Well, there was Farrah fawning over me from her perch on the back of my bedroom door...
Look at that smile, she STILL wants me!
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.
I direct you to post #57, please..... ;-)
I prefer living in the present. I don't want the 1960s in any of its permutations thanks.
And for what it's worth, I have many a Boomer friend and family member who were NOT the free-base radicals that the counterculture was, and I thank the Boomer who reminded us that the young men in Vietnam were also of that generation : they were in no form or fashion interested in being the criminals that the Hippies and Free-Love dopes were...and I wish I could make every one of those pukes who spit on the returning vets and called them "baby-killers" pay for the evil they did.
I just want our more conservative and right-minded boomers to understand that as a Gen-Reaganite (thank you CinnamonGirl!), I am among those who have been forever under the shadow of people who are so obvious in their hypocrisy : they scorned the traditionalism and expectations of the WWII generation, but then turned around and got their noses out of joint when MY generation didn't march lock-step in their footsteps. And what REALLY pissed me off was when they expressed pleasure and praise for actions I took that they percieved to have been in honor of theirs. In my case, I was praised more than once for choosing anthropology because I 'listened to my betters and sought to achieve the same level of enlightenment they pioneered.' See, they thought they invented anthropology as well!! And you know what the truth was? 1) I love history and 2) I went into anthropology because I fell in love with Ancient Egypt. I wanted to get into a profession that would get me where I could be among the artifacts and study them. That was all.
I will try in the future be more specific in the group of Boomers I am aiming my criticism at. Perhaps a simple "Elite Boomers" would suffice? There are a good many Boomers who encouraged me without forcing me to view the world through the prism they inherited from their parents, and there were even some who sympathised with my viewpoint that I didn't want to be lumped in with them.
But I also don't mind getting some Boomers' goats by using the phrase GenReagan. If it pisses them off when I invoke the name of the Greatest President of the 20th century, a man I will now say is in the ranks of Washington and Lincoln, then I will know what side of the political spectrum they fall, and will save my mockery for them.
I agree.
It's like saying all Gen X and Yers are self mutilators and nihilists.
The one thing that is undeniably true about the Boomers (1957 here):
We are the largest population bubble the west has ever seen and that alone makes us seem overwhleming and causes resentment...some vaild.
Second, we were the first generation to truly have something of a leisure upbringing till Vietnam. Middle-middle and upper-middle class kids today would have been considered rich kids in the 60s and early 70s....a point that escapes these youngbloods.
It's the nature of the boom itself. You are surrounded by millions of people who think just like you do, it makes you think you are right. You are Special. You are The Consumer. Your wants and needs run the economy. Everything is tailored for You.
If there were fewer of them, they naturally wouldn't have been so annoying and self-righteous.
I'm going to guess that the largest "opt-in" pinglist is Pokey78's Mark Steyn pinglist.
Pokey -- how many do you have now?
Your generation may bankrupt this country but it was the "greatest generation" that gave us the New Deal and the Great Society and led country down the road to hell faster and farther than any generation before or since.
I might add that your generation also voted in President Reagan who did more to reverse that trend than any president before or since.
So it's not really a generational thing, each generation has those can be held up to be paragons of freedom or communism, it's just that some of every generation seems to want to suck off the gubbermint tit and there's never a lack of a commie pol that'll give it to 'em.
http://www.sltrib.com/2004/Jun/06102004/thursday/174120.asp
For his money, Gillon says Oprah Winfrey embodies it all: "In many ways, she is the most appropriate cover girl for the boomer generation. First of all, (she represents) the women's movement of the '70s, a most important social movement. She's African American. She benefited from the civil rights struggle. And she has perfected this therapeutic culture (in which) we are fascinated with ourselves.
Pokey -- how many do you have now?
454 and counting.
The follies of youth! ;^)
You mean.... Dang! I thought I was on to something... Actually I thought it was quite an achievement, I mean being that I was all alone at the time... (sigh...)
Not even a magazine with purty pictures in it?
Well, there was Farrah fawning over me from her perch on the back of my bedroom door...
Look at that smile, she STILL wants me!
Muttly would just like to point out that
"the 1960's" started in 1960...and went on to '66-67 or so...and the ascot/driving-glove-wearing having fun fishing and shooting and general "expansion budget" great times...old American culture still here and available...all the '50s well-known fun stuff ...well...we were still doing it. THAT was the 1960s...unless everyone has forgotten.
You guys watch too much t.v. We typing dogs remember...though.
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