Baby Boom

by P. J. O'Rourke

  However, the fat girl Joe Brody was dating (fat by the ethereal standards of the era and, come to that, we were entering an era where all standards were ethereal) shared her diet pills. Joe stayed up all night writing a paper on The Scarlet Letter and the next day, still going, he insisted on reading it aloud in American Literature class, taking up most of the period describing the ways Nathaniel Hawthorne’s plot and character development would be transformed if Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale committed the six other deadly sins, starting with gluttony.

  Sex, too, was had in occasional and limited doses. Fumbling anticipation generated a kind of prolonged bliss that fumbled completion has rarely matched. We were tantric when Buddha was still a porker on a shelf over the bar in Phillip Woo’s parents’ restaurant. No one’s life was left in a mess by sex. Although some of our clothing was. What ever happened to the hand job?

  It was an existence upon which no improvement could be made except, of course, for elimination of prejudice, poverty, war, and injustice and Dad buying us an Austin-Healey.

  We were aware of, if not the nature, the prevalence of evil. “Black humor” was in vogue. There was Lenny Bruce, Paul Krassner’s The Realist, ice-nine in Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, and Al Bartz saying, “How do you unload a truck full of dead babies?”

  We were sensitive to grim realities. “With a pitchfork.” In our college application essays we pointed out that prejudice, poverty, war, and injustice should be eliminated.

  Meanwhile it would also be nice to have a place of our own, a “pad.” But who’d iron our madras shirts? (And not our white Levi’s. “Mom, they aren’t supposed to have a crease!”)

  And it would be great if there was no school. But we skipped a lot. Grades don’t count after the first semester of senior year. Ana Klein did a good mom voice. “Pat’s not feeling too well.” We were going to state colleges anyway. Except for Tim Minsky who would be studying math at Yale, to the mystification of most of our parents. “It’s so far away,” my mother said. “If he went to Ohio State he could come home on weekends.”

  Perhaps there were as many troubled adolescents then as there are now. But young people are sensitive to fashion trends, and being troubled wasn’t in style. Girls weighed ninety pounds and barfed after eating a whole half gallon of butter pecan ice cream. Boys drove cars into phone poles at seventy miles an hour. But anorexia, bulimia, and teenage suicide were unheard of.

  We were having fun. The stories we could tell—and do tell and will tell and have told and keep telling in movies, songs, TV shows, memoirs, blogs (though not much in poems and novels—literature is the enemy of fun), and to spouses, children, each other, and to ourself now that we’ve started talking to that person. There was the time Jim Fisk and I drove overnight to Hell, Michigan, a 422-mile round-trip, so we could say that we’d “been to hell and back.” We left right after school on a Wednesday and . . . Oh shut up.

  There’s proof that it was a wonderful moment for our generation in the very fact of how boring our stories are. Every description of paradise is boring. According to the Bible, Adam and Eve didn’t even notice they were naked and spent all day naming animals. It’s a shame how the Baby Boom has never learned to appreciate boredom. It would make this current part of our lives more interesting.

  Teenage 1960s middle-class America was a shining suburb on a hill. Almost twenty years would go by before we realized that. We’ve been trying to walk or fly or bum a ride back there since the first John Hughes movie came out.

  It wasn’t just fun. It was a state of grace. We wanted to bestow our state of grace upon the world. Youth was a virtue. We pitied the moral lapse of those who lacked it. Life was good. We were living. Therefore we were good. Since we were good, and we were mankind, then mankind was good. We’d make mankind as good as itself and living as fun as life. We’d change everything. And we’d write in each other’s high school yearbooks, “Don’t ever change!”

  An’ one time a little girl ’ud allus laugh an’ grin,

  An’ make fun of ever’ one, an’ all her blood-an’-kin;

  An’ wunst, when they was “company,” an’ ole folks wuz there,

  She mocked ’em an’ shocked ’em, an’ said she didn’t care!

  An’ thist as she kicked her heels, an’ turn’t to run an’ hide,

  They was two great big Black Things a-standin’ by her side,

  An’ they snatched her through the ceilin’ ’fore she knowed what she’s about!

  An’ the Gobble-uns ’ll git you

  Ef you

  Don’t

  Watch

  Out!

  —James Whitcomb Riley,

  “Little Orphant Annie”

  10

  THE MAN IS FATHER

  TO THE CHILD

  Then the decade went to hell.

  There was the Vietnam War. We had decided war was wrong. Prominent moralists such as Peter, Paul and Mary agreed. And just when we had decided war was wrong, a war was supposed to be fought by us.

  And there was us. Peace violence. Civil rights looting and arson. Protests loud enough to deafen the nation to every­thing being shouted. Political fantasies so beautiful they made reality get ugly.

  And love—like a parody of the verses from I Corinthians 13 that Baby Boomers would later insist be reeled off at each of their weddings. Love paraded itself, love was puffed up, love behaved rudely, love sought its own, love rejoiced in iniquity.

  And drugs. Ring-around-a-roach clip. Pocket full of bad trips. Grass, speed, acid. We all fall down. Spinning and giddy, we spoke as children, understood as children, thought as children, and instead of putting away childish things we got put away for them—in jail and mental institutions. Or a few of us did.

  It was a day-trip Children’s Crusade. We marched upon the Holy Land where we already lived.

  (Fun, though.)

  A great clash between youth and age began. A generation gap yawned. And so do I.

  It never happened. We had parents who were a lot like us. We can tell because they’ve shown up in the mirror.

  We had parents. They brought us up. There’s a logical inference that we are products of our birth and upbringing. We are what our parents, consciously or unconsciously, meant us to be. We’re the demiurge to their urgency. They were the thought to our deed. It’s an irritating supposition.

  A supposition the Baby Boom prefers is that we’re mutants. “We are the people our parents warned us about.” The Jimmy Buffett song was released in 1983, by which time we were indeed the people our parents had warned us about—lawyers, bankers, and politicians.

  Some kid somewhere must have been the first to say, “You just don’t get it!” Possibly it was Jesus, Gospel of Mark 8:21, “How is it that ye do not understand?” Jesus wasn’t technically a kid, but he had the hair and the sandals. What was it that our parents didn’t get?

  There was the hair and the sandals. But I’m not sure we get those anymore ourselves, even when we’re walking around in Tevas with the gray remnants of our mop top tied back in a ponytail.

  When I mentioned our parents’ “dumpy clothes and vague ideas” I was flattering myself, and the rest of my generation. Look at me in jeans that I’m decades past having the butt to wear or, worse, shorts that everyone under forty wishes it were against the law for Baby Boomers to own. I’m in flip-flops, and not only that it’s winter, so I’ve got on big, floppy socks that the toe thong can squash into. If I have to leave home I’ll slip my feet into cushy balloon-sized “athletic” shoes. I’m no athlete. Nor am I quite yet ancient and bunioned enough to be excused for such footwear. And my T-shirt . . . Our parents would not have subjected the scarecrow in their garden to the indignity of old underwear on public display.

  If our fathers had been as “dressed down” as we a
re—which would have meant they were repairing the roof—they’d have been wearing their old military suntans, washed and ironed by our mothers. And our mothers wouldn’t have cleaned the oven in what we wear to work. The Avon Lady might call.

  As to ideas, the vagueness is ours. What’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding? Our parents had a laugh at the Neville Chamberlain peace-in-our-time and the Eddie Fisher/Liz Taylor/Richard Burton lovebirds and the understanding that people are out to screw you. “Confucius say: when rape is inevitable relax and enjoy it.” All the cringe comedy of our generation cannot match the shock, offense, and transgressive humor our parents could pack into one old chestnut.

  Maybe we’re in touch with the “inner dumpiness” of our parents. They were tired of keeping up appearances, longed to let themselves go and be slobs and slatterns. We’re doing it for them.

  Maybe our parents would have liked a bye on fighting a war. Even Billy and Bobby Stumf’s dad wouldn’t have minded much. Mrs. Stumf, his high school sweetheart, was a babe. Johnny MacKay’s dad and mine and Steve Penske’s and Jerry Harris’s probably had a stray thought about living it up like Liz and Dick with Mrs. Stumf. Maybe our parents did relax and enjoy a screwing once or twice (or three times, my sisters being twins).

  Although, of course, we think, only with each other. The Greatest Generation didn’t have our infinite variety of relaxation. The Baby Boom is living the dream.

  It seems a little late in life to be coming to grips with this, but our parents were hip. We could make this reassessment on the basis on the Greatest Generation’s postures and ­images —the Rat Pack or even Mad Men. But, come on, we had the Greatest Generation around the house. And also tucked under our beds—the “usual gang of idiots” at Mad magazine were from the Greatest Generation. The magazine that made fun of our moms and dads was written and drawn by our parents.

  Possibly the Greatest Generation had lived a little of the dream themselves. During World War II loose lips may have sunk ships, but loose garter belts were another matter. Our parents were hip to sex. They knew what sex meant. It meant that the number of divorces in America more than doubled between 1941 and 1946—impressive for a generation that stayed married no matter what. The divorce rate of the young Greatest Generation wouldn’t be equaled until 1973 when the Baby Boom was old enough to get married, start cheating, and be thrown out of the house.

  Our parents were hip to drugs. There was one drug they knew so well that it gave them all the drug know-how they needed. Smoking loco weed was silly drunk. Kicking the gong around was slow-motion drunk. Taking a sleigh ride was drunk and wide awake, ready to drink more. You’d had enough. You needed to keep your wits about you when a bar fight was breaking out between the gobs and the jarheads. You couldn’t be sluggish with your uppercut or start goofing on the pretty tinkling noise of all the broken glass when 200 pounds of marine was coming at you swinging a chair.

  The Greatest Generation knew how to handle their liquor. My uncle Timmy said, “At lunch, have gin. When you go back to the office you want people to think you’re drunk, not stupid.”

  And they were hip to rock and roll. Listen to Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Dizzy Gillespie, Lena Horne. Now listen to the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me.” We’re the squares.

  Our parents were conformists. The Greatest Generation knew camouflage as a technique, not as an ironic fabric pattern. They liked to blend in. We like to stand out. They might have told us a little more about the quantitative versus qualitative ways of being noticed.

  I had a summer job in college, working construction, and showed up at the site tonsured and clad as one was in the 1960s. The grizzled foreman watched me fecklessly hammer and saw and, glancing from my Rapunzel hair to my bell-bottoms, said, “You know something, you don’t need to look like an idiot.”

  There are some other things the Greatest Generation might have told us—and probably did while we weren’t paying attention. (Our generations are well matched in this respect. They spoke their wisdom rarely, we listened to it the same way.) The trophy elk doesn’t hang around in the Elk Lodge parking lot during hunting season. Our generation doesn’t hunt elk much. We’re trophy elk preening on the Hartford Insurance Company rock wearing a Target logo T-shirt.

  Our parents were joiners, belonging to every kind of organization, association, and fraternal order. We claim to have been blackballed from Sam’s Club. They were wise to safety in numbers. Life is a high-wire act. They weren’t going to work without a net. We network. And some interesting bounces we’ve taken.

  We can’t believe they were serious about their meetings, rituals, bylaws, and rules of order. They weren’t. The veterans’ organizations got serious on Memorial Day. During the other 364 (and that night after the Memorial Day parade) the American Legion post and the VFW hall were places to get drunk. We think Shriners in fezzes driving miniature cars in circles is ridiculous. It was supposed to be ridiculous. We believe we have fun. They had more fun. Anybody who’s having fun at an Elk Lodge meeting has the fun thing figured out.

  Our parents were hypocrites. No matter what they were up to they tried to look and act like they were doing the right thing. They didn’t exactly pride themselves on their hypocrisy, but they were proud of knowing right from wrong, and being a hypocrite showed you could tell the difference.

  “Hypocrite” is one of the Baby Boom’s strongest terms of disparagement. We’re as proud as our parents of knowing right from wrong (and think our knowledge is superior). But when we’re wrong, we get to show off. We lead a life of modern luxury, and nothing is more luxuriously modern than indulging in the egotistical pleasure of personal honesty about misdeeds. In the California King–sized bed of the ego, on the four-hundred-thread-count sheets of pleasure, we like the honest embrace of vice better than the sanctimonious pillow talk of virtue.

  (Although we’re quick enough to jump out of the sack, lock vice in the en suite bath, slap on some lip service, run a brush through our sophistry, and wrap ourselves in floor-length false piety if one of our kids shows up without warning.)

  (And let’s not confuse personal honesty with anything we do at work or on the Internet.)

  Our parents were Philistines, comfortably conventional in their views. I don’t mean to disparage our parents. I admire the Philistines. Archaeologists tell us that the Philistines were a prosperous Bronze Age society that excelled at the ­production—and consumption—of alcoholic beverages. They have my sympathy in the Bible. First there’s Samson busting their chops and raising the roof because he had to get a haircut. Then comes little David, annoying the Philistines with his slingshot and his nutty music—“a cunning player on an harp.” And the next thing you know he’s king of the heap. Samson and David seem like harbingers of the Baby Boom.

  Our parents put effort into philistinism. It was getting harder to remain comfortably conventional in your views. Psychology and sociology were explaining that nothing is really your fault, and neuroscience was gearing up to prove it. Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party and Joe McCarthy’s Senate hearings were muddying the waters in Stalin’s well of pure evil and Ike’s fountain of perfect good. The Theory of Relativity meant . . . What did it mean? One guess was that everything’s relative. In-laws included? Modern literature and modern art were sending the message that what had always been right was left. Left, that is, to the interpretation of the individual. “My kid could paint that” was our parents’ interpretation. (But, though tens of thousands of Baby Boomers would major in the Fine Arts, the Picassos among us have been thin on the ground.)

  We think of ourselves as skeptical about organized religion. Even when we’re religious what the Baby Boom prefers is loosely organized, large, new, denominationally vague churches out in the suburbs where they’ve just found Jesus. My sister goes to one.

  “I found Jesus,” my sister announced.

 
; “Were you,” her twin asked, “playing hide-and-seek?”

  If Jesus had squeezed under the bottom shelf of the linen closet in the house where we grew up and crawled behind the stack of old bath towels He might have won.

  We think of our parents as conventionally religious. We’re half right. They were conventional. But I don’t remember any adult talking about religion outside church. Not even the church’s pastor, not even right outside church on the church steps greeting the congregation after church, when you’d think the subject might have come up in passing.

  I presume that the want, the war, and the murder of the twentieth century left our parents with some questions about God being a nice guy. But with the resolve the Greatest Generation so often showed they resolved not to think about it. Or so I presume. They weren’t talking.

  They went through the motions and maintained the forms. They taught us our bedtime prayer—almost word for word from the seventeenth-century Puritans—without thinking about the thing being frightful.

  Now I lay me down to sleep,

  I pray the Lord my soul to keep,

  If I die before I wake,

  I pray the Lord my soul to take.

  The MacKays, with their hellfire/sand wasp/bicycle-chicken-in-the-parking-lot church, went most Sundays. The Penskes and Harrises went to their church less often. My parents rarely went to church but sent my sisters and me to Sunday school. There was a private service on Sunday mornings, with the kids out of the house, the neighborhood quiet, and the stores closed. That was when the Greatest Generation screwed.

  The Stumfs went to various different churches. Billy said, “My parents are shopping for a church.” I have a mental image of Mr. and Mrs. Stumf pushing a shopping cart down aisles lined with Christs, Yahwehs, Allahs, Buddhas, Shivas, Gaias, and Indian totem poles—Baby Boom spirituality avant la lettre.

  Johnny MacKay received adult baptism by total immersion at the YMCA pool his church had borrowed for the occasion. Johnny said, “We’re wearing these white gowns, and after the girls got baptized and the gowns were all wet and they climbed out of the swimming pool, you could see everything they’ve got!”