Joe Brody was Jewish, at least on his mother’s side. At his bar mitzvah the Reform synagogue looked like every other church except the stained-glass windows were abstract art and there weren’t any crosses. (Christian symbolism would be problematic if Jesus had been condemned to death more recently. The noose might work. But the electric chair? The gas chamber? The lethal injection gurney?)
Later I’d be invited to a Passover seder with the Kleins and the Minskys at Ana’s house. The Minskys were theoretically Orthodox but could never remember which knives and forks were the dairy utensils and which were the meat utensils when their more orthodox Orthodox relatives visited from Cleveland. The Kleins went to temple on Yom Kippur.
“Why is this night different from all other nights?”
“No bacon,” said Tim.
When I began Methodist confirmation classes, pondering the nature of God became an absorbing interest along with building plastic car models and trying to kill squirrels with my slingshot.
I felt I had to have a serious talk with my mother. I told her, “I was baptized Presbyterian. Dad’s family is Lutheran. I went to Methodist Sunday school. The theology [a word I’d just learned] is really different. Presbyterians believe in predestination [an even better word I’d just learned]. Lutherans believe in salvation only through grace. And Methodists believe in grace, good works, and free will.”
My mother said, “It’s the church where all the nice people in the neighborhood go.” She was reverent in her faith. And, fifty years later, so am I. I believe she’s in the heaven where all the nice people in the neighborhood go.
Our generation is not prejudiced. But neither were our parents. They didn’t prejudge races, religions, ethnic groups, gays, or women in the workplace. That would have meant they’d made some kind of judgment, that they’d thought about it. They hadn’t. The Greatest Generation took the world as it came. People who looked different, talked different, and acted different were different. The hell with them. People who were the same were enough trouble. Negroes didn’t get a good education, couldn’t get a decent job, and were looked down upon by society. And likewise for the brother-in-law.
The Greatest Generation didn’t care for being around people who were different. We love it. (Or we’re sure we would love it. One of the Baby Boom’s few secrets—guilty or otherwise—is that when we actually met African Americans, Hispanics, and Muslims, and they turned out to be the same as us, we were disappointed.) We embrace people who are different. Nonsmokers only, please.
To say the Greatest Generation “took the world as it came” isn’t to say they were passive. An awful lot of the world came right at them, armed and angry and filled with woe. They could handle it.
The Greatest Generation integrated the armed forces and Little Rock Central High, passed the Civil Rights Act, sent their daughters to law school, and founded the gay liberation movement by watching Liberace on TV. Our gripe with them is that they did the right thing without being enthusiastic about it. Why couldn’t they be more like the Baby Boom is with recycling and proudly celebrate time spent in the trash bin of human behavior separating vice from virtue?
My family wasn’t bigoted—by the standards of the day. Although my grandmother remained convinced until she died in the 1970s that “pickaninny” was a term of endearment. She would use it out loud to compliment moms on their toddlers at the grocery store.
My mother thought prejudice was funny, a good attitude —by the standards of the day. When I was in high school she confided that her sister Margie’s husband, Murray LeVine, was actually Jewish, not French, like Aunt Margie said he was. Uncle Murray and Aunt Margie lived in a tony suburb where the tennis club was restricted. If Uncle Murray was French, so is Mel Brooks.
The tennis club excluded not only Jews but Catholics, which sheds more light on why I’m Protestant than Granddad’s annulment story. In the Greatest Generation, if you couldn’t pass as a white Protestant, you acted like one. People applauded your effort to blend in. The Three Stooges were Jewish. Passing was multiculturalism—by the standards of the day.
When I was three or four, I was riding in a car with my godfather. He was cut off in traffic by another driver, who was black. “Damn zigaboo!” my godfather said. A few days later I was riding in a car with my father. I pointed out the window and said, “Damn zigaboo!” After I’d been scolded and questioned my father went to my godfather and blew up. To judge by the number of times my godparents told me the story, and by the way they mixed admiration with amusement about this rare outburst from “a real gentleman,” Dad had strong opinions on the subject.
My father had been in the Philippines with a navy construction battalion in 1944 and 1945. After he died I found a photo album in our attic. There were snapshots of him and a young lady. Palm trees could be seen in the background. The young lady was very like my mother in size and shape and even smile but much darker. It may have been an innocent friendship. But if my father received a horizontal education in the higher moral principles, I’m sure he was enthusiastic about it.
But our parents were repressed. We are not. We’re convinced on these two points. Then we learn all about John F. Kennedy. We consider JFK. We consider the photos I found in the attic. We consider our fathers. And we’re the ones repressing that thought.
But we’re uninhibited. Our parents were otherwise. Although my mother told me she fell in love with my father while they were dancing on a table in a nightclub. My father would get divorced from his first wife in 1946.
My godmother, with the extra First Amendment rights of a nonagenarian, tells me that three kids and a decade later my dad was asleep in his chair, newspaper in lap and highball on end table, when my mother decided to add spice to their marriage. Mom took off all her clothes, put on a raincoat, crept through the back door, went around to the front, and rang the doorbell. Dad stayed asleep. Then Mom discovered she’d locked herself out. She threw pebbles at my window until I woke, came downstairs, and opened the door. Dad slept through it all. And I—thanks to repression—don’t remember a thing. But if I did I’d be putting it in a memoir. The Baby Boom is uninhibited.
But . . . But . . . But . . . Politics. Politically, the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boom were diametrically opposed in the 1960s. Our parents were so conservative, especially when they were liberal, like Dr. and Mrs. Klein who, every time they agreed with us about eliminating prejudice, poverty, war, and injustice, began by saying, “If Adlai Stevenson had been elected . . .” They were reacting, the reactionaries. We were the action. We were the act.
And yet consider a statistic from 1963, before Baby Boom activism had been activated, when the Civil Rights March on Washington had just happened, the Berkeley Free Speech movement was still limbering its tongue, and the first major protest against the war in Vietnam was a year away. In 1963 the federal income tax rate on the head of a household who was making $300,000 a year was 91 percent. The Greatest Generation were better pinko radicals than we would ever be, by one measure.
If the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boom are so closely akin in our ideas and our attitudes, then why all the 1960s screaming dinner table arguments? It was a noisy decade, but the screech of electric guitar feedback, the chants of “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh!,” the shots of National Guard rifles, and the wail of police and ambulance sirens were all drowned out by parents and children shouting at each other across the pot roast.
We were arguing with ourself. And we weren’t making much sense.
NIXON IS A FASCIST PIG!
GET A HAIRCUT!
Well, who among us has not had a screaming, senseless argument with ourself about actually having done what we actually wanted to do?
I ATE THE WHOLE HALF GALLON OF BUTTER PECAN ICE CREAM! I’M A FOOL! I STARTED SMOKING AGAIN! I AM SUCH A JERK! I BOUGHT A BOAT WITH THE KID’S 529 COLLEGE FUND! I’M A SHITHEAD!
I GOT DRUNK AND E-MAILED SMUT TO THAT HOTTIE GRAPHIC DESIGNER AT WORK! I AM A WORTHLESS ASSHOLE!
And so another decade goes to hell.
. . . whose strenuous tongue can burst Joy’s grape . . .
—John Keats,
“Ode on Melancholy”
11
THE GREAT DISCONNECT
But this is America. We go to hell in a cheerful, optimistic, can-do American way.
Jim Fisk and I were enrolled at Mediocre State University, and on our first day there Jim exclaimed, “We can do anything!”
He was reading the MSU course catalogue. Registration began the next morning. I looked at the variety of classes available and at the requirements to graduate with a major in one thing or another. “English” caught my eye. I speak that.
We were already smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, and wearing blue jeans in a school cafeteria. “College,” said Jim—a heartfelt sentiment that reverberates to this day, echoing in our hearts down through all the decades since.
MSU in 1965 was still college as college was supposed to be. The traditional scholarly learning, intellectual challenge, fraternal and sororital social grace, BMOC attainment, athletic triumph, and sis-boom-bah rigor were available to Jim and me. But so were lots of other things. The drinking age was eighteen.
The college town was full of bars. Two of them, The Old School Cheer and Final Exam, faced each other across an alley. Each had a patio crowded with students. The guys on the School Cheer patio appeared tall and handsome. Their shirts were ironed and their chino pants were creased. By what means was this accomplished a hundred miles from home? Their haircuts were always just a little past due, in the Bobby Kennedy fashion. How did fashionable guys stay forever one step ahead of the barber? My godfather was a barber. Either you got your hair cut or you didn’t.
The guys on the Final Exam patio didn’t. Some were tubby. Some were undersized. Many were trying to grow beards. This would be easier than trying to grow tall. They wore wrinkled work shirts and dirty blue jeans. I’d been wearing my same pair since the family had dropped me off at my freshman dorm.
The girls on the School Cheer patio appeared pretty and blonde. Their hair was styled with a cute upturn at the shoulders, a “sorority flip.” They filled their sweaters. They wore their skirts a daring inch above the knee.
The girls on the Final Exam patio were maybe not so pretty and blonde. They wore black leotards, denim skirts, and peasant blouses. Their hair was long and very straight. (It wasn’t until the next summer at home, when I walked into the laundry room and found one of my sisters apparently trying to commit suicide with a small household appliance, that I realized girls ironed their hair.)
I looked at the girls on the School Cheer patio. I had a vision of a great sexual quest. There would be flirtations and introductions. There would be “chance” encounters at mixers and invitations to dance. Groups of her friends and my friends would get together after the big football game. There would be dates to the movies and dates to romantic movies. We’d probably see A Patch of Blue five times. There would be the Homecoming Dance, the Winter Carnival, the Spring Fling, and whatever the heck went on in between—March Hare Bunny Hop, April Showers Raincoat Ball, Mayday Emergency Cotillion. There would be fumbling under clothing in the Kappa Kappa Gamma shrubbery while a house mother tsked out an upstairs window, bestowal of one’s fraternity pin or even an engagement ring, and much talk about “our future.”
I looked at the girls on the Final Exam patio. They were smoking unfiltered cigarettes and drinking beer straight out of the bottle. I thought, “I’ll bet they do it.” They did.
When we were home on Christmas break Ana Klein, who was at Selective State University, said, “They’ve eliminated girls’ dorm hours. We can do anything!”
Leo Luhan, who was at Big State University, said, “The secret is to never take a subject you can’t bullshit your way out of.”
“Music Appreciation,” said Ana Klein.
“Poli Sci,” said Jim Fisk.
I said, “English.”
Tim Minsky said, “Leo is telling the truth.”
“But you’re at Yale,” said Jim, “taking Math.”
Tim said, “You’d be surprised.”
And these days, when we’re beset with the math of statistics, their standard deviations, their sampling distributions, and their blatherskite probabilities and predictions that cause half our news items to begin “New studies show . . .” or “Latest polls indicate . . . ,” we are surprised.
And yet, if we’d taken more demanding courses or paid better attention when professors were trying to teach us Math, Statistics, Economics, Demographics, and so forth, we might realize why the Baby Boom has always felt, “We can do anything.”
From 1946 until we were done being born in 1964, some 75,821,000 of us made our appearance in previously tidy American homes. At the time the country had about 192 million people. The Baby Boom was almost 40 percent of the population. No wonder when we farted the nation shat.
And even now—after all the heart attacks, cancers, car wrecks, suicides, and fatal slips in the bathtub that the actuarial tables demand—we continue to be one-fourth of the citizenry. We’re America’s largest minority group ever. And there’s been affirmative action. Minority quotas—practically 100 percent of college admissions from 1964 to 1982. Targeted minority recruitment—Selective Service. Reverse discrimination—“Don’t trust anyone over thirty!” (U.C. Berkeley political activist Jack Weinberg coined the phrase in 1964. He turned thirty in 1970, and Baby Boomers have been teasing him ever since.) Minority outreach—all those ads for Depends and Levitra on network television. And minority set-asides—Social Security and Medicare.
About 35 percent of the federal budget now goes to those two minority entitlement programs. It’s estimated that by 2030, when the last of our generation is struggling with how to get the Depends on after the Levitra’s been taken, Boomer-Americans will be raking in Social Security and Medicare benefits costing half of all the money spent in Washington. We’re riding down the highway of life in a Welfare Cadillac (with the right-turn indicator blinking for miles and miles). Tax rates will go through the roof. Which should keep those Generation X slackers busy, and maybe take their minds off Kurt Cobain dying.
Besides, our families had money. True, they didn’t have much money. In 1947 median family income was $3,031. Median meaning that this was the income for that peculiar family able to look down upon the paltry earnings of exactly one-half of the nation while regarding with envious resentment the other one-half who were rolling in it. Three grand and change is about $31,700 in 2013 dollars. That’s only $4,130 a year more than the 2013 poverty threshold for a family of five. In 1947 to be middle income was a blessing of middling proportions.
It was nonetheless a blessing. The Greatest Generation consecrated itself to raising the country’s median income, and they would continue with their devotions. By 1964 median household income had reached nearly $49,700 in 2013 dollars, in time to sanctify the Baby Boom with college educations. (Incidentally, don’t try this today. Sending an out-of-state kid to U.C. Berkeley, for example, costs $38,000 a year in tuition and fees.)
The growth of prosperity for middle-income Americans is oddly difficult to measure. Like many things government didn’t used to be, it didn’t used to be a statistical busybody. The Census Bureau has no figures for median household income before 1947. The economist Emmanuel Saez, a professor at Berkeley (which institution seems to keep intruding itself into Baby Boom discussion), has spent much of the past decade trying to determine average income in the United States over the previous century.
Of course income is not the same as household income, especially in a two-income household. And an average is a mean and a mean is not a median. (I told you we should have paid attention in Econ.) Aver
ages are blurry statistics with their ink smeared by champagne spills at the top and damp seeping into empty refrigerator cartons where people are living at the bottom.
Dr. Saez calculates that in the years when the Greatest Generation was growing up—1913 to 1932—average annual income ranged between about $12,000 at its lowest and $17,000 at its highest (2013 dollars). In the years when the Greatest Generation had the Baby Boom at home and underfoot—1946 to 1964—average annual income ranged between about $27,000 and about $45,000 (2013 dollars).
But it’s not just the numbers we don’t grasp that matter, it’s the zigzags on the graph we don’t understand that are important too. For the eldest Baby Boom children there weren’t any zigzags. From 1946 to 1964 average income climbed the social ladder, with only the merest slips, from shabby genteel to shabby chic. The Greatest Generation had a different childhood. From 1913 to 1932 average income went up, down, way up, way down, and the best year and the worst year were only a couple of years apart. This is why our parents never had any use for shabby—or much understanding of chic.
The economy is a kind of confidence game. Maybe what gave the Baby Boom its confident air is better gauged by gross domestic product per capita—all the money the people in a country make divided by all the people. It tells us nothing about our individual economic circumstance—what we eat—but it tells us a lot about our economic atmosphere—what we breathe.
Adjusted for inflation, per capita GDP for the years 1913 through 1932 averages approximately $8,500. This is the world of our parents. Adjusted for inflation, per capita GDP for the years 1946 through 1964 averages approximately $18,500. This is the world of us. Blood is thicker than water, but gravy is thicker than both. The difference between the manners, mores, behavior, and attitudes of the Greatest Generation and the Baby Boom is $10,000.