THE
BABY BOOM
Also By P. J. O’ROURKE
Modern Manners
The Bachelor Home Companion
Republican Party Reptile
Holidays in Hell
Parliament of Whores
Give War a Chance
All the Trouble in the World
Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut
Eat the Rich
The CEO of the Sofa
Peace Kills
On The Wealth of Nations
Driving Like Crazy
Don’t Vote—It Just Encourages the Bastards
Holidays in Heck
P. J.
O’ROURKE
THE
BABY BOOM
How It Got That Way
And It Wasn’t My Fault
And I’ll Never Do It Again
Atlantic Monthly Press
New York
Copyright © 2014 by P. J. O’Rourke
Jacket design by Dan Rembert and Charles Woods; Cover photographs: 1956 Thunderbird © Car Culture/Corbis. all other jacket images © BigStockPhoto.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or
[email protected].
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2197-4
eBook ISBN: 978-0-8021-9307-0
Atlantic Monthly Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
www.groveatlantic.com
The Baby Boom is dedicated to the memory of
Clifford Bronson O’Rourke and Delphine Loy O’Rourke, progenitors thereof.
Thou shalt not answer questionnaires
Or quizzes upon World-Affairs,
Nor with compliance
Take any test. Thou shalt not sit
With statisticians nor commit
A social science.
—W. H. Auden
from “Under Which Lyre”
CONTENTS
Preface
Prologue: We Are the World
1 A Regular Old Baby Boomer Speaks
2 A Good and Happy Place
3 Life as We Imagined It
4 In the Doldrums of Fun
5 Mere Anarchy Is Loosed
6 Ends and Means
7 All That Glisters
8 Agents of Influence
9 The Prelude
10 The Man Is Father to the Child
11 The Great Disconnect
12 Era of Good Feelings
13 The Baby Boom’s Garden of Eden—Thanks for the Snake
14 There Shall No Sign Be Given Unto This Generation
15 Dawn’s Early Light
16 Real Life
17 Ripeness Is All
18 Big Damn Messy Bundle of Joy
Acknowledgments
In lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath.
—Dr. Samuel Johnson
PREFACE TO A BOOK ATTEMPTING TO CAPTURE THE SPIRIT OF A GENERATION OF GOD’S FAVORITE SPOILED BRATS
Herein is a ballad of the Baby Boom, not a dissertation on it. A rhapsody, not a report. A freehand sketch, not a faithful rendering. That is to say, I am—it is a writer’s vocation and the métier of his age cohort—full of crap.
Characters, the narrator included, have been drawn from nature and not from individuals. Essence has been added and accidens has been omitted. Merry hell has been played with time, place, personages, and recalled dialogue. Twice-told tales have been trotted out onto the court for three-peats. (And, come now, fellow Baby Boomers, confess your own guilt to the same.) Only the most outrageous and unbelievable things in this book are recounted exactly as they happened.
THE
BABY BOOM
There was a generation,
That had a lot of hair,
Right in the middle of their forehead.
When they were good,
They were very good indeed,
But when they were bad they were horrid.
—with apologies to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
PROLOGUE
We Are the World
We are the generation that changed everything. Of all the eras and epochs of Americans, ours is the one that made the biggest impression—on ourselves. But that’s an important accomplishment because we’re the generation that created the self, made the firmament of the self, divided the light of the self from the darkness of the self, and said let there be self. If you were born between 1946 and 1964, you may have noticed this yourself.
That’s not to say we’re a selfish generation. Selfish means “too concerned with the self,” and we’re not. Self isn’t something we’re just, you know, concerned with. We are self.
Before us, self was without form and void, like our parents in their dumpy clothes and vague ideas. Then we came along. Now the personal is the political. The personal is the socioeconomic. The personal is the religious and the secular, science and the arts. The personal is every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his (and, let us hasten to add, her) kind. If the Baby Boom has done one thing it’s to beget a personal universe.
And our apologies to anyone who personally happens to be a jerk. Self is like fish, proverbially speaking. Give a man a fish and you’ve fed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and, if he turns into a dry-fly catch-and-release angling fanatic up to his liver in icy water wearing ridiculous waders and an absurd hat, pestering trout with three-pound test line on a thousand-dollar graphite rod, and going on endlessly about Royal Coachman lures that he tied himself using muskrat fur and partridge feathers . . . well, at least his life partner is glad to have him out of the house.
We made the universe personal, and we made the universe new. New in the sense of juvenescent. We have an abiding admiration for our own larval state.
We saw that the grown-ups were like primitive insects. They never underwent metamorphosis. They didn’t emerge from their home and office cocoons with brilliant, fluttering wings. They just continued to molt, getting more gross, lumpy, and bald and, as it were, bugging us. Better that we should stay nymphs and naiads. Plus we were having more fun than the adults of the species.
“Don’t ever change!” we wrote in each other’s high school yearbooks. “Stay just the way you are!” What strange valedictions to give ourselves on the threshold of life. Imagine if we had obeyed them, and now everyone possessed the resolute solipsism of adolescence with its wild enthusiasms, dark lethargies, strong lusts, keen aversions, inner turmoils, and uncontained impulses. Life would be exactly like it is today. You’re welcome.
So here we a
re in the Baby Boom cosmos, formed in our image, personally tailored to our individual needs, and predetermined to be eternally fresh and novel. And we saw that it was good. Or pretty good.
We should have had a cooler name, the way the Lost Generation did. Except good luck to anybody who tries to tell us to get lost. Anyway it’s too late now, we’re stuck with being forever described as exploding infants. And maybe it’s time, now that we’ve splattered ourselves all over the place, for the Baby Boom to look back and think. “What made us who we are?” “And what caused us to act the way we do?” “And WTF?” Because the truth is, if we hadn’t decided to be young forever, we’d be old.
The youngest Baby Boomers, born in the last year when anybody thought it was hip to like Lyndon Johnson, are turning fifty. Those of us who were born when postwar birthrates were highest, even before Ike was liked, won’t (statistics tell us) have to wait as long for death as we had to wait to get laid.
We’d be sad about this if we weren’t too busy remarrying younger wives, reviving careers that hit glass ceilings when children arrived, and renewing prescriptions for drugs that keep us from being sad. And we’ll never retire. We can’t. The mortgage is underwater. We’re in debt up to the Rogaine for the kids’ college education. And it serves us right—we’re the generation who insisted that a passion for living should replace working for one.
Nonetheless it’s an appropriate moment for us to weigh what we’ve wrought and tally what we’ve added to and subtracted from existence. We’ve reached the age of accountability. The world is our fault. We are the generation that has an excuse for everything—one of our greatest contributions to modern life—but the world is still our fault. This is every generation’s fate. It’s a matter of power and privilege demography. Whenever anything happens anywhere, somebody over fifty signs the bill for it. And the Baby Boom, seated as we are at the head of life’s table, is hearing Generation X, Generation Y, and the Millennials all saying, “Check, please!”
How can he get wisdom . . . whose talk is of bullocks?
—Ecclesiasticus 38:25,
The Apocrypha
1
A REGULAR OLD
BABY BOOMER SPEAKS
To address America’s Baby Boom is to face big, broad problems. We number more than 75 million, and we’re not only diverse but take a thorny pride in our every deviation from the norm (even though we’re in therapy for it). We are all alike about us each being unusual.
Fortunately we are all alike about big, broad problems too. We won’t face them. There’s a website for that, a support group to join, a class to take, alternative medicine, regular exercise, a book that explains it all, a celebrity on TV who’s been through the same thing, or we can eliminate gluten from our diet. History is full of generations that had too many problems. We are the first generation to have too many answers.
Not a problem. Consider the people who have faced up squarely to the deepest and most perplexing conundrums of existence. Leo Tolstoy, for example. He tackled every one of them. Why are we here? What kind of life should we lead? The nature of evil. The character of love. The essence of identity. Salvation. Suffering. Death.
What did it get him? Dead, for one thing. And off his rocker for the last thirty years of his life. Plus he was saddled with a thousand-page novel about war, peace, and everything else you can think of, which he couldn’t even look up on Wikipedia to get the skinny on because he hadn’t written it yet. What a life. If Leo Tolstoy had been one of us he could have entered a triathlon, a Baby Boom innovation of the middle 1970s. By then we knew we couldn’t run away from our problems. But if we added cycling and swimming . . .
So to the problems of talking about the Baby Boom let us turn our big, broad (yet soon to be firmed up due to the triathlon for seniors that we’re planning to enter) generational backsides.
Nonetheless, a difficulty remains. Most groups of people who get tagged by history as a “generation” can be described in an easy, offhand way: folks sort of the same age experiencing sort of the same things in sort of the same place, like the cast of Cheers or Seinfeld or Friends. I’m almost sure—as a result of taking Modern Literature in college—that Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Ford Madox Ford, Henry Miller, and Ezra Pound were roommates in a big apartment on the Left Bank in Paris in the 1920s. (If not, I give the sitcom idea free to the reader.)
But the Baby Boom has an exact definition, a precise demography. We are the children who were born during a period after World War II when the long-term trend in fertility among American women was exceeded. Our mothers began this excess abruptly in 1946. They peaked in their use of the stuff that makes babies in 1947, and thereafter they gradually tapered off until in 1964 they were taking the pill or rolling over and pretending to be asleep or telling their husbands, “Go phone the pope about where to buy rubbers.”
As a generation, we are spread across the huge space of America and span so much time that the oldest Baby Boomers are sometimes the parents—usually via an oopsie—of the youngest Baby Boomers. (It’s painful to think how many of those babies were put up for adoption because it was too soon for the Baby Boom to have soothed the fierce mores of society. Shame was still felt about “illegitimate” children as if the cooings, gurgles, and spit-ups of some infants conformed to established rules and regulations while the cooings, gurgles, and spit-ups of other infants weren’t legal. On the other hand, in fairness, society may have had an inkling of just how hard it would be to extract child support payments from Baby Boom fathers.)
Anyway, distinctions among varieties of Baby Boomers need to be made. Geographical distinctions are peripatetically moot for us. I have a friend who says he got so stoned in the 1960s that the next thing he remembers is standing in line for a Procol Harem concert at New York’s Fillmore East with a ticket in his hand for a Procol Harem concert at San Francisco’s Fillmore West. Distinctions according to race, class, gender, or sexual orientation would be offensive to Baby Boom sensitivities. Furthermore they’d be beside the point because the author—much as he endeavors to be as different from everyone else as a member of the Baby Boom should be—finds himself to be hopelessly ordinary in matters of race, class, gender identification, and which section of Playboy he turned to first when he was sixteen.
But time is a distinction we all have to endure. And there are temporal variations in the Baby Boom. We have our seniors, our juniors, our sophomores, and our freshman.
The seniors were born in the late 1940s. The author is of that ilk. This book is necessarily written from the ilk’s point of view. The first pronouncement of the Baby Boom is “I have to be me.” It’s as if we think the pronouncements of all those who came before us were something like, “I have to be Gerald and Betty Ford.” Then Dad’s hair began to thin and he whacked somebody with a golf ball and Mom got a little tipsy. The Baby Boom speaks the truth.
The seniors were on the bow wave of the Baby Boom’s voyage of exploration. But they were also closely tethered in the wake of preceding generations. In effect the seniors were keelhauled by the Baby Boom experience and left a bit soggy and shaken. If we wound up as financial advisers trying to wear tongue studs or Trotskyites trying to organize Tea Party protests, or both, we are to be forgiven. Hillary Clinton and Cheech Marin are seniors.
The juniors were born in the early 1950s. They were often younger siblings of the seniors and came of age when parents were throwing in the towel during the “What’s the Matter with Kids These Days” feature match. The juniors pursued the notions, whims, and fancies of the Baby Boom with a greater intensity. For them drugs were no longer experimental; drugs were proven. John Belushi was technically a senior, born in 1949, but, knowing John, he was probably held back a couple of grades and can be counted as a junior. From the juniors we get the teeny-boppers, the groupies, and the more ragamuffin barefoot urchins of Haigh
t-Ashbury. They hunted up some shoes when they eventually made their way to Silicon Valley. (Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were both born in 1955.) But they never did find their neckties.
The sophomores were born in the late 1950s. By the time they reached adolescence the Baby Boom ethos had permeated society. Sophomores gladly accepted sex, drugs, rock and roll, and the deep philosophical underpinning thereof. But they’d seen enough of the Baby Boom in action to realize that what works in general terms doesn’t always work when the bong sets fire to the beanbag chair. Circumstances had changed. In college many of the sophomores attended classes. Some even snuck off and got MBAs. I have a friend who went to Stanford in 1973. The Stanford campus is home to the redoubtable conservative Hoover Institution think tank. When my friend arrived at the school the Hoover Institution’s office windows were boarded up as high as a rock could be thrown. (We’re not the most athletic generation, so the windows didn’t have to be boarded up too far.) That year the boards were taken down. The sophomores were the authors of The Official Preppy Handbook.
The freshmen were born in the early 1960s. All that the Baby Boom had wrought was, for them, a given. What we accomplished with blood, sweat, and tears or, really, with buds, sweat, other lubricants, and tear gas or, in actual fact, with listening to Blood, Sweat & Tears, especially “Spinning Wheel,” over and over again on the record player while we stared at the amazing kaleidoscopic patterns in the linoleum, freshmen took for granted.
They felt no visceral effects from the events that formed the Baby Boom. To freshmen the Vietnam War was just something that was inexplicably on TV all the time like Ed McMahon. Feminism had gone from a pressing social issue to a Bea Arthur comedy show that their parents liked, and, by the time the freshmen were in college, feminism was an essay topic for the “Reading Shakespeare in Cultural Context” course. Hint: Lady Macbeth hit that glass ceiling hard.