Posted on 06/10/2004 9:21:50 AM PDT by qam1
Has any generation in history ever banged on about itself more and with less merit than the baby boomers?
Oh good, another 1960s retrospective. And another. And another. You can't move for celebrations of "the decade that changed the world forever". Tate Britain is honouring the art of the swinging decade in an exhibition starting at the end of the month. BBC Four is a week into its Summer in the Sixties season, while the Sunday Times magazine is devoting acres to the 10 years that shook the planet.
Why this surge of interest? Has a milestone passed? Or is there no better excuse than the fact that 2004 marks the 40th anniversary of 1964?
Not that the 60s generation need a reason to celebrate themselves and all their works. They rarely stop. Open a magazine or click on the TV any time and before long you'll see the raddled face of, say, David Bailey, cackling as he recalls how many beautiful women he slept with in those golden years. Next Alan Parker, Terence Stamp or Ken Russell will pop up to pay homage to David, each other and the decade that made them all.
To put the question simply: has any other generation ever banged on about itself more and with less merit?
I spent the weekend in Normandy with veterans of D-day, a group who can list saving the world among their collective achievements. They were studies in stoic modesty, depicting themselves as frightened lads who had only been doing their duty. Yet their children, the baby boomers, born at war's end, have no such reserve. They claim for themselves much greater accomplishments, constructing nothing less than a new society.
Note how everything they did was a first, a "revolution". Most have quoted Philip Larkin so often - "sexual intercourse began in 1963" - they've come to believe it, imagining their bedhopping was a genuine innovation. They seem unaware of the hedonistic 1920s, the naughty 1890s, the bawdy 18th century, to say nothing of the Roman and Greek empires. No, in their eyes, promiscuity was unheard of till they invented it.
They were "the first teenagers" too, as if before 1960 children mysteriously skipped from age 12 to 20 overnight. I know, I know - they're referring to the youth rebellion that gave the 60s its fire. Except that wasn't new either. In 1911, 30 kids walked out of Bigyn school in Llanelli, to protest over the caning of one of their peers, sparking a pupils' strike across Britain. Young people were at the forefront of the conscientious objection movement in the first world war a few years later. Whenever there has been a call for change, youth has usually been its voice.
Perhaps historical accuracy is not really the point. When the 60s crowd insist they were the first young people to walk the Earth, they mean it was the first time they had walked the Earth - and that's what counts. For what underpins all this 60s mania is solipsism on a massive scale: because it happened to me, it must have happened to everyone and must matter enormously. Thus David Frost sighs at "the joy, the exhilaration of being in your 20s - to be young was very heaven". I could say the same about my experience of the 1990s, but Tate Britain wouldn't do an exhibition about that.
All of us enjoy or enjoyed being young, but that hardly makes it a social phenomenon. "It was nirvana," recalls Eric Stewart of 10cc. "We were being paid huge sums of money for enjoying ourselves." No doubt Wayne Rooney or the boys from Busted would say the same today, but that doesn't make it a revolution. It takes the arrogance of the 60s generation to confuse their own agreeable personal experience with a historical shift.
The flipside of this thinking is that, just as the world was good when they were young, it must be bad now that they're old. So today's music, television, films and politics are all dismissed as pale successors of their 1960s forebears. We'll get to the substance of this charge in due course, but does it not strike the Mick Jaggers and Harold Pinters how much they now resemble the William Rees-Moggs and Mary Whitehouses they once lampooned, both generations sharing in the same dim view of modernity?
This conservative cast of mind should not be such a surprise. For all the grand talk of revolution, epitomised by the 1968 crowd who still regard sitting down in a few university offices as the height of political action, the 60s achieved strikingly little. The hedonism and search for self-realisation of that decade took just 20 years to calcify into the selfish individualism and materialism of the 1980s, with the old political content rapidly dropped. Sure, they still wore the laidback patina of 60s peace and love - businessmen in Richard Branson-style beard and jeans - but they were and are as hard-nosed as the capitalists they had once pretended to detest.
Even at the time, they were always more chic than radical. The sexism of the period was rank: women were "chicks" to be used as decorations or sexual playthings. The pill was hailed as a tool of liberation but, as writer Mike Phillips shrewdly tells BBC Four, it made women "not free, just more available". Nor did many of the great partygoers of the age seem too troubled by the racism in evidence all around them. Sarah Miles may remember "love bursting out all over", but there was not much love on the streets of Notting Hill or Smethwick. Enoch Powell made his "rivers of blood" speech in 1968, but it was not till the 70s - so easily mocked as the decade of naff - that the next generation of musicians did what Eric Clapton and the rest had palpably failed to do, forming Rock against Racism and taking political action that actually meant something.
There is a rightwing critique of those times, and BBC Four will air it on Saturday with I Hate the Sixties. The programme argues that this was the period in which Britain lost its moorings, destroying the grammar schools, undermining the church and ushering in the permissive society. That is not my critique. I am grateful for the reforms that saw censorship lifted, homosexuality legalised and some of the pain of bitter divorce and back-street abortion alleviated. (Although left and right can surely unite on the folly of 60s planning policy: old Victorian housing demolished to make way for high-rise monstrosities, centuries-old town centres smashed for soulless concrete.)
No, my objection to the 60s generation is their own endless self-regard, their brimming confidence that everything they touch betters all that has come before or since. To puncture their arrogance, it might be worth taking the fight on to their strongest territory. Yes, the 60s produced some first-rate music and the Beatles remain the greatest band ever. But scan the charts and you soon see that the soundtrack of the 60s was not made up of Lennon and McCartney alone, but the Barron Knights and the Bachelors. Next time you see the smug face of a 60s veteran, utter these two words: Englebert Humperdinck.
Not if the Gen-X and Gen-Y people start participating and voting as if their life depends on it -- because it does.
The liberal boomers already cannot pull a majority except in the urban leftist jungles. Each election cycle they will fall further behind, so long as the younger voters Just Say No! to the Boomers' retirement bonanza.
Personally, no...but look around and remember these idiots who doped it up, smoked it up, lived on the dole and re-elcted pols like Gephart and President Clinton.
It was once stated that if you remember the '60s you never really lived it. Does that mean these people who can't get over it are just making up nonsense?
Amen...I hope to work until I die, but I have so much fun doing it there is no reason to retire.
I was born in '57. My mom was born in '23. This stuff all started to hit me around the time Clinton was elected, thanks in part to Rush. I remember telling her then, that "I fear for this country when your generation's gone (and mine's running the show completely)."
Our country and it's media was forced by it's pretense to temporarily suspend the collective Bush bashing to honor the WWII generation when the WWII Memorial was dedicated two weeks ago. THEN Ronald Reagan passed away.
I view tomorrow's funeral as a funeral for the WWII generation and it's era, as well as for Ronaldis Magnus himself. I still fear for this country.
Great article.
Did you ever notice that the folks who complain or boast the least are the ones who've had it the hardest lives?
Driving up and seeing my ancient Granny smiling and tending a garden on a sweltering Alabama day, for instance.
There were some good things
and good times for these people.
My personal pick
for most romantic
song ever written came in
'77 --
Way on the other side of the Hudson,
deep in the bosom of suburbia,
I met a young girl, she sang mighty fine,
Tears on My Pillow and Ave Maria.
Standing by the waterfall in Paramus Park
she was working for the Friends-of-BAI
She was collecting quarters in a paper cup.
She was looking for change and so was I.
She was a Jewish girl. I fell in love with her.
She wrote her number on the back of my hand.
I called her up, I was all out of breath, I said,
"Come hear me play in my rock and roll band.
I took a shower and I put on my best blue jeans.
I picked her up in my new VW van.
She wore a peasant blouse with nothing underneath.
I said, "Hi". She said, "Yeah, I guess I am."
Ariel…
We had a little time, we were real hungry.
We went to Dairy Queen for something to eat.
She had some onion rings. She had a pickle.
She forgot to tell me that she didn't eat meat.
I had a gig in the American Legion Hall.
It was a dance for the Volunteer Ambulance Corp.
She was sitting in a corner against the wall.
She would smile and I melted all over the floor.
Ariel…
I took her home with me. We watched some TV,
Annette Funicello and some guy going steady.
I started fooling around with the vertical hold.
We got the munchies and I made some spaghetti.
We sat and we talked into the night,
while channel 2 was signing off the air.
I found the softness of her mouth.
We made love to bombs bursting in Arrrrrriel….
Ariel…
[Ariel, Dean Friedman]
But the furniture is so cool...
"sexual intercourse began in 1963"
When I was a teenager (during the Reagan era) my father would get exasperated and say, "You kids all think you invented sex!"
But I thought we were whiners AND slackers? Isn't that what someone on the Gen-Reagan thread called us? Or more accurately 'most' of us are whiners, if I remember correctly.
The Boomers have me half convinced that there was no band before or after the Beatles.
The follies of youth! ;^)
The Sixties---what a waste! To be really blunt - what a tragedy for so many! And to think there are still those who look back in a fond nostalgia confusing their youthful surges and the cultural debasement of those times...I guess there are those who can only handle life in a fog.
I was born in 1946. Joined the Navy and started paying Social Security in 1964. Retired after 29 years and started over in a new career. I once calculated that I would have to live to the age of 108 just to get back the principal I put into the system. 57 years of paying and (if I'm lucky), around 15 years of pay back.
Not exactly a "retirement bonanza" as one poster has asserted.
Will I draw SS when I am eligible? You bet I will.
BTW, it will be decrimented significantly, because of my military retired pay. Can't be having anyone getting more than our elected representatives now, can we?
I too have been "contributing" to the system since 1966. I will start getting SS at 62. My contributions, matched by my employers, are well into six figures and I don't know if I'll break even either. Back to the 60s, I think it was a great time to attempt to grow up. Most of my friends served their country during Vietnam and have been hard-working, productive Citizens.
I hope you mean that it 'started to hit you... thanks to Rush,' not that Clinton was elected thanks to Rush, LOL.
Who are The Beatles?
I saw the start of Cinnamon Girl's thread, count me among Gen-Reagan.
Englebert still tours, not so Jimi. Excess takes its toll.
Some icons of the 1960s (Timothy Leary, the Beats, some of the "protest" leaders) weren't baby boomers but they embraced the wave of hedonism (and young flesh). They also made a fortune off it.
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