutually inclusive).
According to sherrycooper.com, "boomers will redefine retirement with great energy and creativity, working well beyond age 65 and mostly by choice...healthy goal-driven boomers will seek purposeful leisure..." Am I the only person who finds that paragraph terrifying?
Working "well beyond age 65"? Swell. That's great news for the economy, transnational trade, all levels of government, the civil service, the CBC, academia, the arts (I could go on here, but it's too depressing). Seasons 30 to 40 of The Vinyl Café ought to be a riot.
And what exactly is this futuristic-sounding "purposeful leisure"? I read that quote to a fellow post-boomer artist, and he stopped cold, gulped, and said, "Oh God, now they're all going to be artists ... watercolours are back."
While I don't condone violence, I can condone a reasonable, humane culling of the aging herd. They don't have to actually die, just virtually pass away. And here's how: if you are a boomer, stop. Just stop. Stop working, stop acquiring, stop micro-managing your (and my) universe, stop sucking the life out of popular culture, stop going outdoors in those ghastly Crocs and Tilley Endurable hats, and, please, stop talking about how you're eventually going to stop and, instead, stop. Now.
You've had a good run, flower children, longer than anybody else's, but the bloom's off, it's last call at Alice's Café, time to relocate. I hear P.E.I. is nice, and it has a convenient bridge. The kind that locks at night.
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Tangled Up in ME
Joseph Hart Utne Reader
It's finally happening. In spite of the plastic surgery, the Viagra, the three-wheeled motorcycles -- the baby boomers are feeling old. As the Wonder Years fade to the Blunder Years, they're gazing deeply into the unflattering mirror. They're seeing wrinkles and gray hair. And they're saying, 'Hey, we're elders! Far out! Let's mentor someone!'
Forgive me if I don't camp overnight for tickets to that show.
Isn't it enough that we'll be the underpaid and uninsured chumps who'll wheel them to the 'bongo room' at the assisted-living facility? Do we have to listen to them drone on about their acid-drenched weekend at Woodstock, too?
This is the generation that exhorted us to never trust anyone older than 30 -- then grew up and proved the point by ushering in the long nightmare of social conservatism and permanent war that is our current reality. They promised a revolution and boy did they deliver. Safety net: shredded. Social Security: squandered. Liberalism: perished. Fairness: forgotten. Great Society: whatever. Do I even need to mention climate change? AIDS? The Monkees? So now they want to pass on their wisdom to the rest of us. Uh-huh.
OK, OK. I know I'm trading in gross generalizations here. I mean, some of my best friends are baby boomers. In fact, one of them just informed me that all alternative rock can be traced to Rubber Soul. (Really? Even Motorhead?)
I'm actually pretty invested in the notion of mentorship; I've always had a soft spot for geezers. I'm the afterthought child of pre-boomer parents, so I spent most of my childhood with a couple of taciturn members of the 'Silent Generation.' When they and their peers finally lurched out of their collective coma and began talking about the past, it was riveting.
My mother told me about her father's struggles to find a job during the Great Depression, and about the hobos who came to the back door to beg for food. She spoke about her work as a Dorothy Day-style Catholic, and how the dawn of World War II, while it ended the Depression, plunged us into conservatism after a long and hard-won battle over fairness and class consciousness. My dad told stories of stumbling into anti-aircraft nests hidden in the woods in Central Park, and about the rumors that Japanese subs were in the harbor off the coast of Long Island. He told me about his search for college, and how he was turned down by one school after another because they'd filled their quota of Jews.
These stories had value because they were remote from my experience and therefore became a measure of it. They opened up the history of my country and my people like a knife opens a vein. It's hard not to roll my eyes at the notion of boomers as mentors because their history is so pervasive. Is there a three-minute period of their collective experience that hasn't been made into an hour-long VH1 documentary? I have my own acid-drenched weekends to (blearily) recall, thank you very much.
I recently slogged through a puff piece on Paul McCartney in the New Yorker (a magazine, incidentally, that has been scrubbed free of its wit and style by, yup, baby boomers). McCartney is perhaps the quintessential boomer: a banal, modestly talented guy who's been elevated to genius status by an accident of demographics. But maybe, I thought, the New Yorker had managed to uncover some shred of wisdom from the 65-year-old musician. Alas. 'There was one guy who wrote 'Yesterday,' and I was him,' McCartney muses. 'You have to pinch yourself.'
Such misty-eyed sessions of 'those-were-the-days' tend to dominate the landscape of aging boomer culture, as does a sort of innocent grandiosity. Al Gore more or less claiming to have invented the Internet is just one item on a long list of willful superimpositions: The Beatles as if there were no Elvis; free love as if there were no Emma Goldman; utopian communes as if there were no American Transcendentalists; student movements as if there were no Latin America; LSD as if there were no laudanum.
Given this inability to put their personal experience in context, it's hard to see what boomers have to offer us in the way of mentorship. I think I speak for many when I suggest that as they become 'elders,' a higher road and more challenging practice would be for them to shut up and listen for a change.
Contributing editor Joseph Hart, 39, lives in Viroqua, Wisconsin, and is more of a hippie than he lets on.
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