Talkin’ ’bout my generation
I have always despised the baby boomers, for obvious reasons: I thought I was one of them.
I hate everything about them: their reckless self-absorption; their ghastly, repetitive music; their timorous, by-the-book attitude toward child rearing. Lately, boomers like filmmaker Ken Burns and columnist Tom Friedman have taken to delivering pompous graduation speeches, apologizing for bollixing up the world. Burns claimed to this year’s Boston College grads that his generation has “squandered the legacy handed to them by the generation from World War II.’’
What bosh. Five words for Ken and Tom: Sit down and shut up.
Finally, there is some good news on the generational front: I am not a baby boomer. That is according to my friend Joshua Glenn (born in 1967; occupation: “freethinker’’), who has written a half-serious but completely hilarious essay about post-boomers’ “Stockholm Syndrome,’’ meaning their intellectual imprisonment in a debased culture not of their own making.
“This summer, for example, we’re all required to watch blockbuster movies (‘Star Trek,’ ‘X-Men’) based on TV shows and comics originally created for the amusement of boomer young adults,’’ Glenn writes on the website hilobrow.com
. “We’re also supposed to pony up the big bucks to see boomers (Bruce Springsteen, Billy Joel, Elton John, Fleetwood Mac, the Eagles, Jimmy Buffett) and the boomers’ idols (Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones, Simon and Garfunkel) wheeze out their golden oldies on much-hyped tours.’’
Glenn has devoted considerable time - too much time, frankly - to slicing up the post World War II generations not as the Census Bureau does but into narrower, more meaningful tranches.
For instance, he eschews the media-generated labels of “Gen X’’ and “Gen Y’’, substituting instead “The PC generation’’ (born 1964-73) and “The Net Generation,’’ (born 1974-83).
Amusingly, he calls my generation (born 1954-63) “The Original GenXers:’’ “The Original Generation X is cynical, ironic, skeptical - which is not the same as directionless, nihilistic, or depressed!’’ he insists. “OGXers had a front-row seat for the Reagan Revolution, during which they saw ‘liberal’ become a pejorative term, as many Americans recoiled from the various liberation movements (sexual, feminist, gay, ethnic) of the Sixties and Seventies.’’
Glenn finds it unsurprising that my generation has embraced either conservatism, or the “soft ideologies’’ of ecologism and antiracism, instead of, say, social justice. Overall, he calls my generation “slacktivists,’’ not passive or apathetic, but not placard-wavers either.
But here is the important news: The hateful boomers (“conservative liberals, socialist capitalists, mainstream outsiders, millionaire populists,’’ Glenn calls them) have finally lost their grip on the presidency.
In his book “The Audacity of Hope,’’ Barack Obama (born 1961) dismissed the “psychodrama of the baby boom generation - a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago’’ in favor of his agenda of hope and change, yadda yadda yadda.
So the president is an Original GenXer, and he smokes. That’s two for two, and counting.
The book is intended for the general reader, but it’s not service journalism, and it doesn’t traffic in smiley-faced pabulum about how wonderful it is that nonagenarians finally have time to learn Spanish. It’s depressing.
Rosofsky bounced the question to his agent, John Thornton, who successfully sold the book to Penguin.
“[Beam] has identified, in my view, not the problem with the book but its achievement,’’ Thornton wrote. “It provides the uninitiated, i.e., most of us, a fresh and lively view into another world. Sure it partakes of various genres, but the best books always dwell in the spaces between categories.’’
Alex Beam is a Globe columnist. His e-dress is beam@globe.com. 