The Selfishist Generation's Sorry Record

For Throwback Wednesday, the cohort DDM hates most of all

Like most writers, I think nearly everything that emanates from my keyboard stinks.

But a decade ago, I wrote a column I’m proud of to this day. It described, in no uncertain terms, my opinion of Americans born between 1946 and 1964.

Look, I’m a libertarian. I get that the 1950s were too uptight. Way too uptight. But maybe that had something to do with the fact that 85 million Earthlings had just been butchered, making placid conformity in the suburbs a welcome change.

A little cultural loosening was in order, but like their rock god Ziggy Stardust, the Baby Boomers took it all too far — and their generation’s done more damage to The Land of the Free than any other.

Enjoy!

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There’s still time. Turn your televisions off. Now. And don’t turn them back on until November 23rd. By then, crazed, schmaltzy, vacuous JFK nostalgia, currently enveloping the nation, will have dissipated.

Coverage of the 50th anniversary of the assassination of the 35th president started two weeks early, and will culminate on the 22nd, with NBC’s “two-hour documentary ‘Where Were You: The Day JFK Died,’ reported by Tom Brokaw.”

An appropriate commemoration of a presidency tragically extinguished by a crackpot’s bullet? Nah. It’s just another opportunity for Baby Boomer navel-gazing.

Forget Watergate, the McGovern campaign, the first Earth Day, Woodstock, Tranquility Base, Vietnam, the Summer of Love, the struggle against Jim Crow, The Beatles on Sullivan. It’s the murder of John F. Kennedy that resonates deepest for Boomers, the 78-million-strong cohort born between the end of World War II and the early 1960s.

Kennedy’s killing is the fount of Boomers’ victimization saga. Losing such a “visionary” leader, their dubious narrative holds, was the first of many traumas. In the decade and a half to come, they would realize that America had too many sexual “hang-ups,” capitalism was incompatible with environmental protection, and the have-nots had not due to inadequate “public investments” — i.e., expensive programs designed by Ivy League grads. While male Boomers were shipped off to die for nothing in a far-off jungle, their distaff counterparts began to understand the boring and demeaning nature of being a “stay-at-home mom.” Careers were preferable to a life sentence in the suburbs. Accordingly, marriages must eschew gender roles. And when a union struggled, it was better for everyone, including the kids, to divorce.

The heart gets what the heart wants. No matter who gets hurt.