In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Dear Baby Boomers,

zuzu

It’s been almost 40 years since Woodstock. The babies conceived there are getting gray hair and crow’s feet and are old enough to run for President themselves. Some of them have kids who are old enough to fight in the current war. Remember that one?

Can we move on, please?

Love,

Zuzu, b. 1968.

P.S. Women weren’t eligible for the draft in 1969, nor for combat jobs as volunteers. Some of your fellow Republicans, however, were.

h/t Mnemosyne.

134 thoughts on Dear Baby Boomers,

  1. I agree with McCain that dropping a million taxpayer bucks on a museum to commemorate a three-day concert is asinine.

  2. If we can spend gazillions of dollars on looking for weapons of mass destruction that don’t exist, I don’t see why we can’t spend a minute fraction of that money to commemorate something that really happened and that actually does exist.

    But hey, I know John McCain prefers to spend money on phantoms, so don’t mind me.

    And BTW, he has a lot of nerve talking about a “major pharmaceutical event” when his party is the one chasing hallucinations. And wasn’t Mrs McCain in rehab for a major pharmaceutical event of her own?

    Glass houses. Stones. Discuss.

  3. In case it hasn’t come across, the solipsism of the Baby Boomers often drives me up the fucking wall.

    Yes, I’m sure Woodstock was a lot of fun. But the rest of us don’t care.

  5. Woodstock IS a tourist destination in upstate New York and a museum would mean jobs for rural New York. Woodstock festivals were also held in the 80’s and 90’s so maybe there would be interest for those under 50. I know the idea of the government actually stimulating economic growth is considered bizarre to today’s left- who apparently are more interested in making ageist slams.

  7. I know the idea of the government actually stimulating economic growth is considered bizarre to today’s left- who apparently are more interested in making ageist slams.

    What’s ageist about pointing out that the world has moved on since Woodstock, and that Presidential candidates really need to stop rehashing the cultural wars of their youth?

  8. That’s a generation that needs to grow up and stop living in the past.

    If this is just a thread celebrating ageism and condemning entire generations of people, by all means, let me join in… wait, no, won’t play. Will. Not. Play.

    It’s a full moon, everybody. Sorry for sounding like an old hippie, but sometimes people get particularly aggravated when the moon is full, you know?

    Peace and love! (((kisss kissssss))) Flowers are better than bullets!!!!!

  9. What’s ageist about pointing out that the world has moved on since Woodstock, and that Presidential candidates really need to stop rehashing the cultural wars of their youth?

    Maybe because they aren’t simply “cultural wars”, but determine the authorship of history–which as you know, is written by the victors.

    They were WRONG and we were RIGHT and they can’t forget it. They are determined to re-write the history of the antiwar movement, Ministry of Truth style. Vietnam = down the memory hole. McCain is one of the people who was DEAD ASS WRONG, then as now.

    Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

    If Woodstock had been a Fourth-of-July picnic celebrating the war and Lawn Order (borrowed that term from Abbie Hoffman, may his soul rest in peace) with Bob Hope, Pat Boone and that whole USO-show crowd, he’d be all for having a museum, and call anyone anti-American who disagreed with him.

    And yes, condemning awhole generation (whom I daresay, you haven’t met every single member of) is a trifle ageist, wouldn’t you say?

  10. And yes, condemning awhole generation (whom I daresay, you haven’t met every single member of) is a trifle ageist, wouldn’t you say?

    Who’s condemning an entire generation, Daisy? Why is asking that Presidential candidates address current problems instead of rehashing the problems of their celebrated youth a condemnation of an entire generation?

    Personally, I’m a little tired of having the youthful events of the Baby Boomers presented as the sine qua non of American cultural happenings simply because of the outsized importance which has been attached to the Baby Boom generation.

    Woodstock was a concert whose importance has been overinflated (and whose attendance has similarly been overinflated). The Vietnam War is over, and you might have noticed that we’re in another war right now. One that John McCain isn’t interested in ending, even as he fights the dirty fucking hippies in his head.

  11. Who’s condemning an entire generation, Daisy? Why is asking that Presidential candidates address current problems instead of rehashing the problems of their celebrated youth a condemnation of an entire generation?

    You don’t think some of these posts are insulting? Well, if you don’t., can’t change your mind.

    Personally, I’m a little tired of having the youthful events of the Baby Boomers presented as the sine qua non of American cultural happenings simply because of the outsized importance which has been attached to the Baby Boom generation.

    Who said that? I am talking about the legacy of Vietnam, which has everything to do with what is happening right now. Who do you think is in charge of the Pentagon and the military, if not men who earned their rank during Vietnam, guys exactly like McCain?

    That is what this is really about. Were the 60s/70s just a party? If you think so, the conservatives have won half the battle, right there.

    I believe that time period represented unprecedented cultural revolution, as people challenged sexual, racial, economic, psychological, educational, and military repression. If you don’t think so, please have a look at TV-LAND, Ozzie and Harriet, Andy Griffith, I LOVE LUCY, and so forth.

    If they can successfully reduce all of that to just a party, they have finally won the propaganda war, which they’ve been attempting ever since Nixon was impeached.

    Woodstock was a concert whose importance has been overinflated (and whose attendance has similarly been overinflated).

    Woodstock was a cultural marker, and as much as I like the music, et. al., the flip side of that cultural marker was the Manson family murders, which literally happened at the same time. I do not romanticize either one, and I see them as Yin/Yang.

    The Vietnam War is over, and you might have noticed that we’re in another war right now.

    And the lesson of Vietnam was: Never again a draft army, and we might be able to fight until infinity. It was right there in the Pentagon Papers. Nixon dutifully abolished the draft, stating that he had shit-canned the antiwar movement, not just the present one, but for all time.

    Looks he was right, huh?

  13. Who said that? I am talking about the legacy of Vietnam, which has everything to do with what is happening right now. Who do you think is in charge of the Pentagon and the military, if not men who earned their rank during Vietnam, guys exactly like McCain?

    That is what this is really about. Were the 60s/70s just a party? If you think so, the conservatives have won half the battle, right there.

    Actually, what’s happening right now has a lot to do with a generation unable to let go of the cultural conflicts of its era. What else have the past few elections been about?

    The military did learn its lesson after Vietnam, and had built up a professional force again by the time Clinton left office. But the military is ultimately overseen by the civilian leadership, and the civilian leadership in this case has broken the military because it can’t let go of the Vietnam era, including the draft and the protests. They know the country would never accept another draft, so they stretch the military to its limit and beyond, even as they refuse to urge their kids to sign up and try to cast war protesters as dirty fucking hippies stuck in the 60s. Instead of, oh, seeing the cultural landscape for what it is now instead of looking back 40 damn years.

    I believe that time period represented unprecedented cultural revolution, as people challenged sexual, racial, economic, psychological, educational, and military repression. If you don’t think so, please have a look at TV-LAND, Ozzie and Harriet, Andy Griffith, I LOVE LUCY, and so forth.

    The real cultural revolution during the 60s had a lot less to do with what’s on TV Land and more with what was happening in the Civil Rights Movement. Which itself had fuck-all to do with Woodstock. Even the anti-war movement had a great deal to do with self-interest, as young white middle-class men faced being drafted.

    As for it being “unprecedented,” I think you’re giving short shrift to earlier cultural revolutions, such as suffrage and the Roaring 20s hot on the heels of the Victorian era, and what got started during Reconstruction.

    If they can successfully reduce all of that to just a party, they have finally won the propaganda war, which they’ve been attempting ever since Nixon was impeached.

    I’m going to ignore the insult to my intelligence. Look, people not part of the Baby Boom generation are really not all that wrapped up in its cultural markers. We just don’t care. And, like I’ve been saying, there are a huge number of people in this country who’d really rather our Presidential candidates address the country’s current issues than bring up 40-year-old grudge matches.

  14. ***Woodstock was a cultural marker, and as much as I like the music, et. al., the flip side of that cultural marker was the Manson family murders, which literally happened at the same time.

    Don’t forget Altamont, the ANTI Peace, Love, and Flowers concert.

  15. Actually, what’s happening right now has a lot to do with a generation unable to let go of the cultural conflicts of its era. What else have the past few elections been about?

    Amen. Clinton’s “I didn’t inhale.” Kerry didn’t deserve his 40 year old medals. Bush going AWOL from his safe stateside duty. Gore serving with a typewriter, not an M-16. Etc.

  17. zuzu said:

    Even the anti-war movement had a great deal to do with self-interest, as young white middle-class men faced being drafted.

    Aren’t most movements about self-interest? I don’t fight transphobia/sexism/homophobia/biphobia/etc for other people’s benefit. And as a white anti-racist I tend to gain a lot out of finding solidarity with people of colour as long as I’m doing a good enough job of being an anti-racist.

    The most suspicious movements are those with a professed altruistic intent. 3/4 of the time they don’t know (or fail to seriously question) what they should be doing to dismantle oppression, and nearly all the time they want brownie points for being so cool which defeats the point in the first place anyway.

  18. Interestingly, Daisy, you’re pretty much making my case for me.

    The Baby Boomers are not the be-all and end-all of American culture and history. A lot of history happened before you were here, and it will continue after you’re gone and your great-great grandchildren look at the Woodstock memorial and think, “Wait, it was a concert and they have a memorial to it?”

    What us non-Baby Boomers are a little tired of is having to watch the Baby Boomers fight the same cultural battles over and over again. We’re trying to point out the disintegration of our infrastructure since the 1970s and John McCain’s response is, “Look! Hippies! Don’t you hate hippies?”

    Well, no, John. A lot of us have no opinion about the hippies, what with not being Baby Boomers and all, and therefore not giving a shit.

    In case it’s not clear, the problem here isn’t that people went to Woodstock. The problem is that the people who are running the damn country are still obsessed with who did and didn’t go to Woodstock instead of thinking about, you know, current problems.

    I know the right-wingers are convinced that they can win the culture war of the 1960s retroactively, but the solution is not to say, “Nuh-uh, we were cooler than you losers!” The solution is to say, “Grandpa, can’t you live in the present and stop talking about how the hippies were mean to you when you were a kid?”

  19. Who do you think is in charge of the Pentagon and the military, if not men who earned their rank during Vietnam, guys exactly like McCain?

    Actually, a lot of people in charge of the Pentagon and the military were draft-dodgers or AWOL/deserter types who are so insecure about not having gone to war that they have to grotesquely overcompensate by fighting wars of choice while beating their chests. That’s the real legacy of Vietnam — that by throwing stones at dirty hippies the right can score points about war and cowardice while being stuffed to the gills with cowards who love the idea that war is for other (poor) people.

    Still has fuck-all to do with Woodstock, really. But count me in as another person who’s sick to death of white, upper-class Baby Boomers beatifying themselves for either being awesome hippies or being awesome opposers of hippies. When the years passed, the bulk of the generation went corporate and chickenshit, commodifying everything, including any prior commitment to the liberal side of the upheavals of the 60s.

    Oh, and P.S., on the “ageism” claim — which generation insists on assigning generational markers to every generation after it (Gen X “slackers,” the “narcissists” of Gen Y, the “Quiet Generation,” etc.)? When Baby Boomers quit engaging in generational classifications and tsk-tsk-ing every generation that comes after it for whatever the hell it thinks younger people aren’t doing in the same way that the Baby Boomers did things, then I’ll stop making generalizations about the Baby Boomers. If that’s ageist, so is everything said about every generation that’s followed the Baby Boomers.

  20. Aren’t most movements about self-interest? I don’t fight transphobia/sexism/homophobia/biphobia/etc for other people’s benefit. And as a white anti-racist I tend to gain a lot out of finding solidarity with people of colour as long as I’m doing a good enough job of being an anti-racist.

    The most suspicious movements are those with a professed altruistic intent. 3/4 of the time they don’t know (or fail to seriously question) what they should be doing to dismantle oppression, and nearly all the time they want brownie points for being so cool which defeats the point in the first place anyway.

    Absolutely true, but somehow, this mythology has been built up around the Vietnam anti-war movement, that it was Different and Special because those who were protesting were Different and Special and Much More Politically Engaged Than Kids These Days, and God, Why Are You So Apathetic?

    The fact that it was largely driven by self-interest seems to be left out of the mythos.

    Can you tell I’m a member of Gen X who got just a leeetle tired of Boomer professors griping about how apathetic my generation is, compared to the Principled and Selfless Souls of the 60s?

  21. As for it being “unprecedented,” I think you’re giving short shrift to earlier cultural revolutions, such as suffrage and the Roaring 20s hot on the heels of the Victorian era, and what got started during Reconstruction.

    I didn’t live through those times, and cannot witness to them. I am simply talking about what I saw, in my own family and community. “Unprecedented” meaning, for instance, that I was taught black people would never live in my neighborhood, and within about two months, there they were. Unprecedented. (and it was, they had never lived there before)

    We just don’t care.

    If I don’t care about something, I usually don’t bother writing about it.

    If I don’t care, I usually don’t even realize I don’t care, until someone informs me.

    Okay, whatever. But it’s interesting, considering the other thread, about why some women don’t identify as feminists. I guess we’re just too old, huh? You make sure you tell us YOU DON’T CARE. Old broads like me and Hillary need to STFU, huh? We should just GO AWAY.

    You know, I get that message a lot lately, so I’m sorry if I am over-sensitive about it. (How is that any different from the culture at large, telling postmenopausal women we are of no importance?) That kind of thing hurts, you know?

    And of course, I hate seeing anyone agree with John McCain attacking Hillary.

    PS: I agree, norbizness, that the music at Monterey was far better.

  22. “The real cultural revolution during the 60s had a lot less to do with what’s on TV Land and more with what was happening in the Civil Rights Movement. Which itself had fuck-all to do with Woodstock.”

    Dingdingdingding.

    I’d vote for a million bucks spent on a museum on Vietnam war protesters, but not for one on Woodstock.

  23. And of course, I hate seeing anyone agree with John McCain attacking Hillary.

    Oh, hold the fucking PHONE, lady.

    You think anyone is siding with McCain? Who?

    If I don’t care about something, I usually don’t bother writing about it.

    If I don’t care, I usually don’t even realize I don’t care, until someone informs me.

    You haven’t read a damn thing anyone’s written here about why this is annoying, have you?

    Okay, whatever. But it’s interesting, considering the other thread, about why some women don’t identify as feminists. I guess we’re just too old, huh? You make sure you tell us YOU DON’T CARE. Old broads like me and Hillary need to STFU, huh? We should just GO AWAY.

    Oh, Jesus Christ. First Stalin, now this.

  24. the Principled and Selfless Souls of the 60s

    Plus they were crazy sexist, too. The advent of the birth control pill meant women were more for the release of male sexual tension, than to fill any significant role in the peace or civil rights movements.

  25. The advent of the birth control pill meant women were more for the release of male sexual tension, than to fill any significant role in the peace or civil rights movements.

    Chicks up front.

  26. Look, people not part of the Baby Boom generation are really not all that wrapped up in its cultural markers. We just don’t care.

    Speak for yourself. I care. Each generation that moves us closer to equity and fairness has markers. The BB’s had Woodstock & many more. $1M for a museum? Go for it. It’ll be great for the area (kudos to shinybear) as well.

    And the entire post was so ageist, it’s embarrassing. By stating, “Dear Baby Boomers…” you addressed an entire generation and played into McCain’s hands.

    My opinion of GenX’s cultural marker? The first Lollapallozza. And if in 20 years we can get a museum to it or the idea of cultural concerts, I think that would be pretty nifty.

  27. I agree with McCain that dropping a million taxpayer bucks on a museum to commemorate a three-day concert is asinine.

    The US Festival rocked!

  28. Zuzu, you don’t by any chance have high blood pressure, do you?

    I assumed you were siding with McCain, telling Hillary to knock it off. Weren’t you? What were you saying, then?

    McCain, you realize, is no baby-boomer. Hillary is. Who, then, is the thread about, if the title is addressed to Baby-boomers???

    EKF, excellent points, about the historic revisionism… they started saying “Vietnam-Era veteran” around 1984, by my estimation… that way guys could say “I’m a Vietnam-era veteran!” even if they were stateside, answering telephones. And now, Lindsey Graham (my senator, God help me) says he is a Gulf War veteran, and when you investigate, it’s Gulf War ERA veteran. Say what?

    I know the right-wingers are convinced that they can win the culture war of the 1960s retroactively, but the solution is not to say, “Nuh-uh, we were cooler than you losers!”

    Um, is that what you think it is? How about “Nuh-uh, you people committed genocide against Cambodia!” A little different, doncha think?

    Interestingly, Daisy, you’re pretty much making my case for me.

    What case? The case that you don’t care? If you don’t care, there can’t be any case to be made. A case is only made by people who DO care.

    But in any event, I will graciously back out of the thread, so you youngsters can have fun sneering at me, Hillary, Jimi Hendrix, etc etc.

    Peace and Love!!!! (((inserts flower in gun barrel)))

  29. they are just bitter – either they were hiding from the draft or sitting in pow cell they wouldn’t have been in if the US had actually listened to the dirty fucking hippies. (who were having all sorts of sex as well – oh ick).

    As a late boomer (13 when woodstock went down) i have to say this obession with woodstock on the right and on the left i guess just boggles my mind – pretty good concert – not a bad film – but come on – it’s like almost 40 years – can we just move the hell on?

    mabye i’m just a little upset that Johnny rotten isn’t being used as a menace anymore.

  30. I’m a so-called Baby Boomer and Woodstock meant nothing to me. Neither did Monterey, the Summer of Love, or whatever. The most defining musical event of my young adult live was Live Aid.

    So why am I considered a boomer?

    The oldest boomers are only five years younger than my mother. Paul McCartney, one of the rock stars of the Baby Boomers, is my mother’s age. I was 8 when Woodstock happened and 9 when the Beatles broke up and 3 when Jack Kennedy was assassinated. No one my age could be drafted because the draft ended before I was 18.

    So why am I a boomer?

    Why are people born between 1945 and 1963 lumped into the same generation? Gen X, Gen Y, Gen Z or whatever the hell the “next generation” is called aren’t lumped into one big 17-year span.

    And unfortunately, my generation was the first to have its adult life established under Reagan. (shudder)

    So a pox on everyone’s generation.

  32. Atrios is on board with the hippie hating.

    Speak for yourself. I care. Each generation that moves us closer to equity and fairness has markers. The BB’s had Woodstock & many more. $1M for a museum? Go for it. It’ll be great for the area (kudos to shinybear) as well.

    I actually don’t care one way or the other about the museum. If the local government thinks it will be a boon to the local economy, they should spend what they think will draw the tourists.

    What bugs me is Old Man McCain complaining that the hippies were mean to him 30 years ago, so therefore we should elect him President. Get over it and live in the present, dude. If I run for President, I’m not going to complain about those bastards who went to the US Festival and how they’ve ruined America. Because it was a music festival and it was twenty years ago.

  33. I assumed you were siding with McCain, telling Hillary to knock it off. Weren’t you? What were you saying, then?

    We were telling McCain to STFU and talk about something other than who was doing what in the 1960s.

    As I recall, Hillary almost never talks about the 1960s. Because she’s actually living in the present, unlike McCain.

    I have no idea how you turned a slam against McCain’s obsession with the dirty fucking hippies into a slam against Hillary.

  34. I assumed you were siding with McCain, telling Hillary to knock it off. Weren’t you? What were you saying, then?

    Daisy, who brought Woodstock into the campaign in the first place? That would be John McCain. Who’s using it to attack Hillary.

    He’s fighting a war against the dirty fucking hippies in his head, represented by Hillary Clinton.

  35. Each generation that moves us closer to equity and fairness has markers. The BB’s had Woodstock & many more.

    Woodstock moved us closer to equity and fairness?

    And the entire post was so ageist, it’s embarrassing. By stating, “Dear Baby Boomers…” you addressed an entire generation and played into McCain’s hands.

    You’ll forgive me if I don’t agree with your assessment.

  36. And the entire post was so ageist, it’s embarrassing. By stating, “Dear Baby Boomers…” you addressed an entire generation and played into McCain’s hands.

    My opinion of GenX’s cultural marker? The first Lollapallozza. And if in 20 years we can get a museum to it or the idea of cultural concerts, I think that would be pretty nifty.

    WTF? Telling me what the cultural marker of my generation is, isn’t ageist? Especially when you picked something with no relevance to any GenXers I know at all, but just happens to echo what you want to call such a big cultural marker for your generation?

  39. And unfortunately, my generation was the first to have its adult life established under Reagan. (shudder)

    Also scary is having your adult life established under Dubya. (shudder to the max)

  40. LOL. Yeah, I get told that a lot. I’d have pegged it as early punk, before the poseurs showed up, which was the total opposite of slacking, but since I can never figure out where the generational divides have been re-drawn today, who can tell.

  41. Daisy, it would appear to be ageist if it is addressing all baby boomers. However, I get the sense it was directed at those like McCain, telling him to get out of the past.

    Though I did see some bashing of the baby boomers in the thread, which probably didn’t help the concept that the whole thing was about bashing them.

    However, I have noted calmly discussing such things isn’t really helpful to a blog when it’s just easy for everybody to attack. Overgeneralizing is a serious shortcoming in every generation.

  43. Besides it’s all fairly normal. Those born in the 60’s didn’t really care about the experiences of those prior to them who went through the depression or WWII. I’m a so called baby boomer myself because I was born in 1960. Baby boomers was only meant as a term because of the large number of births during a certain time period, and it encompasses several generations from 1945 to 1964 (some say 1965). Can’t say I’ve every really identified myself by a term that is only because of my birthday.

    Whatever my experiences in the past, I don’t expect the succeeding generation to either identify with or even care much about. It’s not their experience, and that is what they will care. The same thing happens to every generation and will continue to do so in the future.

  44. The problem is that the people who are running the damn country are still obsessed with who did and didn’t go to Woodstock instead of thinking about, you know, current problems.

    Don’t you think that’s deliberate, though? They think they can generate a lot of self-righteous sound and fury without having to address actual problems, because if they did, they’d have to talk about the fact that the Republicans are responsible for most of them, these days.

    The advent of the birth control pill meant women were more for the release of male sexual tension, than to fill any significant role in the peace or civil rights movements.

    That’s not exactly true. Certainly the men of the New Left were disgustingly sexist and treated their female counterparts dreadfully, for the most part. But women played huge and significant roles in both the civil rights and the anti-war movements. Women powered the civil rights movement, and women were active in all the New Left organizations such as SDS and the Weathermen. In fact, it was the sexism those women faced despite the professed commitment to equality of their male colleagues that helped to spark second-wave feminism. Women weren’t just bedding in these cultural upheavals.

  45. The biggest issue I have with the Boomers is how the historical narrative from the 1950s on seems to be almost entirely from their perspective. It’s the Forrest Gump approach to history.

  46. Whatever my experiences in the past, I don’t expect the succeeding generation to either identify with or even care much about. It’s not their experience, and that is what they will care. The same thing happens to every generation and will continue to do so in the future.

    Ironically, one of the things that got us into Vietnam was that the leaders at the time wanted their own little WWII-style victory, because they were envious that they’d missed the “good parts” of that war.

    Plus c’est la meme chose, plus ça change…

  47. While I am a member of GenX and got fed up with the crap many in the Babyboomer generation heaped upon us in high school and college. Some of the Vietnam vets I’ve encountered decried the apathy and lack of “patriotism”….those who participated in the anti-war movements were the loudest in condemning my generation’s “apathy”. Neither of the individuals I’ve encountered in both groups bothered to take much time to understand us or the context in which our lives were being lived.

    McCain’s comments on Hilliary betray deep bitterness I’ve heard from many working-class Latino Vietnam vets who were my neighbors. For those who believed in the war, they viewed anti-war protesters as traitors who undermined their wartime efforts…in short… the classic “stabbed in the back” canard used by post WWI nationalists to explain Imperial Germany’s “inexplicable defeat”.

    For the vets who were anti-war or indifferent, they felt the anti-war movement did not do enough to differentiate between mostly working class soldiers who were drafted and the policy makers and military brass who ordered them into Vietnam.

    Both groups viewed the anti-war movement as one populated by upper/upper-middle class White kids who had no problems yelling demonizing epithets towards them when they arrived home…something they viewed as a continuation of the ethnic/class division between the upper/upper-middle class White and working-class Latinos like themselves. Moreover, they realized that many of the kids had some protection from possible retaliation due to their class and race privilege. There was certainly no way the working-class Latino vets felt they could get away with that, especially in the 1960’s.

    To add to the mix is encountering many in the anti-war movement and their like-minded children in high school and college who had a tendency to overromanticize Marx, Lenin, and Mao while ignoring or minimizing accounts of those who suffered living in societies whose leaders attempted to put their theories into practice.

    One example that really hits home is how some of the baby boomer aged faculty looked upon events as the Chinese “Cultural Revolution” as one of revolutionary liberation which betrayed more about their ignorance borne of living a sheltered upper/upper-middle class American life away from the calamities that such events brought on the majority of people living through it. It was a simultaneously amusing and sad experience to have to constantly point out the ill-effects those implemented theories had on actual living people….like my family and childhood neighbors.

    In short, this fight to define the historical legacy of the 1960’s will continue between two implacably opposing groups who were deeply affected by the Vietnam War and its consequences until they hold some sort of a forum to reconcile…..or more likely continue to fight this cultural war until they pass on.

  48. Actually the narrative of history of 1950’s onward would be their history. And you have several different perceptions of that history. There is the ‘good ole boys in power’ narrative, the ‘hippy’ narrative, the ‘civil rights’ narrative, the ‘women’s movement’ narrative. Each has a different perception of the same time.

    And they are going to see current events through the eyes of their experience. Everybody living today will come under the scrutiny of those who are not yet born. And the future might well be just as frustated at your historical narrative of what will be their past. *L* It’s life.

  52. Can just to jump on the ageism bandwagon for a sec- I am really tired of the super sentimentality attached to older generations, whether it’s Ted Koppel’s greatest generation or Baby Boomers or whoever at the expense of the generations (X like mine- Y like my kid) who are stuck with staggering debt and decidedly less opportunity and much more urgent climate issues. Oh and we’ve got our own immoral war too- voted on by many *gasp* Baby Boomers!

    Please- time did not stop in 1969. We Xers are still working on the same things that Boomers were (and many people before them).

  53. Helen…that would be me you were calling ageist. Odd since I picked a cultural marker for my own generation. I’ve never been very hip, so picking festival concerts might be uncool. But that’s me.

    And zuzu…I never said that Woodstock did anything for equity…just that it was a good generational marker, the one thing that the generation is marked by, NOT what did the actual moving society forward. geez…

  54. Daisy, it would appear to be ageist if it is addressing all baby boomers. However, I get the sense it was directed at those like McCain, telling him to get out of the past.

    McCain, I repeat, IS NO BABY-BOOMER. Hillary is.

    I thought this whole thread was addressed to HER since it says DEAR BABY BOOMERS, which is what McCain was also saying. I thought it was a takedown of her silly idea for a Woodstock museum. Isn’t it?

    If not, I respectfully submit the thread be renamed DEAR JOHN McCAIN instead.

  55. jfpbookworm,

    That part may be simply because, unfortunately, those in power now are the ones who were born right around the WWII era. Also they were the ones who came into adulthood in the 60’s. And as exholt said they are very much shaped by their experiences at that time.

    Having been a witness to the 70’s, I can very much agree with exholt. And ever since that time, neither side has seen the other’s side. Right or wrong, or annoying as hell, it still is the perception of those that lived the time.

    Defining our life experiences or our children by our own perceptions of the past is a useless endeavor. Jeez, I remember my father witching about my generation because he was damn sure we couldn’t survive the depredations of the depression. We were too spoiled. Everybody seems to forget that for the most part the human spirit is very adjustable to what it has to do to survive. Decrying the next generation is a really stupid exercise, and rightfully pisses off the members of that generation.

    I think I got off the topic of the thread. Sorry.

  56. Daisy,

    Just my thoughts, but whether it was meant to be directed at Hillary or McCain, I took it as saying quite using the past as a way to dodge current issues. Since it appears both Hillary and McCain were doing that, I saw it as a criticism of that.

    Who the heck knows? I’ve been known to completely miss points all the time. *L*

  57. It’s not Clinton’s “silly idea’ for a museum. The museum is going to happen and it’s going to cost a lot more than $1 million, and it looks like it’s going to be way cool.

  60. But then I’m a sucker for music museums. I spent two hours in the guitar room at the Experience Music Project in Seattle.

  62. McCain, I repeat, IS NO BABY-BOOMER. Hillary is.

    And as I said above, neither are Paul McCartney, Abbie Hoffman, or Robert Altman. Yet they all lived in that time period and heavily influenced what happened during the 1960s. Huey Newton? Not a Baby Boomer.

    Which is, you know, kind of the point. It’s not “were you born specifically between 1946 and 1962?” It’s “did you participate in the seminal events of the 1960s as a young person?”

    John McCain did, just as Paul, Abbie, Huey, and Robert did. You may not want him, but you’re stuck with him.

  63. And, again, I have no problem with Hillary trying to get a measly $1 million for a tourist project in her state. I think it’s silly, but it’s not my state that’s trying to get those tourist dollars.

    But for McCain to find that tiny piece of the budget and blow it up into YET ANOTHER gigantic food fight over who was and wasn’t a hippie is what I’m really fucking sick of hearing about. I don’t care about who was or wasn’t a hippie. I care about what’s happening right now. Stop living in the goddamned past.

  64. Can’t say I’m interested in a museum devoted to Woodstock. *L* If it helps the local economy, that’s cool.

    Ummm, so why are people getting their panties in a twist????? I think I’m missing something.

  65. I think the definition of baby boomer has changed. I did miss something somewhere. *L*

    There’s lots of crossed wires in the thread. It seems some are operating under the literal definition of baby boomer as being those born between 1945 and 1964 (65). Which is what I understand the definition to be. Not as somebody who experienced the 60’s no matter what their age is.

  66. I work in NYC and I’ve been to Woodstock a few times in the last ten years. All I can say is that it is a magnet for the young- much like Haight Ashbury is in SF and every legendary counterculture enclave.

    Woodstock has been a center for the arts and descent for one hundred years. It still attracts the bohemians, the new agers, the nonconformists of all ages.

    The idea that one would only be interested in museums that reflect their own life exprience is silly. There goes Valley Forge. I wasn’t a beatnik but my favorite place to go in San Francisco is City Lights Bookstore- the history there gives my tingles.

    A Woodstock museum will be a celebration of the 60’s counterculture and rock and roll. It’s construction will employ many people. People will be paid to work there and a major tourist attraction like this will help the local community from hotels to restaurants to the crazy crystal loving Mom and Pop hippie shoppes.

    I was born between the generations and like many of you I loathed the boomers for a long time. Finally I learned to get over myself. I started realizing that I was judging indiviuals by a media construction. I started to think about the boomers who I loved and admired. The civil rights activists who died. The soldiers who died in Viet Nam and the peace activists who went to Canada. The first wave feminists- think of the heroism. The first generation hit by AIDS and their valiant activism to fight back.

    I realized that I admired their love of life, their willingness to experiment, their endless questioning of everything imaginable.

    I can’t help it- I love them. They were crazy and cool in their day. We are a better world because of them.

    And we should honor them and their culture in a museum.

  67. I was born in the 80s, and grew up hearing how my computer using generation was a bunch of lazy slackers who didn’t care. I honestly don’t even KNOW what generation I’m suppose to belong to (Generation Y? The Computer Generation?) cause it’s just NOT important to me. What IS important to me is what is going on RIGHT NOW in the world. Bringing up people’s past has always annoyed me in elections. I worry about this generation I am in that seems to be living in an era they weren’t alive to see. Why are so many 20somethings waxing on about Woodstock like they were THERE? Deal with your own current culture. Ya want a awesome concert to support? Pick one of the like, 6 we have every year trying to fight hunger or AIDS or genocide. sorry. Tangent.

    I feel like John McCain is pretty much going, “In the Second Grade, Hillary wet her pants! See, she’s to WEAK to be president!” It’s like, STFU, I don’t CARE. What I care about is how she has changed as a person and what she has done for the world. Not if she inhaled or not.

    Sorry. I have strong feelings about that kind of bullshit McCain is doing.

  68. I worry about this generation I am in that seems to be living in an era they weren’t alive to see. Why are so many 20somethings waxing on about Woodstock like they were THERE? Deal with your own current culture. Ya want a awesome concert to support? Pick one of the like, 6 we have every year trying to fight hunger or AIDS or genocide. sorry. Tangent.

    Hey the kids who hang in Woodstock are probably right with you. They are very much in the now.

    To me this is about John McCain trying to make Hillary seem like a hippie which is ridiculous- she was never that cool- she was always a political nerd. LOL

    I’m just saying that what Hillary and Chuck Schumer want is not silly- it’s a great idea for a rural area that needs to recover from 8 years of Bush.

  69. I don’t see what McCain’s done here as fundamentally “Boomerish”. While the content of his ad employs images from the era of Boomers’ youth, the form of the ad is reflects a style of American politics that’s been repeated many times and is not particular to the Boomer generation.

    McCain is doing two things. First, he’s reminding us of his war service, which is almost never a negative in American political culture. Casting oneself as a war hero when possible goes back to the very beginning of the Republic.

    Second, I would argue, he’s doing an altered version of what was called “waving the bloody shirt” in the years following the Civil War. This was a tactic employed by Republicans who attacked their Democratic opponents by reminding voters that southern secessionists, prior to secession, were Democrats. The idea was to tar Democrats with guilt by association (never mind, of course, that northern and southern Democrats split in 1860, but that’s another story). So he’s reminding voters that while good Republicans were standing up for the nation in the 1960s and 70s, today’s liberal Democrats were busy participating in cultural excesses like Woodstock.

    So, yes, there is on the surface an ongoing conflict rooted in the Boomer generation, but I don’t see McCain’s ad as a particular expression of intragenerational conflict (thought that is part of it). I think it’s a statement that’s more strongly linked to the broader cultural resentments that the right has been stoking for years that it thinks will resonate with its base, which is not age-defined. The Woodstock images are familiar and flamboyant enough for maximum effect.

  70. I think it’s a statement that’s more strongly linked to the broader cultural resentments that the right has been stoking for years that it thinks will resonate with its base, which is not age-defined. The Woodstock images are familiar and flamboyant enough for maximum effect.

    So true. And he’s playing to cultural conservatives because right now the Republicans are all about “I am the MOST conservative”. They are fighting for any right-wing vote they can get. It’s so degrading to watch.

    The moderates and the liberals are all going Democrat next year and they know it.

    Back in the 90’s McCain was all about being moderate and “hip” remember? That was more benificial for him then.

    I so hate politicians.

  71. While the content of his ad employs images from the era of Boomers’ youth, the form of the ad is reflects a style of American politics that’s been repeated many times and is not particular to the Boomer generation.

    I disagree with you to this extent:

    I am 38 years old. I cannot remember a time when the 1960s weren’t an issue in a national election. First it was that Reagan stood up to the dirty fucking hippies in California (he was the one who instituted “fees” for the University of California schools in 1967, which up until then had been free of charge).

    Bush I carried the Reagan torch, fending off the DFH’s with his WWII service. Then came the Clintons, who were of course DFH’s who didn’t go to Vietnam, and we got to hear the right screaming about that for 8 goddamn years. Then came Bush II, who was the “good” Baby Boomer who took a National Guard slot rather than go to Vietnam, and he “beat” Al Gore, who went to Vietnam as an Army journalist. Then we had the election of 2004, which ended up hinging on where John Kerry was on Christmas Eve in 1968.

    And here we are back at 2008, and the election is still about who was where in the 60s, and who was a DFH and who wasn’t, and who supported the Vietnam War and who didn’t.

    When it’s been going on for almost 30 years with the same memes and the same characters dragged out over and over and over again (Hanoi Jane, anyone?), it’s hard to claim that it’s not tied in to a particular generation.

  72. Defining our life experiences or our children by our own perceptions of the past is a useless endeavor. Jeez, I remember my father witching about my generation because he was damn sure we couldn’t survive the depredations of the depression. We were too spoiled.

    Shayne Carmichael,

    Agreed, though it is extremely difficult to do so as our perceptions and perspectives on the world are often strongly shaped by our perceptions of the past. In a sense, they serve as a means for us to make some sort of sense of a chaotic world full of random conflicting information and stimuli.

    I can relate somewhat to your reactions to your father’s criticisms. Many of my aunts and uncles would constantly berate those of our generation for being “spoiled” for not having gone through living the life of a war refugee fleeing marauding soldiers or going days without eating. Much of that talk stopped after they found through mutual college friends that I was studying 5-7 hrs/day, doing 2-3 hrs/day of strenuous exercises, and eating so little that I ended up being unhealthily thin by the end of frosh year in an effort to show those older relatives up.

  73. Ponder this for awhile. Not only are the conservatives trying to rehash the angst of the Vietnam era, but they have been nursing a jealous streak since FDR. The demagoguery that has turned 9/11 from the worst failure of our civilian and military leaders to protect the U.S. to a freaking Christofascist, jingoistic circle jerk is about the inferiority complex of modern US Conservatism. They fucking think Dubya is the Republican FDR. These fuckers think the WOT is their shot to shine politically like the Democrats did during WWII and it appears they will destroy the military and the US economy to do so.

  74. The protesters and hippies were by and large white, suburban, middle and upper middle class kids. The hippy movement deserves no credit to giving women more rights, I’m sorry, I ain’t buyin’ it and I’m tired of aged hippy dudes telling me how hip they are to women and all. Give me a break.

    Who cooked, cleaned, fed and clothed in the communes? Who picked up after the parties? Who got to enjoy free love without consequences?

    That male privilege existed in the righteous hippy utopia enough to cause pissed off female activists to say, WTF?, does not mean by default the hippies get to take credit for the women’s liberation movement.

    By the same token, that white middle class and upper middle class women in the seventies burned their bras and got Roe V. Wade overturned does not mean they get to take credit for the liberation of poor women or women of color. That is a war unto itself, which many (as stated in another thread) of the Righteous Originators haven’t had to bother to notice or care about.

    When each has to fight its own battles, as each must often (to break from oppression of the larger group), then that group gets to claim the prize of victory for itself.

    McCain is attempting to engage in an old class war, a time-worn Republican tactic. Unfortunately, he’s about 20 years too late Ronnie already played that card to the hilt.

  75. Might I also add that as a child of the 70’s I had the honor of witnessing most of the programs of the War on Poverty fizzle away, starved by defunding and entrenched social problems too large for any program to address.

    I saw hippies who graduated high end universities in early seventies turn into high paid professionals who then ushered in the Yuppie generation with a vengeance.

    But this ‘hippie’ and ‘yuppie’ experience speaks only of white middle class folks and frankly, I’m really GD tired of having my life and reality mapped out by the experiences of white middle class folks and nothing else.

  76. Lollapalooza as a Gen X cultural marker? Now I’m a huge music geek, but even so that’s just silly.

    The real Gen X cultural AND POLITICAL marker? I can think of two.

    1. Pro-democracy rallies in Tiananmen Square. Image that everyone of my generation remembers? Young man facing down a tank.

    2. The Berlin Wall comes down. Image? People sitting on top of the wall, pulling people up from either side.

    That’s the funny thing about all the “Gen X is so apathetic” crap. We’re a pretty serious lot, really. We were never apathetic so much as we were depressed.

    About the Woodstock memorial – if it will help stimulate the local economy why not build it? However, attempting to play the dirty hippy card was a pretty underhanded move on McCain’s part. Not that anyone should be surprised by that.

    I’m not sure that the current political elite is still fighting the 60s culture wars so much as they’re attempting to use any remaining tension in the general populace as oart of a cynical marketing campaign. Kind of depressing that it seems to be working.

  77. It’s funny. All these people talking about how the members of the New Left became soulless yuppies–I’m the kid of New Leftists, and I grew up surrounded by them and their friends. They became writers, social workers, teachers, union organizers. And more than one of them grew up working class.

    I think this is a myth. The Yuppie phenomenon came up in the 1980s. For someone to be a young professional–say, in their 20s in the 1980s, he or she would have to be born in the 1960s, maybe the late 1950s. That person would have been too young to be part of the new left in the 1960s.

    It wasn’t the same generation.

  78. McCain missed “the 60’s.” He became a career naval officer in 1958 and was stationed overseas or on naval bases for the first half of the decade, where culturally it was still the ’50’s. By the time the ’60’s went national, beginning with ‘the summer of love’ in 1967, McCain was a POW. All the major events of “the ’60’s” took place from ’67 to ’73. When he was released in 1973, “the 60’s” were just about over.

  79. Count me in as another ageist jerk who’s sick and tired of the Baby Boom generation eternally waxing nostalgic/bitter about the Glorious/Infamous 60s. It’s this mythical age that will never leave the American public precisely because it’s made up more by myths and misconceptions than by actual events. Bleh.

    Anyone have THIS foisted on them by well-meaning friends/relatives?
    http://moreoldfortyfives.com/TakeMeBackToTheSixties.htm

    Yikes.

    ****

    Jeez. Remember when John McCain was actually refreshing and honorable? What happened? Why is he pandering? Too bad.

  81. And here we are back at 2008, and the election is still about who was where in the 60s, and who was a DFH and who wasn’t, and who supported the Vietnam War and who didn’t.

    When it’s been going on for almost 30 years with the same memes and the same characters dragged out over and over and over again (Hanoi Jane, anyone?), it’s hard to claim that it’s not tied in to a particular generation.

    I see what you’re getting at, and perhaps I was stretching a bit in my argument. But I made a mention of “form” (perhaps “method” would have been a better word) to suggest that this kind of harkening towards the past in the manner McCain does isn’t a particular form of Boomer solipsism. That’s why I brought up “waving the bloody shirt”; it continued years after the Civil War ended – even as late as 1896, McKinley’s Civil War service was woven into his campaign style.

    I suppose one could argue that whether this is Boomer-specific or not is beside the point and the fact is that Boomer politicians keep invoking the cultural images and conflicts of their formative years and that they should stop. Maybe, but it seems to me that we’ll be seeing the same kind of thing even after Boomers have passed from the scene: younger folks resenting what they see as the self-centeredness of their elders. That’s not new, either. We’ll see it, Mnemosyne, when we’re the age Boomers are now.

    I might suggest the the issue isn’t with Boomers generally, but rather with a particular subset that has been waging this kind of cultural warfare, repackaging it, and reselling it.

  83. I think this is a myth.

    I had a friend through high school whose parents were very proud of having been to Woodstock, and they were the most conservative, soulless yuppies you could ever hope to meet.

    So, no, not a myth. Just not the people in your social circle. In one of the most affluent suburbs of Chicago, our Woodstockers were firmly settled into corporate jobs and busy raping the economy throughout the 1980s.

  84. I suppose one could argue that whether this is Boomer-specific or not is beside the point and the fact is that Boomer politicians keep invoking the cultural images and conflicts of their formative years and that they should stop. Maybe, but it seems to me that we’ll be seeing the same kind of thing even after Boomers have passed from the scene: younger folks resenting what they see as the self-centeredness of their elders. That’s not new, either.

    Possibly. But I do think that as with all of their other effects on our culture, the Baby Boomers are having an oversize effect on our politics that won’t be seen again in quite a while, if ever. The generation that comes after us will only be slightly larger than our cohort, not enormously larger, and probably won’t have the same history with us that we have with the Boomers.

    Like it or not, the Baby Boomers have been rolling through our culture like an elephant through a python. It’s hard to say what the full effects of that will be in the long run.

  85. I’m not sure that the current political elite is still fighting the 60s culture wars so much as they’re attempting to use any remaining tension in the general populace as oart of a cynical marketing campaign. Kind of depressing that it seems to be working.

    What’s really weird to me is that it’s been picked up and carried forward by younger conservatives like Jonah Goldberg and Michelle Malkin. I mean, seriously, they think that there are still hippies shutting down college campuses? They’re really that concerned about what idiocy Jane Fonda was up to before they were born?

    The 60s meme has taken on a life of its own. Our children will probably be accused of being dirty fucking Woodstock hippies by Jonah and Michelle’s children.

    (Okay, even the thought of Jonah and Michelle cross-breeding made me throw up a little in my mouth. Brrrr.)

  86. Woodstock was a big deal to Baby Boomers
    The Viet Nam war was a big deal to Baby Boomers. The older ones were in it, the middle ones tried to stay out of it, and the younger ones grew up with it. The generational divide? The grunts were boomers and their officers were either Baby Busters like McCain, or Greatest Generation types like Westmoreland, McNamara, etc.

  87. Uh, not all hippies became soulless conservative yuppies nor did all hippies go on to noble higher callings. Pretty much like people tend to do for some bizarre reasons, they settled into all walks of life. There’s been nothing mystical like the hippies going to a higher plane of existence or selling their souls to the devil. Really.

    exholt, yeah, it does bother me that each elder generation seems to have no clue what it does to its own young generation.

    An example: parents of the depression who struggled to make sure his and her children never wanted like they did. Then get pissed because they perceive their children to be weak and unable to fend for themselves if the shit does hit the fan.

    But life in general should tell one that when that shit does hit, people have a tendency to survive no matter how spoiled they were in the first place.

    The odd thing really is that your relatives probably never wanted you or their children to ever suffer what they did. And after they’ve given you that comfortable existence, call you spoiled. It’s sad to dismiss the potential spirit of someone in that manner.

    A funny thing is that in my life, I’ve survived a few things my father never had happen to him. It didn’t matter I was spoiled at one time, I got through it and I’m still here. But I’d be willing to bet that if you told my father in 1972 that I would survive the things I did, he would have laughed and shook his head.

    It’s why I don’t doubt my own kids will manage what life throws at them just fine.

    So if anybody wants to take a lesson from this, it is very helpful to ignore the older generation on this issue.

  88. I think the annoying thing about this ad is that McCain is zeroing in on such a minute thing that might actually bring jobs and tourist money to an area.

    A million dollars for something that seems it might be actually good for a local economy seems like a good deal compared to, say, Ted Steven’s $398 million bridge to nothing.

  89. I’m not sure that the current political elite is still fighting the 60s culture wars so much as they’re attempting to use any remaining tension in the general populace as oart of a cynical marketing campaign. Kind of depressing that it seems to be working.

    This is a more succinct explanation of what I was trying to say (in part) in my earlier responses.

  90. I think that the best reason for the federal government to fund a historical monument at Woodstock is, in fact, to convince the baby boomers that the concert did in fact end and is history, not current events. There is a time and place for federal intervention and the cessation of mass boomer cognitive dissonance is worth the coin.

  91. McCain is doing two things. First, he’s reminding us of his war service, which is almost never a negative in American political culture.

    I’m sorry… did you miss the election of 2004?

  92. That’s why I said “almost never” a negative in American political culture, zuzu.

    If one looks at American elections – especially American presidential elections – more broadly, one sees that candidates who have served in the military almost always make note of that during their campaign. It’s considered a positive, a sign of one’s willingness to serve one’s country and of one’s character. Even if it doesn’t garner you many votes, it’s very rare for that service to be used to attack you by your opponent.

    If we recall, say, the elections of 1996 and 1992, both Bush I and Dole contrasted their World War II service with Clinton’s lack of service in Vietnam, the idea being that they were of a generation that stood up and got the job done as opposed to the self-indulgent irresponsibility of Clinton and his peers. Clinton overcame that by being a smarter politician, a divided electorate and a poor economy (in 1992), and incumbency and an improving economy (in 1996).

    I’d say that the election of 2004 was the exception that proves the rule. John Kerry could not be tarred with the “never served”/”draft dodger” label, especially given Bush II’s own questionable military record. It’s precisely because Kerry’s military service would appear honorable that the Republicans had to attack it by saying that Kerry didn’t really do anything in Vietnam, that he was dishonest about or incompetent at the things he did do, and, most importantly, that Kerry undermined his own service and that of his comrades in arms when he became an antiwar activist.

    There’s a similar strain of this today, when Rush Limbaugh denounces those who are serving in the military who are opposed to the war in Iraq as “phony soldiers”. According to the Republican narrative about Kerry in 2004, the problem with Kerry wasn’t that he was a soldier (well, he was in the Navy, but indulge me here), it’s that he was a “phony soldier”.

  93. So, no, not a myth. Just not the people in your social circle

    Fair enough, but the myth is not “Hey, some of the New Left maintained their radical politics and channelled their energies into teaching, writing, social work, peace activism, feminism, helping student dissidents get out of China, and union organization, and some of the New Left became total soulless assholes, it depends on who they were.”

    The myth is “Hippies are the same people as the New Left, and they all became soulless asshole Yuppies.”

  94. Bah. I hit “post” halfway through by accident. Here’s the rest of it:

    The people in my parents’ circle are no less representative than the assholes you know (although I should add that the New Leftists I knew scorned Woodstock as utter nonsense), but their activities don’t serve a right-wing narrative of devaluing and mocking leftists.

  95. The people in my parents’ circle are no less representative than the assholes you know (although I should add that the New Leftists I knew scorned Woodstock as utter nonsense), but their activities don’t serve a right-wing narrative of devaluing and mocking leftists.

    I bolded that part because I don’t think that’s a coincidence. There were the people who actually worked for social change and continued that work even after it was unfashionable, and there were the people who enjoyed the parties while they lasted and then moved on to corporate jobs, with a lot of people between the two extremes.

    Not unusual (many people flirted with communism in the 1930s and then left it behind) but, again, it gets more attention because of the sheer number of people involved.

  96. Heh. I’m sure my parents and their friends would agree. Never underestimate the power of infighting on the Left!

  97. Heh. I’m sure my parents and their friends would agree. Never underestimate the power of infighting on the Left!

    I thought this might be appropriate:

    LORETTA:
    The People’s Front of Judea. Splitters.

    REG:
    We’re the People’s Front of Judea!

    LORETTA:
    Oh. I thought we were the Popular Front.

    REG:
    People’s Front! C-huh.

    FRANCIS:
    Whatever happened to the Popular Front, Reg?

    REG:
    He’s over there.

    P.F.J.:
    Splitter!

  98. John McCain’s strategy is attacking Hillary Clinton. He needs to get the GOP nomination. He should be more concerned about Giuliani, Romney and Thompson. Wingnuts will see the ad, laugh and then vote for someone else. He needs to go negative against his GOP opponents. Actually, he needs a miracle, but that’s another story.

  99. By the time we got to Woodstock
    We were half a million strong
    And everywhere there was song and celebration
    And I dreamed I saw the bombers
    Riding shotgun in the sky
    Turning into butterflies
    Above our nation
    We are stardust
    (Billion year old carbon)
    We are golden
    (Caught in the devil’s bargain)
    And we’ve got to get ourselves
    Back to the garden.
    – Joni Mitchell

    The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
    – William Faulkner

  100. My only contribution to this conversation is that I am reminded of a South Park episode where they were at some Woodstock-like music fest and the kids were all, “WTF? You’re smoking weed and dancing around and that’s supposed to make anything get better?”

    Preach it zuzu. Thank you for expressing what has been bothering me for a long while.

  101. The grunts were boomers and their officers were either Baby Busters like McCain, or Greatest Generation types like Westmoreland, McNamara, etc.

    Hector B.,

    This generational dichotomization between grunts and their officers is a gross oversimplification. Some of the boomer-aged working-class Latino neighbors I knew as a kid were military officers who got their commissions through West Point or ROTC scholarship programs. Also, one of my boomer aged science teachers served in Vietnam as an Army officer whose commission was derived from attending Army OCS.

  102. Daomadan – it did make things better. You have no idea how sexually repressed we were, how impossible it was to talk about what we felt, how many people were locked into lives that they didn’t want and couldn’t escape because of fear or shame.

    People in the process of becoming liberated look ridiculous. I’ll grant you that. But that doesn’t mean that what we were doing had no value, or that you haven’t benefited from it.

  103. exholt — I’m going basically by when the people on The Wall were born. If your neighbors were officers who engaged the enemy in combat in Viet Nam, they were far more likely to have been born before the baby boom than not.

  104. exholt — I’m going basically by when the people on The Wall were born. If your neighbors were officers who engaged the enemy in combat in Viet Nam, they were far more likely to have been born before the baby boom than not.

    All of them were serving as young lieutenants deployed not too long after graduating from the academy/college/OCS around ’66 – ’69. They were all born at the beginning of the baby-boom cycle (’46 – ’48).

  105. Look, people not part of the Baby Boom generation are really not all that wrapped up in its cultural markers. We just don’t care. Look, people not part of the Baby Boom generation are really not all that wrapped up in its cultural markers. We just don’t care.

    So, why does every musical group under 40 steal “our” music, then?

    Notice I put the “our” in scare quotes, as I’m not subscribing to that generationalist idiocy.

  106. It’s funny. All these people talking about how the members of the New Left became soulless yuppies–I’m the kid of New Leftists, and I grew up surrounded by them and their friends. They became writers, social workers, teachers, union organizers. And more than one of them grew up working class.

    Yeah, and I also don’t recognize this idea of war protestors as rich wite kids yelling slurs at soldiers. My dad and all his cousins are Vietnam vets, we’re latino, and while he’s not a protest-y type of person, he was definitely supportive of the anti-war movement. He always laughs at this idea that soldiers were being abused and spat on, he says the spitting is full stop crap, the only time he ever heard of soldiers being spit on was black soldiers during desegregation/busing when they’d have to let the Black soldiers leave headqurters early for safety reasons, they were being attacked on the streets (not for being soldiers I don’t think though, just in general). And as far as being yelled at, he says that there were so many anti-war soldiers that it was assumed by almost everyone that soldier=anti-war, and the only people who’d treat them like crap were the older Korea and WWII guys down at the VA–“you dirty hippies.” lol

  107. So, why does every musical group under 40 steal “our” music, then?

    What would be covered under “boomer music” that you are implying that we GenX et al are “stealing” from you boomers?

  108. Exholt, you are kidding, aren’t you?

    As a musician and a parent, plus a devotee of public radio stations, I pretty much keep up with modern developments in yoof culture and it is very rare for me to see (outside the hip-hop and R&B genres) bands who aren’t either outright clones of bands from the 60s to 80s, or at least heavily influenced by same.

    It’s become a bit of a game for me, “spot the reference” – Velvet Underground, Led Zeppelin, Go=Betweens or whatever.

    Moreover, since the kids have grown up a bit and I’ve gone to see young bands live, I haven’t been able to escape the feeling that it’s 1982 or 1983. There is really very little difference. (If you think that’s a little late for baby boomers, think again – I was there.)

    But I hate getting sucked into this false frame. Zuzu, rightwingers just love it when people on the left eat each other over false dichotomies like Baby Boomer / Xer / Y gen or whatever. LOVE it. Because it diffuses our effectiveness and takes focus away from the things we need to oppose them on.

    Oops, I forgot there was no we. There’s just you and us, on the different sides of an imaginary fence. How sad, Zuzu.

  109. Honestly, I would fully support taking a little money away from WAR to build a museum to commemorate an event of PEACE. Woodstock was about young people rising up and protesting because the government was doing something wrong – something all generations can learn a great deal from.

    I’m not a baby boomer, not even close. My parents were. But Woodstock isn’t just a baby boomer thing – it’s a symbol of fighting for peace, of caring for each other (even as strangers). I think the symbol would be an even greater one if we could take just a few pennies out of a war fun to pay for a project like this.

  110. Woodstock was about young people rising up and protesting because the government was doing something wrong

    Whoa — I like this line of thinking. But in actuality, Woodstock was three days of sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll — not that there’s anything wrong with any of those.

  111. Moreover, since the kids have grown up a bit and I’ve gone to see young bands live, I haven’t been able to escape the feeling that it’s 1982 or 1983. There is really very little difference. (If you think that’s a little late for baby boomers, think again – I was there.)

    Ah, yes, that Baby Boomer tendency that all of us younger people so appreciate: “If it’s cool, it belongs to us.” Quickly followed by, “All you kids do is imitate us.”

  112. As a musician and a parent, plus a devotee of public radio stations, I pretty much keep up with modern developments in yoof culture and it is very rare for me to see (outside the hip-hop and R&B genres) bands who aren’t either outright clones of bands from the 60s to 80s, or at least heavily influenced by same.

    It’s become a bit of a game for me, “spot the reference” – Velvet Underground, Led Zeppelin, Go=Betweens or whatever.

    Moreover, since the kids have grown up a bit and I’ve gone to see young bands live, I haven’t been able to escape the feeling that it’s 1982 or 1983. There is really very little difference. (If you think that’s a little late for baby boomers, think again – I was there.)

    Helen, you do realize that nothing in “boomer” music was original, either? I mean, Led Zeppelin ripped off Delta blues shamelessly, for instance. No music is completely free of influence, and I find it very interesting that you explicitly except hip-hop and R&B as if they weren’t huge forces in popular music today (and as if R&B were free of influence).

    But I hate getting sucked into this false frame. Zuzu, rightwingers just love it when people on the left eat each other over false dichotomies like Baby Boomer / Xer / Y gen or whatever. LOVE it. Because it diffuses our effectiveness and takes focus away from the things we need to oppose them on.

    Oops, I forgot there was no we. There’s just you and us, on the different sides of an imaginary fence. How sad, Zuzu.

    Well, thank you for your concern, but if you’d bothered to read the post, you might have seen the reference to “your fellow Republicans” there. You might also have noticed that it’s John McCain using the cultural battles of 40 years ago to attack Hillary Clinton. I merely suggested that perhaps we should consider *moving on* from those culture wars in light of the fact that an entirely new generation is fighting in an actual war, one that was started by our Baby Boomer president and his cohorts in order to have a victory after Vietnam (not to mention, a bigger victory than his father had).

    I do find it fascinating how defensive people have gotten (and not just here, at Eschaton and other places) at the mere suggestion that perhaps what happened 40 years ago isn’t of the highest concern to the issues of today.

    Oh, and Helen: what’s sad is that you’d actually consider not airing an issue because it might play into the right wing’s hands. So what?

  113. I don’t know if anyone is still here – but Zuzu, the ‘culture wars of 40 years ago’ is the entire basis for the modern Republican party’s mass appeal. The whole program of the party is that it’s time to get rid of the dirty fucking hippies and the feminists and the abortionists and the atheists, not to mention all the colored people, and put things back the way they were. It’s not enough to roll your eyes and say that this stuff is irrelevant. If you don’t want to return to a world where women stay home and have babies and black people say yassuh and nossuh and anyone who doesn’t love Jesus keeps that to herself, you need to defend what Woodstock represents.

  114. If you don’t want to return to a world where women stay home and have babies and black people say yassuh and nossuh and anyone who doesn’t love Jesus keeps that to herself, you need to defend what Woodstock represents.

    I completely disagree. I think we need to defend all of the improvements of the past 40 years, even the ones that happened after 1969. After all, if we stick to Woodstock, we lose legal abortion — Roe v. Wade wasn’t decided until 1973, four years after Woodstock.

    We’re in the 21st century. Anyone who talks about trying to return to the “good old days” of the 1950s (or the 1960s) needs to be laughed out of the room for what they are: old fogies who can’t stand the fact that the world has changed and they’ve been left behind.

  115. And since I haven’t run off at the mouth enough in this thread yet … 😉

    I think blix has inadvertently hit on what it is that’s driving me absolutely nuts about the fact that Baby Boomers are now in charge of our politics. I really feel as though the people in power right now are spending so much time arguing about whether we should go back to the 1950s or go back to the 1960s that they never even consider that we should be moving ahead.

    You couldn’t have had the 1960s without the 1950s — a huge amount of stuff was papered over during the 1950s and came bursting out during the 1960s, as repressed things always will. But to me, it feels like we’re still fighting the battles of 1967, not 2007.

  116. If you don’t want to return to a world where women stay home and have babies and black people say yassuh and nossuh and anyone who doesn’t love Jesus keeps that to herself, you need to defend what Woodstock represents.

    Well, what *does* Woodstock represent, exactly?

    In any event, I never said Woodstock was bad, nor did I even express an opinion about the museum issue (though plenty of people projected such an opinion onto me).

    I just don’t think that one concert that occurred 40 years ago should continue to have the significance it has both as a weapon and as a positive, given that far more important events occurred both before and after it. Like, say, the Civil Rights Movement, the ERA, Roe v. Wade, the antiwar movement, Watergate, the economic crises of the 70s and 80s, the War on Poverty, the dismantling of the War on Poverty, Ronnie Raygun’s Reign of Terror, Iran-Contra, the erosion of civil and political rights, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the uprising in Tianenmen Square, famines, genocide, the fall of the Soviet Union, the failure of universal health care, wars in the Balkans, the attempted takedown of Bill Clinton, Welfare Reform, the situation in the middle east, the fight for same-sex marriage, stolen elections, hysteria on immigration, terrorist attacks, hysteria about terrorists under the bed, highly expensive and destructive wars of choice that threaten to break the military, the beating of the war drum for Iran, global climate crisis, and Katrina.

    Against that background, Woodstock, which was after all a concert, kind of fades in significance. And yet it’s still being used as a club to beat people with, or as a touchstone of nostalgia, and it’s being used as an issue by Presidential candidates who refuse to let go of their 40-year-old grudges.

    Like I said: can we move on, please?

  117. Well, what *does* Woodstock represent, exactly?

    Well, one thing that Woodstock represented, as Joni Mitchell put it and as I quoted above, was this:

    I dreamed I saw the bombers
    Riding shotgun in the sky
    Turning into butterflies
    Above our nation.

    And if you don’t think that song and others like it helped to fuel the antiwar movement – well, you’re just wrong. The music of the 60s was a form of political communication. Things were said in music that could not be said in any other medium.

    Woodstock was a concert in the way that Stonewall was a riot. You and I live in the space that Woodstock helped to create. McCain hates that space and he hates you, and his invocation of Woodstock stirs the millions of American who join him in their hatred.

    So we can’t move on. It’s naive to think we can.

  118. And if you don’t think that song and others like it helped to fuel the antiwar movement – well, you’re just wrong. The music of the 60s was a form of political communication. Things were said in music that could not be said in any other medium.

    Are you trying to tell me the protest movement didn’t even start until Woodstock, or before “Woodstock” the song was released in 1970?

    Again, the antiwar movement existed independent of, and prior to, Woodstock and would have occurred even in its absence. Why? Because young men (and in particular, middle-class white men) were being drafted, and they didn’t want to fight in an immoral war of choice.

    So Woodstock’s a nice symbol, but what did Woodstock, by itself, change?

    Woodstock was a concert in the way that Stonewall was a riot. You and I live in the space that Woodstock helped to create. McCain hates that space and he hates you, and his invocation of Woodstock stirs the millions of American who join him in their hatred.

    So we can’t move on. It’s naive to think we can.

    Actually, I think that it’s naive to compare Woodstock and Stonewall. Stonewall actually changed things, and was the turning point where an oppressed minority decided to fight back, and it was the one event that galvanized the LGBT movement.

    As for “living in the space Woodstock helped create” — I disagree, strongly. I have yet to see a single post explaining what kind of effect that Woodstock, as an isolated event, has had on the kinds of freedoms that I enjoy today. I posit that it’s not nearly as important as the Civil Rights Movement, the women’s liberation movement or the antiwar movement, all of which predate Woodstock and existed independently of it.

    and his invocation of Woodstock stirs the millions of American who join him in their hatred.

    That’s just another sign we all need to stop living in the past.

  119. The fact is that we have been living through an interesting time in history from WWII on and that there are people walking around who participated in that history. Maybe, for instance, thinking about how people responded t the cold war might have some use in countering your patriot act?

    Re. the music thing, hip hop and R & B aren’t that big in Australia except for a few highly commercial acts. Most of the live bands you’ll see on a saturday night in the pubs and clubs are sixties-style guitar bands, two guitars bass and drums, and they even dress and have facial hair like the woodstock generation. Then there’s a subset that looks and sounds exactly like the “little bands” which sprang up in response to the punk movement in 1977.

    I am quite aware of the appropriation thing – like I say, I’m a musician, I could hardly be unaware of it – but the fact remains that X and Y generation bands like to copy the 60s. I’m just saying that it sits incongrously with a rejection of all things Boomer.

    I take your point, Zuzu, that you’re talking about republicans, but if you hate specifically on BBs then you catch all of them, left and right alike. Your title was “Dear BBs”, not “Dear BB Republicans”. I would have thought a blanket hate of any broad social group would have been against the spirit of this blog.

    Finally, about BBs being in power – besides the fact that the majority of us are working stiffs like me, it’s pretty obvious that older people are often in power. That can be a bad thing sometimes, and sometimes it might be good. When the person isn’t merely trading on seniority, you get good stuff like wisdom and experience. Also, people get better at stuff with practice. And, you know, often you need years to get to that place, especially women with our career interruptions and other barriers. I get the feeling from some people’s writing – and I don’t think it’s overt, but it’s there – that people over 50 should just quietly self-destruct and step aside.

  120. I’m just saying that it sits incongrously with a rejection of all things Boomer.

    Who’s rejecting all things Boomer? Asking that the 60s and the relative importance of the Baby Boomers and their life events be put into some kind of perspective is “rejecting all things Boomer”?

    I take your point, Zuzu, that you’re talking about republicans, but if you hate specifically on BBs then you catch all of them, left and right alike. Your title was “Dear BBs”, not “Dear BB Republicans”. I would have thought a blanket hate of any broad social group would have been against the spirit of this blog.

    You’re going to have to demonstrate my “hatred” of anyone. “Can we move on now?” = hate? Really?

    I guess I’ll be over in the corner, drinking my Haterade.

    I get the feeling from some people’s writing – and I don’t think it’s overt, but it’s there – that people over 50 should just quietly self-destruct and step aside.

    Oh, for fuck’s sake. How is asking that the current people in power get over the conflicts of their youth and start paying attention to the events of today telling people over 50 to go away? They’re ignoring 40 years of history that have gone by and they want to be leaders?

  121. BTW, did it ever occur to you that maybe one reason that bands are recreating the look and sounds of 60s bands is that we’ve been told over and over that those were the best bands evah and they were part of a golden age of music, doing the most important protest singing, etc.?

  122. zuzu, in different eras different art forms have different levels of importance. For a very brief period, from about 1965 to about 1975 or so, popular music became very important as a vehicle of mass communcation and mobilization.

    That doesn’t mean it was great music. Lots of the most important music from a political point of view isn’t very good as music. It wasn’t meant to be art, it was expression of a mass aspiration to a better and more authentic way to live. It played an important role in the political developments of the era – the movement to end the war, the civil rights movement. Feminism came into its own as a political movement only in the 1970s and by that point popular music as a political force was spent, and had pretty much returned to where it was before and where it is today- entertainment mainly, art sometimes, but mostly about personal self-expression. So the music of the 60s is almost entirely uninfluenced by feminism, which is certainly a reason to be skeptical of it. But I believe that modern feminism wouldn’t have been possible without the major culture shift of the 60s, and that culture shift spread and took flight through music.

  123. Helen, you do realize that nothing in “boomer” music was original, either? I mean, Led Zeppelin ripped off Delta blues shamelessly, for instance. No music is completely free of influence, and I find it very interesting that you explicitly except hip-hop and R&B as if they weren’t huge forces in popular music today (and as if R&B were free of influence).

    To second Zuzu’s point, wasn’t music from the 50’s and 60’s ripped off much earlier influences such as African-American originated blues music among other things?

    Though the Boomers did greatly influence the American cultural and political landscape, they are far from the be-all and end-all in terms of originating great music…or progressive political movements as the Boomer dominated politicians, MSM, and many Boomers would have you believe. For a lack of a better term, this attitude strikes me as a form of generational narcissism.

    Unless I am misreading the post and Zuzu’s comments, all she is asking is for the Boomer generation to put their own cultural wars and experiences into perspective and not to inflate their importance to the point they drown out more current concerns.

  124. blix, you’re still not making a case for the independent significance of Woodstock, without it being part of broader cultural forces.

  125. What’s their point of bringing up Woodstock and Vietnam protests? The Boomers and Xers/Millenials have the same ideas. Instead of decrying the apathy of Xers/Millenials, they should join in.

  126. How is asking that the current people in power get over the conflicts of their youth and start paying attention to the events of today telling people over 50 to go away?

    As long as you specify “the people in power”, and not “baby boomers”, that’s perfectly valid. But when you say “baby boomers”, you mean something different from “people in power”. The title of the post was referring to BBs.


    Unless I am misreading the post and Zuzu’s comments, all she is asking is for the Boomer generation to put their own cultural wars and experiences into perspective and not to inflate their importance to the point they drown out more current concerns.

    Because the current concerns – environmental destruction, people in power tricking people into war, patriarchal attitudes – are the same. Sure, if someone is still fighting the Cold War, that’s one thing. But the demons the “dirty hippies” fought against sure haven’t gone away. The chainsaws are still in the forests, the troops still in foreign countries which haven’t invaded us, women still being subjected to the madonna/whore paradigm.

    The bbs and Xers and Y gen are within the same lifetime. It’s still the same world in some ways, although different in others.

    exholt Says:
    October 27th, 2007 at 8:19 pm
    Helen, you do realize that nothing in “boomer” music was original, either? I mean, Led Zeppelin ripped off Delta blues shamelessly, for instance. No music is completely free of influence, and I find it very interesting that you explicitly except hip-hop and R&B as if they weren’t huge forces in popular music today (and as if R&B were free of influence).

    To second Zuzu’s point, wasn’t music from the 50’s and 60’s ripped off much earlier influences such as African-American originated blues music among other things?

    I already answered that one, scroll up…

  127. As long as you specify “the people in power”, and not “baby boomers”, that’s perfectly valid. But when you say “baby boomers”, you mean something different from “people in power”. The title of the post was referring to BBs.

    Gosh, I don’t know, the fact that this was a campaign commercial just might have tipped you off that I was talking about people in power.

  128. I am quite aware of the appropriation thing – like I say, I’m a musician, I could hardly be unaware of it – but the fact remains that X and Y generation bands like to copy the 60s. I’m just saying that it sits incongrously with a rejection of all things Boomer.

    If all music appropriates from earlier forms…especially in the case of 50’s and 60’s popular music….could the boomers lay claim that this music was exclusively theirs in the first place? In short, what the Gen X and Y bands are doing according to your argument is no different from what the 50’s and 60’s artists were appropriating from their musical predecessors. What makes the boomers so exceptional in this regard?

    While the boomers may have popularized certain genres of music due to their sheer size and the music industry’s desire to cash in on that massive demographic…that does not necessarily make the boomers the holy grail from which all subsequent popular music sprang forth. To do so not only gives too much credit to the boomer generation, but more importantly, ignores the contributions of musicians and genres that preceded them.

    Also, I do not think most Gen X, Y, and subsequent generations are necessarily rejecting all things boomer. Rather, I believe they are rejecting the annoying tendency among boomers in power as well as individual boomers to patronizingly dismiss us Gen X, Y, and subsequent generations while overinflating their own importance and in the process drown out our voices in public space.

  129. As long as you specify “the people in power”, and not “baby boomers”, that’s perfectly valid. But when you say “baby boomers”, you mean something different from “people in power”.

    I’m not sure how it is in Australia, but right now we have two Baby Boomers leading our country: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. The chief justice of the Supreme Court is a Baby Boomer. The most recent Attorney General is a Baby Boomer.

    Baby Boomers are the people in power right now. I know you prefer to think of your generation as the beleaguered teenagers that you were in 1969, but it’s 30 years later, and Baby Boomers are running the government here in the US. And, frankly, they’re fucking it up beyond measure because they’re obsessed with “fixing” things that went wrong in the 1960s and early 1970s like Vietnam and Watergate.

    I get the feeling from some people’s writing – and I don’t think it’s overt, but it’s there – that people over 50 should just quietly self-destruct and step aside.

    This from the generation that coined the phrase, “Never trust anyone over 30”?

    If people over 50 are willing to look at the world as it is and pitch in, great. If all you want to do is talk about how great Woodstock was and how These Kids Today are just so greedy and materialistic for complaining about having to take on $30,000 in loans just to go to college then, yeah, you’re not really contributing much to the conversation.

  130. This from the generation that coined the phrase, “Never trust anyone over 30″?

    Can’t you see the irony here? Besides the fact that you are falling for the fallacy that “all” baby boomers said that (Like “all” feminists “burnt their bras”, right?) you are doing kinda similar thing!

    If people over 50 are willing to look at the world as it is and pitch in, great. If all you want to do is talk about how great Woodstock was and how These Kids Today are just so greedy and materialistic for complaining about having to take on $30,000 in loans just to go to college then, yeah, you’re not really contributing much to the conversation.

    See, again, you reckon you’re talking about republican members of the government, but then it’s “you want to do” and “you’re not really contributing much”…

    As if I, or any of the baby boomers I know personally, had said those things. As if all over-50s think those things.

    It’s sad that with the level of awareness on Feministe, ageism is still OK. That’s all I have to say on this.

  131. Helen, you’re way off base if you think that the post is ageist.

    But, hey, if you don’t want to trust anyone under 50 now, that’s fine.

  132. See, again, you reckon you’re talking about republican members of the government, but then it’s “you want to do” and “you’re not really contributing much”…

    It may be different in Australia, but in the US, the Boomer generation ARE dominant in politics, MSM, education, legal, and business establishments.

    More importantly, I personally have encountered plenty of boomers of nearly every political persuasion and in many venues slagging on us Gen Xers as apathetic slackers while they were THE GREATEST GENERATION EVAH!

    This was especially prominent when I was going through school and college/university where most teachers and Profs of that generation would make snide comments that would cause Gen Xers like myself to cringe. This combined with comments from boomer neighbors made it quite clear this slagging, at least in my experience, was not necessarily dominated by republicans or democrats, conservatives or progressive liberals. I’ve had plenty of conservative boomers some of whom were pro-war Vietnam vets berating my generation for lacking patriotism as well as liberal progressive boomers who were anti-war activists decrying my generation’s supposed apathy in being involved in political activism.

    This was especially ironic as most classmates at my undergraduate institution were politically active in various progressive and political causes ranging from assisting teachers in the local school districts to arranging protests against the US military’s School of the Americas. In fact, on-campus protests for various progressive causes were so common it was practically a part of the campus culture. Plenty of other Gen Xers and millenials are actively involved in progressive political activism off-campus…including those who blog and comment on this and other progressive blogs.

    It also does not help that many other Gen Xers like myself were bombarded with boomer framed coverage of my generation in various news media such as the NYT and Time magazine among others throughout the 90’s. Much of that coverage framed my generation in such a way that boomer assumptions about us were assumed and reinforced with little, if any input from us to challenge those assumptions. In fact, it got so ridiculous that even some boomer aged former anti-war activists I knew felt this was over the top. Unfortunately, their numbers paled in comparison to the numerous boomer aged neighbors, teachers, Profs, work supervisors, etc who felt entitled to make snide patronizing comments about my generation’s “apathy” and lack of initiative.

    It just seems like a more aggressive variant on the old canard older generations like to pull on younger generations to puff themselves up by slagging and shaming the young for their supposed shortcomings.

  133. We don’t have a draft and we live in a corporatized fascist state. If there’s a draft, young Republicans will take the streets.

    I say, Bring it on.

    The counterculture/New Left also arose from the Civil Rights Movement and we don’t have a momentous cultural upheaval like that. Racism has gone underground.

  134. We don’t have a draft and we live in a corporatized fascist state. If there’s a draft, young Republicans will take the streets.

    You know, my friends and I would all pay good money to see these young Republicans take to the streets against the draft…especially the ones I’ve seen at a couple of Ivy league schools recently. We can laugh at and film them in all their glorious hypocrisy. Chickenhawks unite!!

    The counterculture/New Left also arose from the Civil Rights Movement and we don’t have a momentous cultural upheaval like that. Racism has gone underground.

    Agreed.

    As a couple of prior commenters have noted, many in the New Left are still active in progressive causes to the present day. The problem is that they are often drowned out by the establishment boomer dominated MSM’s concerns ranging from rehashing the era of their youth to slagging on those of us not privileged to be part of the boomer generation. In fact, one former anti-war protesting boomer who has been a school teacher for decades has once commented to me that she cringes at how her generation are starting to act and sound like their parents.

    As for no momentous upheaval….I think part of that has to do with the fact Gen X, and millenials have much less economic security than their boomer counterparts at a similar age. Unlike most boomers who grew up with the optimism they will do better than their parents, I recalled having disquieting conversations with classmates in high school about whether we will have any social security or pension to speak of by the time we reach retirement due to a large demographic reaching retirement age and mismanagement of the fund by those in power. I think the prior commenter who said we were much more serious had it right…and that seriousness has often been mistaken by most boomers as “apathy”.

Comments are currently closed.