Why Are Baby Boomers So Greedy and Cynical
At a press gathering merely afterward the 1992 election, David Broder, the dean of Washington reporters, commented to me that my Clintonista colleagues and I seemed so, well, so young to him. "I approximate you Baby Boomers are actually taking over," he said.
That'south when information technology happened. I'd never been called a Boomer earlier. Poor Broder. My eyes got squinty and my confront got red. The veins in my temples throbbed. The look on his face was horrible. He must have idea I was virtually to rip off his head and spit down his neck. Which I was.
"I am not a Babe Boomer," I snapped. "I am and so tired of hearing virtually the goddamn Baby Boomers! I've spent my whole life swimming backside that garbage barge of a generation. They ruined everything they've passed through and left me in their wake."
Broder shook his caput and walked away.
Just the garbage barge simply chugs on. Equally they enter late center age, the Boomers still can't grow upwardly. Guys who once dropped acid are now downing Viagra; women who in one case eschewed lipstick are now getting liposuction. At the risk of feeding their narcissism, I believe information technology's time someone stated the unproblematic truth: The Baby Boomers are the most cocky-centered, cocky-seeking, self-interested, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing generation in American history.
I hate the Boomers.
I know information technology's a sin to hate, so let me put it this style: If they were animals, they'd be a plague of locusts, devouring everything in their path and leaving but a wasteland. If they were plants, they'd be kudzu, choking off every other living matter with their sheer mass. If they were artists, they'd be abstract expressionists, interested but in the emotions of that moment—not in the lasting issue of the artistic procedure. If they were a baseball club, they'd be the Florida Marlins: prefab prima donnas who bought their manner to prominence, and so disbanded—a temporary association but not a squad.
Of course, information technology is as unfair to demonize an entire generation equally it is to characterize an entire gender or race or religion. And I don't literally hateful that everyone born between 1946 and 1964 is a selfish pig. But generations tin can take a unique character that defines them, especially the elites of a generation—those lucky few who are blessed with the money or brains or looks or skills or education that typifies an era. Whether it was Fitzgerald and Hemingway defining the Lost Generation of World War I and the Roaring Twenties, or JFK and the other heroes of the World War 2 generation, or the high-tech whiz kids of the post-Boomer generation, certain archetypes define certain times.
You know who y'all are. If you lot grew your hair and burned your typhoon carte on campus during the sixties; if y'all toked, screwed, and boogied your way through the seventies; if you voted for Reagan and believed "Greed is good" in the eighties; and if you're trying to make upwards for it at present by nesting every bit you cluck most the collapse of "family values," you're it. If not, even if demographers call you a Boomer, yous probably hate our generation's elite as much as I do.
It is my contention that the single greatest sin a generation can commit is the sin of selfishness. And information technology's from this standard that I draw my harsh decision. I'm not alone in this view, of class. The Boomer in Master, my onetime boss, Pecker Clinton, used to tell me well-nigh an influential professor he'd had at Georgetown. His name was Carroll Quigley, and he taught young Beak Clinton and hundreds of other Hoyas about something called the Future Preference.
I can notwithstanding run into Clinton doing his Quigley impression, eyes full of mischief, his voice an Arkansas version of a bad Boston accent, as we bounced around in a motorcoach or flew through a thunderstorm on Air Elvis, our campaign plane back in 1992. "Mistah Begahhla," he'd intone every bit he looked at me through the bifocals perched on the terminate of his nose. "Why is America the greatest sociiiiiiety in human hist'ree? The Few-chah Pref'rence. At every critical junk-chaah, we take prefuhhed the few-chah to the present. That is why immigrants left the old waaahld for the new. That is why paahrents such every bit yours cede to send their children to univehhsities like this wan. The American ideal is that the few-chah tin be bettah than the paahst, and that each of u.s. has a personal, moral obligation to make it so."
I'll get back to President Clinton in a minute. But first, allow usa conclude that by his old professor's exam, the Boomers have been a miserable failure. At nearly every critical juncture, they take preferred the nowadays to the future; they've put themselves ahead of their parents, alee of their country, ahead of their children—ahead of our future.
Allow's commencement with the sixties, the Boomers' dilettante ball. While a few courageous young people similar John Lewis and the Freedom Riders risked their lives—and others like Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner gave theirs—the civil-rights movement was led by pre-Boomers like Martin Luther Male monarch Jr. (who would be seventy-1 if he were alive today) and continued without strong support from the Boomers on college campuses.
Yet, I must say this: If you were one of those young people who did take chances their lives to fight racism in the sixties, who put their bodies on the line to register voters, who marched and sang and taught and preached confronting segregation, you stand equally the best refutation of my anti-Boomer tirade. In that one moment of conscience and courage, you did more with your life than I've washed in all the moments of mine. In a generation of selfish pigs, y'all were saints.
But the reality is that well-nigh campuses did non go hotbeds of unrest until the Boomers' precious butts were at risk as the Vietnam War escalated. They didn't want to stop the war because they were bothered by working-class kids being blown apart; if they had been, they wouldn't have spat on those working-form kids when they came home from Vietnam, or tried to make heroes out of the Communists who were trying to kill them.
However as troubling as that may be, the sixties were in many ways the Boomers' finest moment. Information technology was at least a fad then to pretend to care about racial justice at home and war abroad, to speak out confronting pollution and prejudice. But it was more often than not just talk. As they came of age, and as idealism might have required some real sacrifice, idealism suddenly became unfashionable.
And and then the Boomers careened into the seventies without a idea to picking up where Male monarch and the Kennedys left off. Without a war to threaten them, their selfishness came into full flower. Y'all know the results: Drug corruption, once a bazaar curse of hip musicians, became more common than the clap. And speaking of sexually transmitted diseases, the Boomers began to fornicate with such carelessness that rabbits were request them to cool their jets. They didn't invent sex or drugs or rock 'n' curl, but they damned near ruined them all.
And don't requite me this crap about Boomer music. The Beatles were all born before the terminate of the state of war. So was Janis. And so while the Boomers can claim they had the proficient sense of taste to mind to gifted pre-Boomers, when it came their turn to make music, the truest expression of their generation, what did they requite us?
Disco.
The generation that came before the Boomers gave them Dylan. The Boomers gave us KC and the Sunshine Band. Thanks a lot.
Unfair? Perhaps it is a bit of an overstatement. Some friends of mine accept suggested information technology'southward an outrage to ignore Babe Boomer Bruce Springsteen, for i. True plenty.
But even more than than music, our remarkable economy is what drives and defines the times we alive in today. And every bit the generation in the economic commuter's seat, the Boomers should go the credit for building this remarkable prosperity, right?
Well, non quite. Nothing can detract from the scenic entrepreneurship of Boomers like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. But what'due south interesting is that much of today's prosperity owes its origins more to the high-tech young nerds of the post-Boom generation than to the Boomers themselves. The most vital role the Boomers have in the current economy is to sit on their brains and invest in postal service-Boomer loftier-tech start-ups. The same folks who sponged off their parents when they were young are at present, as they age, getting rich off the industry of their younger brothers and sisters.
Boomer political and economic values reached their about perfect expression under pre-Boomer president Ronald Reagan in the eighties: Screw your neighbor, lay off the manufacturing plant workers, shuffle a lot of paper, build an economy in which a few people go the gold mine and most people get the shaft.
The same Boomer elites who hid in classrooms to avoid Vietnam while poor and minority kids got shot at used their elite education in the eighties to lay off the folks who got shot at and survived. The Reverend Jesse Jackson used to say that the eighties economic system was based on three things: merge, purge, and submerge. Merge companies, purge workers, submerge communities. No more of this hippie, sixties, share-the-wealth crap now, boyfriend Boomers, information technology's every man for himself!
The orgy of greed, fed by a mountain of debt, ran the economy into the basis. The massive, selfish tax cuts produced even more massive deficits and debt, which the Boomers passed on to those who followed. Having grown upward using their parents' credit cards, the Boomers found it just equally easy to pass on their bills to their children. Boomers like Blitz Limbaugh like to say we owe Ronald Reagan a debt we can never repay. Aye, Slim, about $three trillion.
Information technology is telling that when he ran for reelection, Ronald Reagan got higher support among Boomers than he did from his young man older Americans. Perhaps some of the Greatest Generation saw the selfishness in Reaganism, saw the shortsightedness, the hateful-spiritedness in cutting schoolhouse lunches and telling children ketchup was a vegetable, and turned abroad from it. And maybe the Boomers saw those same qualities, that savage selfishness, and embraced it.
Which brings me back to the Boom in Chief. It'southward non for null that Pulitzer-prize-winning writer David Maraniss called his biography of Pecker Clinton First in His Class. (It is interesting to note that the same Boomers who supported Reagan were less likely to vote for Clinton than the World War Ii generation was.)
But is the starting time Boomer president typical of his generation? That, pardon me, depends on what the meaning of is is.
Clinton'south right-wing critics seize on his personal failings to pigment a extravaganza of the ultimate sixties hippie: pot-smoking, draft-dodging womanizer; the Muhammad Ali of selfishness—the kind of guy Newt Gingrich called a "countercultural McGovernik." Merely Clinton's public calendar has, I believe, generally kept faith with old Professor Quigley. His basic political philosophy is to adopt the future to the present and to stress communitarian values over selfish individualism. His virtually profound emotion is empathy. To this day, he'south widely mocked for declaring to a human who was dying of AIDS, "I feel your pain." But feeling someone'southward pain is true compassion, which literally means "to suffer with." A most un-Boomer sentiment, indeed.
In a archetype example of preferring the future to the nowadays, Clinton took a terrible political hit for raising taxes to pay down the deficit. His party lost the Firm and Senate, but over time the economical policies worked, and because he was willing to pay the short-term cost, nosotros savor the long-term economical benefits.
But if in his public policy Clinton has been anti-Boomer, in his personal failings he has given ample fodder to his critics and much heartbreak to those of u.s. who dear him. Having an matter with a young adult female and lying most information technology is a stupid and selfish act. And Bill Clinton lives with the knowledge that he has caused his family immeasurable hurting. But it was ultimately a sin against his family unit, not yours. You lot call up he got away with it? Got abroad with it? Imagine how you'd experience if your daughter read a Starr written report on the Internet, chronicling your worst, about shameful moment.
He didn't get away with shit.
And if I had to choose, I'd rather accept a leader who was rotten to his family but good to the land than the other way effectually.
Still, I cannot deny that Clinton's personal sin—selfishness—is the very one I track confronting his generation for. Perhaps the classically, tragically Boomer nature of his faults explains the sanctimonious outrage from some of his Boomer brethren in the media. It's as if they're saying, How dare he deport like one of us!
It is my view that the truly classic Boomer politician is not Bill Clinton but the man who despises him: George W. Bush. A mannerly and disarming guy, Bush has coasted through life on his family'southward money and his daddy's name. He went to the best schools. And while at those aristocracy schools, he served as the model for Otter in Animal House. He went into concern (backed past family wealth) and failed. Tried again. Failed. And once again—well, you get it. He finally struck it rich when his male parent'south wealthy supporters fabricated him the figurehead managing partner of the Texas Rangers. Bush-league used his Boomer charm to con the good people of Arlington, Texas, into raising their taxes to build his Rangers a new stadium. When the team was sold in 1998, Bush made a profit of more than $fourteen million.
And what does Bush-league offering us, later this life of wretched Boomer selfishness? Lectures about personal responsibleness. We have a give-and-take for that in Texas: chutzpah.
The specter of Bush the Son striving to avenge Bush the Male parent brings us to the Question: How could the World State of war Two generation—the Greatest Generation—have raised the Worst Generation?
I put that question to Tom Brokaw, chronicler of the Greatest Generation. Brokaw was born in 1940, so he's not a Boomer chronologically. Nor is he one attitudinally. "I take one foot on each side of the ice floe," he says. Raised with World War II values in the Midwest, Brokaw was busy having children and wearing a tie to work in the sixties. And all the same he is charitable to the Boomers.
1 reason the Boomers were so spoiled, Brokaw theorizes, was their parents' understandable desire to compensate for their own deprivation. "Even those who had not really known poverty in the Depression withal had a harder life than most of us can imagine today," he says. "Think virtually it: Most men worked in manual labor. Most women did transmission labor in the home as well. And then many parents from that generation have said to me, 'We had so little, nosotros wanted our children to accept so much—and nosotros spoiled them.'"
The transformation of America from the forties to the sixties was perhaps the about rapid and radical in our history. "Parenthood itself became very different," says Brokaw. "Especially fatherhood. Many men of the World State of war II generation had been facing death in their teens." They'd known strict military discipline and knew their lives or their buddies' lives might depend on following orders from authority. They looked at their own children at seventeen, who didn't take any life-or-death reason to obey authorization, who in fact had the luxury of challenging everything they were told, and the Globe War 2 generation didn't know what to make of it.
Brokaw makes a skillful point. Merely permit's not blame the parents. Skilful Lord, I said to him, we're talking about men and women who take reached center age! You live a one-half century, your faults can't be blamed on Daddy anymore. Likewise, every parent in history has wanted to give his kid more than than he had. And every boyish wants to become laid. And since the showtime caveman spun around till his head got dizzy, every homo has experimented with methods of altering consciousness. Only only in the Boomers did parental indulgence and human craving trigger such a tsunami of selfishness.
In the long run, will it matter that one generation was so spectacularly selfish? Maybe non. In a great karmic irony, the Worst Generation may in turn be raising some other great 1. Having taught the children of the Baby Boomers off and on for v years at present, at the University of Texas and at Georgetown, I observe them to be the contrary of everything I despise about their parents—they are engaged in their communities, spending countless hours volunteering to build housing for the poor or to feed the homeless. They are concerned well-nigh their classmates, having calmed down the PC mania and replaced it with a sensible sensitivity to the feelings of others. They care about the future and are concerned about their grandparents. They are more responsible in their individual lives and more than engaged in our public life. I have no idea whether it's considering of the Boomers or in spite of them.
And unlike me, who spews vitriol and venom at the Boomers, their kids curlicue their eyes and let out an ironic laugh. That's another affair: These kids are ironic simply not contemptuous. They're Letterman's children. And they seem to understand that their parents are growing older merely not growing up.
Brokaw has the deviation pegged: "The World War II generation did what was expected of them. Simply they never talked about it. It was function of the Lawmaking. There's no more telling metaphor than a guy in a football game who does what'southward expected of him—makes an open-field tackle—then gets upwardly and dances around. When Jerry Kramer threw the block that won the Ice Basin in '67, he simply got up and walked off the field."
That kind of cocky-effacing dignity is wholly conflicting to the Boomer aristocracy. Simply when that day comes, when they finally walk off the field—or what'southward left of the field—a few of u.s.a. who've been abaft behind them will exist doing a fiddling dance of our ain.
This commodity originally appeared in the April 2000 issue.
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