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.
Add me to the ping list too!
"I hate the Sixties"... heh, heh, heh.
I do hope that comes to a TV screen near me soon. I'd enjoy watching it with my parents (Boomers both), although I have a sneaking suspicion my mother would get snaky and stalk off after my first cackle.
"The 60's youth was the first generation that managed to fool itself into an assumption of moral superiority and actually manage to hang onto that illusion into maturity (if you can call it that)."
Noooo..... the scariest thing was that they managed to fool their ELDERS into thinking that 'the kids' were the wise ones... that authority was illegitimate... the keepers of the civilization just threw wide the doors to those who wanted to trash it. And trash it they did.
Who the heck is David Bailey?
Me too! I'd LOVE to see that.
I'd like to see that too. Unfortunately here in America we are also going to have a baby boomer love fest T.V. special called "Boomer Nation" and they are going to praise Oprah Winfrey as being the ultimate boomer.
I do hope that comes to a TV screen near me soon. I'd enjoy watching it with my parents (Boomers both), although I have a sneaking suspicion my mother would get snaky and stalk off after my first cackle.
Good Luck, I love to show my baby boomers parents, Though they know their generation was screwed up (but they still think the WWII generation was the worst) so they wouldn't be too pissed off about it, If I laugh I already know what my mother would say which is what she always says since I was in Kindergarten when I bring up the Baby boomers which is "Hey, We are the reason you were allowed to wear blue jeans to school"
I guess fighting for and winning the right for kids to be allowed to wear blue jeans to school is the Baby Boomers biggest accophishment according to my mom. But I guess that's where it all started, If the WWII generation didn't give in the Baby boomers wouldn't have been egged on to protest later.
I read that one, too. I have pretty much the same memories as she listed. Reagan was the first president I voted for. I was in college and remember stagflation and gas lines.
By strict definition and by many measurements, I am a Boomer. But by CG's definition, I am Gen Reagan.
I'm just afraid that if I say I am Gen Reagan, everyone will substitute "Gen X" and take me for a spoiled-rotten slacker.
OTOH The Xers get to trot out Clinton as a boomer (he was leading edge) as well as the then-important-now-self-important overaged hippies so emblematic of the Boomers.
I'll wait and see how the defintion emerges. If it makes any Gen-Xers feel any better, I am not figuring on seeing a dime of Social Security that I have contributed into for 25 years and will have put in almost 50 years before I am done.
And yes, Gen-X is viewed as slackers. Its Gen-X kids that seem to be getting their act together.
You are both added, Welcome to the ping list
I just counted the number of people on the list and there is now 105,
Wow! I never expected to have that many when I started the thing.
And only one drop out so far(Well really 3 but the other two left freerepublic entirely).
Anyone know the freeper ping list record?
I rest my case.
1967 was the last full year my parents were together before divorcing. I (an only child) turned 6 (and both my folks 30 fwiw) that summer of love. We always had the local MOR station on in our house. On which I remember hearing songs such as Ed Ames's "My Cup Runneth Over" and Al Martino's "Mary in the Morning". Plus Petula Clark's "Don't Sleep in the Subway". I always associate songs like those with '67 than "Sgt. Pepper", which I didn't hear for the first time until around 1970.
foreverfree
Somethin's happen here, boomers are getting theris!
Some Gen-Xers were "slackers" because there was a block on hiring "young kids". When I got out of school, they were asking for 2-5 years experience.
What were the boomers in the late 1960s who didn't work when they got out of high school/college? Drifters? Free spirits?
"Has any generation in history ever banged on about itself more and with less merit than the baby boomers?"
This is all I need to see! This is what I've thought for ages - well, specifically the "real" baby boomers of the Hippie Generation.
They've celebrated themselves forever, in public. I get so sick of all the self-righteous "yeah, those protests were great about independence and free speech and not conforming to a selfish greedy society", that frequently appears on movies and TV shows, etc.
Truth is they are the Selfish Generation. Yet immediately they had the *gaul* to tag the slightly younger crowd the "Me Generation" (Disco Gen, or officially the latter part of the baby-boomers). It was THEY who were the G-D "Me" Generation. All that sound and fury about how great they were and loving and caring and freedom-loving signified nothing. It was BS.
Hey Gray, don't take it personally! ;-)
We ARE generalizing, but any idiot knows not every individual person of the subject generation was either at all involved in any of the '60s mess, or that even that 1 generation did everything that was ever bad/wrong (SS) in the world! ;-)
Hey, these are great singers!!!! >:(
Yeah, and in my case those happened in the same teeny month!
The majority of us went to Viet Nam when our country called us. The majority of us had to work immediately during and after high school because we did not have elistist mommies and daddies that could sent us to college. If we did go to College, we worked our way thru.
The majority of us were not hippies, war protestors, college students, we were just simple people that love our Country, died for our Country when asked, and never asked nor expected anything from anyone. We worked hard for everything we have. It is time that the baby boomers stop being represented by war protestors and hippies.
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