Freshmen have no personal memory of the Kennedy and King assassinations, which showed the tragedy inherent in greatness and taught the Baby Boom to stop just short of it, the way Bill Clinton did. They may have suffered a momentary golden oldies pang when John Lennon was shot, thinking, maybe, “Now the original Wings will never be reunited.”
The freshmen didn’t witness the monumental civil rights movement. They were taught that it was monumental in school. Being taught that a thing is monumental in school turns it into an intellectually unvisited memorial, a Grant’s Tomb of the mind. To the freshmen racism, sexism, and homophobia are as much slurs as facts. They don’t even stop to puzzle over the evil the way I stopped at an Alabama gas station on a 1959 car trip to Florida to puzzle over the drinking fountain labeled “colored.” Not that I was puzzling over evil at the moment, because I had no idea what “colored” could have to do with a drinking fountain. Colored water? Bad idea. Why would anybody want it?
And that’s pretty much as far as freshmen get with moral reasoning about America. Good for them. They live in a better country. They have the luxury of fretting over things like the deficit, the one-percenters, the congressional deadlock, the fairness of the nation’s health insurance system, and whether, if they spend a lot of time at the gym and get a tattoo, they stand any chance of hooking up with twenty-six-year-olds.
They’re still Baby Boomers. The freshmen may be different in many ways from the Baby Boom’s upper classmen, but there’s no mistaking them for members of any of the younger and duller (if hotter) generations.
The tip-off is the blather, the jabber, the prattle, the natter, the gab, gas, yak, yap, baloney, blarney, bunkum, the jaw-slinging, tongue-wagging, gum-beating chin music that is the Baby Boom’s gift to the world. Stephen Colbert is a freshman. So is Ann Coulter. So are Jon Stewart, Sarah Palin, Conan O’Brien, and Larry the Cable Guy.
Among prominent freshmen Baby Boomers is President Barack Obama. There was a controversy when he was running for president that showed how much of a freshman Baby Boomer President Obama is and also illustrated what an extraordinary change the Baby Boom has made in the nature of American flapdoodle.
President and Mrs. Obama were members of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. Trinity’s pastor until early 2008 was the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Reverend Wright had married Mr. and Mrs. Obama and baptized their children. Reverend Wright is a man of strong views, forcefully delivered, and, shall we say, not always tactfully put.
In a sermon after 9/11 Reverend Wright said, “We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye . . . and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought back into our own front yard.” In another sermon he said, “The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color.” And, most famously, he said, “God damn America.”
Now, a senior Baby Boomer, especially in the senior Baby Boom’s 1960s heyday, would have been standing on a pew, clenched fist raised in the air, shouting in response with fervid suggestions for righteous action probably involving property damage at the nearby University of Chicago. A sophomore Baby Boomer, assuming the sophomore was awake early enough for a church service and could find the church, would have been nodding in stoned agreement and hoping that Trinity United’s activist social ministry included free lunch. A junior Baby Boomer would have been muttering to himself, “That might be pitching things a bit high and inside.” But a freshman Baby Boomer . . .
The controversy played out after various news organizations and political opponents took professional umbrage at Reverend Wright’s sermons with anticlimatic results. Although Senator Obama sat in the congregation, there was no indication that he paid any attention whatsoever to Reverend Wright.
The freshman Baby Boomer was born into a sea of hooey and swims about comfortably therein unaware that other environments of discourse exist. For all we know, while the Reverend Jeremiah Wright fulminated and swore, the future president was fiddling with his BlackBerry blabbing to Rahm Emanuel. It is the Baby Boom way.
Once people spoke their minds. And what awful things we heard (cf. Rev. Wright—born 1941—above). Baby Boom speech is not mindless but there’s a cardiac bypass. We speak from the heart and that’s not the half of it. We speak from the gut, from the spleen, from the liver’s bile ducts, out our butts, through our hats; even our T-shirts cannot shut up with the things we have to say, never mind social media and talk-radio talk-show call-in callers. We talk until the cows come home, and who keeps cows anymore. We talk of cabbages and kings, as well we might, because who among us can tell the king of Saudi Arabia from a cabbage, burnoose aside. We found drugs—speed, cocaine, Starbucks—that were talk itself in pill, powder, and custom frappuccino form.
And yet one thing that cannot be said about the Baby Boom is “It’s all talk.” You can’t say that about a generation whose powers of language are so fundamentally transformative that one of its members ran for president using the name “Barack” when everybody knows he’s called Barry.
America in the two decades after World War II was full to the point of sloshing over with motive, means, and opportunity. There was a feeling that children born into this age of high purpose, wide prosperity, and handsome prospects could be or do anything. It wasn’t a fact. But facts are faint things next to feelings. Facts are acknowledged, feelings are felt.
What makes the Baby Boom different from other generations is the way everybody was feeling we could be or do anything. What unifies the Baby Boom is the way we talked everybody into letting us get away with it.
We know nothing of to-morrow; our business is to be good and happy to-day.
—Reverend Sydney Smith
2
A GOOD AND HAPPY PLACE
Personally speaking (and personally is the only way our generation does speak and personally is the only way a book about the Baby Boom could be written), I think the world we’ve changed should be measured against the world as it was when the Baby Boom was a baby. There was a life we got before we got life by the throat. And personally speaking—in an average kind of family in an average sort of neighborhood in an average part of America—this was a pleasant life, on average.
Among the earliest memories I can summon is one of pure awe, the kind produced by our first glimpse of the Rockies or of enormous surf or, to use a more apt comparison, of anything on the screen when we got our first television. And I do mean anything. Farm Report. Mass for Shut-ins. The Today Show with Dave Garroway, coanchored by a chimpanzee named J. Fred Muggs. (Not as attractive as Katie Couric but as incisive.)
However, we didn’t get a television until the average— 50 percent by 1953—American household did. So I’m standing at a living room window, chin on the sill, watching the big kids walk to school.
All children, at all times, have wanted to be adults, except the Baby Boom. We wanted to be older, greater children. There were plenty of them going by my house. Every neighborhood had lots of kids in those days, though “the baby boom” was hardly under way. Come to think of it, every neighborhood had lots of parents. There was a daily parade of generations to be viewed.
I was looking at the march of the Silent Generation. Not that they were silent coming down the sidewalks. They were, I noted with envy, making the glorious racket of free individuals out and about on their own. They seemed, as well as I was able to form such a thought, to be the very personification of riotous autonomy. They did invent rock and roll, after all. Some of them built loud hotrods. Some indulged in clamorous behavior that had the nation fretting about juvenile delinquency.
The Baby Boom would have an ultimately disappointing relationship with the Silent Generation. Sometimes the relationship started with older siblings, more often with the babysitter. My babysitter would play roc
k and roll on our phonograph, and a boy with a ducktail haircut would visit her when the grown-ups were safely gone. Bill Haley and His Comets didn’t sound like much to a child’s ears, thumpy and repetitive, but the music had a kind of disturbed urgency. Children like disturbance. I urgently hoped the babysitter and the boy with a ducktail haircut would do something disturbing, like let me look at the switchblade knife that boys with ducktail haircuts were said to carry or play doctor with each other. (Maybe that happened on the couch after I’d been put to bed, but the generation that was born too late for service in World War II was also born too early for much beyond a dry hump.) As far as I could tell, the most transgressive thing they did was make popcorn without permission.
The Silent Generation seemed to hold an unfulfilled promise of interesting social agitation. The term “Silent Generation” was coined in a 1951 cover article from Time magazine, then as now the digest of what educated cement heads think. Time wrote, “Youth today is waiting for the hand of fate to fall on its shoulders [the Korean War wasn’t fate enough?], meanwhile working fairly hard and saying almost nothing.”
Mort Sahl, Dick Gregory, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and everyone in Monty Python were members of the Silent Generation. Although it turns out they were just kidding. The hand of fate appeared to be always almost ready to fall upon the shoulders of the Silent Generation and turn them into James Dean or Maynard G. Krebs. But they couldn’t quite get the goatee to grow or find a Porsche to crash.
Speaking of fate and its hands, there’s never been a Silent Generation president, unless we count Jimmy Carter, who was technically a member of the Greatest Generation but didn’t graduate from the Naval Academy until 1946. This generational chief executive lacuna is probably the result of what students of the electoral process call “the road trip factor.” Going on a road trip with a Baby Boomer president would be bad enough. Barack Obama having smug disagreements with the GPS, telling it, “This is a debate I want to have.” Bill Clinton driving off the road every time a pedestrian with breasts appeared. George H. W. Bush might have been fun once, before he gave up beer. But think about going on a road trip with Jimmy Carter.
Somehow the Silent Generation was mostly just noise. They are the generation who ultimately surrendered to adulthood. We are the generation who kept fighting the battles of adolescence down to the present day. Between the Baby Boom and the Silent Generation there is a marked difference in outlook, opinion, and polyester Sansabelt pants.
My other glowing toddler memory is Dad coming home from work. The Greatest Generation arrives. The sight of my father driving up the driveway produces an exultant thrill. And not just because he often brought a toy.
We in the Baby Boom had an unadulterated love for our parents that few children, past or future, have matched. Maybe we surpassed what other children felt for their parents because, in the past, children grew up in colder and more crowded homes with mushier meals and the razor strap still hanging by the bathroom sink, and, in the future, children had us for moms and dads.
Our parents didn’t get divorced. They didn’t hit us much. If they were neurotic they had the good manners to have a drink instead of a long talk with us about it. They were stricter (or are remembered as being so) than we would be with our kids. But they were less pestering and intrusive. A Greatest Generation parent was as likely to turn up at school blaming a teacher for his kid’s poor arithmetic grade as Xi Jinping is likely to turn up at Amnesty International blaming Bono for his country’s poor human rights record. Our parents may have been distant by modern standards, but a certain distance is helpful in adulation.
I remember riding in the car with my mother, lolling around on the front seat as children were allowed to do. I looked at her face, sunlit in profile, and was so stricken by her beauty and so overwhelmed by my love for her that I despaired of any adequate positive expression of my feelings and reached over and pulled the hood release on the Buick.
And only a few years later we would hold this generation in categorical contempt. During the 1960s we would talk about our parents, as a group, in a way that today we would be embarrassed to talk about militant Islamic fundamentalists, as a group. Our depth and breadth of prejudice would shock every one of our twenty-first-century sensibilities, if we ever thought about it. Which we don’t because, later still, we got all soppy and sentimental about the Greatest Generation just in time to put them in nursing homes or the grave.
In my fledgling recollections, the Jazz Age generation is also somewhere around the house. Every neighborhood had lots of grandparents, too, although their exact function wasn’t clear. They weren’t leading their own lives the way grandparents do today. Nor were they raising the kids their kids had abandoned to their care. They certainly weren’t having second careers. A job did not define a person in the Jazz Age. Jay Gatsby didn’t even have a job. One career, at the very most, used to be considered enough.
Grandma’s 1920s had had flaming youth, rude manners, shocking fashions, permissive sex, illegal drugs in the bathtub gin, atrocious music, and sillier dancing than a Grateful Dead concert’s. Everything the Baby Boom set out to do in the 1960s had been done already, forty years before. But, suddenly and completely, it had disappeared.
Our beliefs and behaviors would live on. After another forty years (and counting) we can tune in NPR, turn on MSNBC, or drop out on the couch with the Sunday New York Times and be reimmersed in our groovy notions of yore. We can visit Burning Man, an Occupy Whatnot demonstration, or Portland, Oregon, and see our bygone selves replicated with a few additional piercings and neck tattoos.
If we weren’t so used to this it would be astonishing—as though we’d arrived on campus in 1967 to find all the coeds in cloche hats with stockings rolled down to their knees and “Oh You Kid” written in grease pencil on their yellow rain slickers, singing “Yes! We Have No Bananas” and voicing strong opinions on the pressing question of whether girls should bob their hair.
Were the twenties a failed experiment at having a sixties, like a first attempt at a space launch blowing up on the pad? Or do anomalies in youthful Weltanschauung pop up from time to time in a meaningless fashion? There’ve been such blips in the past—the Romantic movement, the French Revolution. But they didn’t have a generation like the Baby Boom to make it stick.
Still, it is a mystery how the flappers and whoopee makers and bright young things wound up as our grandparents, wearing aprons over ugly, flowered housedresses or baggy pants mismatched to old suit coats, puttering in the garden, muttering to themselves in the kitchen, and looking out over the tops of their bifocals puzzled at our 1950s childhood world, which was, one would think, so much less puzzling than the hip flask and 23 skidoo world that had been theirs.
Actually, my own grandmother would have been the wrong person to ask about these things. Presbyterian daughter of a downstate county sheriff and widow of a postmaster appointed by Calvin Coolidge, she was the kind of Republican who was still mad at Roosevelt—Teddy Roosevelt, for splitting the Republican Party in 1912 and allowing a Woodrow Wilson to be elected. (There are hazards in generational generalizations.) But I had another elderly relative. As far as I knew he was a retired supermarket meat cutter whose main interest was pitching horseshoes. One time in my twenties I deigned to sit and talk with him—it was Christmas or something. He had played trumpet in the band at a speakeasy with a whorehouse upstairs.
Numerous mysteries would unfold and were unfolding in the quotidian existence of the 1950s. The idea that we had an uncomplicated and sterile past is an invention to flatter ourselves about our complex and richly organic present.
There was the mystery of what was in the attic. Something large and horrible, I was sure. The door to the attic stairs opened into my room. I couldn’t go to sleep until I’d checked two or three times to make sure that the hook and eye latch was fastened. I don’t recall considering what kind of large and h
orrible thing would be stopped by a small hook and eye in a cheap hollow door. Anyway, there was something worse in the basement. To be sent down there after dark to get a clean pair of socks for school the next day was to experience fear beyond telling. And the night wind gave dreadful clawing shapes to the branches on the tree in the front yard.
Never mind that the house had been built the year before. The tree still had the fabric from the plant nursery wrapped around its trunk and was under four feet tall. The basement was brightly lit, as yet uncluttered, and so clean and dry that I could smell the concrete curing in the foundation. And the cobweb-free attic barely had room for the two suitcases and one broken cane chair it contained. We are an imaginative generation.
Our parents weren’t. Or, rather, they deliberately chose not to be. Our parents put a lot of thought and planning into the avoidance of imagination. This is the solution to the mystery of the houses we grew up in, which were too ugly to have been designed and decorated simply by accident.
Every imaginable disaster seemed to have occurred in our parents’ lifetime—financial panic, sudden spread of grinding poverty, absurd popular ideologies, fanatical governments, systematic murder of millions of innocents, military conflict everywhere in the world, and the invention of a bomb that would obliterate a whole city. For any further imagination, our parents had no use.
The exception was their cars. With automobiles the Greatest Generation let imagination take flight, almost literally, given the aviational sheet metal on some of their vehicles. The cars of the 1950s and ’60s are a byword, almost a synonym, for crass materialistic excess. Intellectuals, to this day, lodge particular complaint against the tail fins. Perhaps they take the ornamental use of fins personally, many intellectuals being fishy types. But upswept rear fenders and the equally inveighed against lavish application of chrome are the least of what make the era’s American cars astounding.