Posted on 07/12/2004 9:38:33 AM PDT by qam1
1946, 1964 classes don't always agree........
There's a great distance between Barry Manilow and Barry Bonds.
Manilow, the singer, was born in 1946, the first year of the postwar baby boom. About 76 million births later, Bonds, the baseball slugger, became one of America's last boomers. That was in 1964, when demographers say the boom ended.
Typically, those born within that period are lumped together as the "baby boom generation," as if their values, beliefs and habits are unified. In fact, as the "late-wave boomers" turn 40 this year, it's clear that the classes of 1946 and 1964 are often very different, at times resulting in alienation and even finger-pointing.
John Dieffenbach, a 40-year-old attorney in Pleasantville, N.Y., says many of the oldest boomers are "a self-aggrandizing" bunch who treat him like an auxiliary member of their generation. "I'm part of their club but don't get the benefits." He doesn't get the "benefit" of nostalgia - being able to say he recalls when Kennedy was shot or the Beatles arrived in America. And people his age might not receive full Social Security benefits when they retire because the oldest boomers may strain the system.
The oldest boomers came of age at a time of affordable housing, easier acceptance to colleges and better job markets. The youngest boomers struggled through deeper recessions, crowded workplaces and, now, outsourced jobs.
Younger boomers also worry that in the next decade or so, their 401(k) values will fall as retired older boomers cash out of stocks.
"I share very little culturally with a 58-year-old," Dieffenbach says. In 1986, when the media declared "Boomer Generation Turns 40," he was just 22. In 1996, when newspaper articles celebrated "Boomers Turn 50" - counting the candles on their cakes (400,000 a day) and the cash spent on their birthday presents ($1 billion that year) - Dieffenbach was just 32.
"I'm waiting for the 'Baby Boomers are Dead' stories," he says, only half-jokingly.
This month, a new book, "Kill Your Idols," features essays in which rock critics who are young boomers and Generation Xers tear down allegedly classic boomer albums such as "Tommy" by The Who, released in 1969, and "Pet Sounds" by the Beach Boys, out in 1966.
"I grew up with the notion that I missed out on the greatest party ever because I wasn't at Woodstock," says the book's co-editor, Jim DeRogatis, born in 1964. "Well, I've seen the movie, and it's a stone-cold bore."
In his essay, DeRogatis slices up The Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band." He mocks one of the 1967 album's songs, "Fixing a Hole," which he says embodies the myopia and self-centeredness of older boomers: "It really doesn't matter/If I'm wrong I'm right/Where I belong I'm right."
The song reminds DeRogatis of two boomers born in 1946: Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. In his autobiography, "Clinton takes 957 pages to say he really didn't do anything wrong," DeRogatis says, while President Bush "still won't say he was wrong" about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction.
Dennis Peterson and his daughter, Dee Ann Haibeck, are boomer bookends, born Jan. 1, 1946, and Oct. 28, 1964. Peterson of Bellevue, Wash., says people from his era "opened the door for a lot of discussions America hadn't been having" - about such divisive matters as race, women's rights, the Vietnam War. He says those of his daughter's era "didn't have the testosterone to get involved in social issues. I don't think they had our sense of responsibility."
Haibeck feels some of her dad's hippie contemporaries "changed our culture for the worse" by making society too liberal.
Dieffenbach has a suspicion about why he and others born in the early 1960s are counted in the boomer generation. As the oldest boomers continue to lobby for power and their legacy, they think there's strength in numbers, he says. "They're just using us to increase their volume.'
qam is "trashing" people by having a "Gen-X" bump list?
>>You are obsessed with trashing those of us born after 1946.
Unless I missed something, Gen Xers were born after 1946 too.
Actually, I was born 1958. Elvis, the Beatles, Vietnam, and all the rest of those Boomer cultural markers are meaningless to me.
But you are right about all the rest of us picking up the trash now that the party is over.
Where did I say that; I said that qam seeks and out and posts the worst articles about its "elders".
Incessantly.
Here, here. I certainly appreciate what TGG did in WW2, but really, did they do anything that other generations would not have under those circumstances? And have they not been amply rewarded with the GI bill, Social Security, Medicare, and the benefits of almost 30 years of US worldwide economic dominance after WW2?
Being born in 1960 I have far less in common with Baby Boomers than hubby, who was born in 55.............and he dislikes being lumped in with them - although he does admit to being a hippy in his younger days!!!!
And I like the way Howe and Strauss divided the 'X' generation into 'Atari' and 'Nintendo' X-ers. I turn 40 next month, and certainly have very little in common with early boomers; however, the same could be said of my my tatooed and pierced brethren in the Nintendo wave of the 13th gen.
They didn't USE to be. For some reason, somebody keeps adding years to "Baby Boomer."
I am a Baby Boomer and I don't have a damn thing in common with the liberal hippies of this day and age.
I'm sick and tired of reading all these threads about how bad we've trashed this country.
er....I meant of that day and age.
Most of us were NOT John Kerry and his ilk.
>>my tatooed and pierced brethren in the Nintendo wave of the 13th gen.
My brother and I were talking about this last night (after his 39th Birthday). I don't get the whole tattoo and tacklebox crowd, but I guess Boomers don't get us either.
Its interesting how history shapes different generations or even parts of generations.
Your reply was to #2, which is qam's "template" post for the Gen-X bump list. qam's profile provides more info on what the list is about.
Except that it's most helpful, at least as a starting point, to keep your eye on the numbers. The peak year of the Baby Boom was 1957, with huge numbers both immediately before and immediately after, like an enormous tidal wave. That cohort is now 47, give or take a few years. Make all the cultural extrapolations you want, but that's the basic fact from which all others spring and will be the most decisive fact in what happens in the economy and elsewhere.
Here's a perfect example of why I loathe the Baby Boomers. So full of themselves, so self-righteous, so arrogant and condescending. And of course, the irony is that for all of their talk, they are the most selfish, self-centered, self-absorbed, self-important bunch of brats the world has ever seen.
I wish the entire pack of pompous, spoiled jack@sses would go save someone else's world and leave us and ours alone. I'm a 37-year old Gen X'er, and am more than a little tired of the Boomers telling me and everyone else how awful we are, how much we don't care as much as they do about whatever, and of the Boomers trying to tell everyone else what they should and shouldn't say or do.
And?
What reply SHOULD I have made it to? Is there a requirement about that here on FR?
C'mon, Howlin! I REMEMBER Tommy, and I remember wondering "Why does everybody think this is so wonderful?". Same could be said for "The Wall". That being said, I have to ask my fellow X-ers, Why oh Why does no one in your/our generation treat the guitar as a lead instrument? Why have a guitar in a song if all you're going to do is strum it (or worse yet, bang the hell out of it)?
Your complaint appeared directed at the bump list. All qam did was post the article and the ping.
Not sure what's wrong with either.
I was born in 1963 and this guy needs to get a life
kind of amazing that there is an entire segment of freepers that hate me, without knowing a thing about me, just because i was born in 1956, LOL!
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