Baby Boom

by P. J. O'Rourke

  If Steverino Leary got valuable information about the Weathermen out of Real Name Larry it didn’t do much to aid the authorities. You can’t make a joke out of terrorism, especially now that globalization has produced a larger, cheaper, more efficient international terrorizing supply chain. But I’m glad we’ve outsourced most of it. Wherever the motherfucking crazy motherfucker militant Islamic fundamentalists are, at least I’m not hiding them in the Puddles attic.

  Weathermen leaders Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers never were captured. They had to turn themselves in, in 1980. Now they’re passing acquaintances of the president of the United States. Some say this is dim of the president. Some say this is hypocritical of Bernardine and Bill. But, in the far reaches of our hearts, we, with our deep Baby Boom dislike of the consequential, say, “Is this a great country or what?”

  Skinny Bob, who did become a newspaper reporter, used the Freedom of Information Act to get a copy of the Baltimore Police Department file on Puddles.

  When the police had raided the Puddles office ­seeking—and finding—small amounts of marijuana, the charges were soon dropped. According to the file, “Officer [redacted] recommends that drug possession arrests be nol pros to avoid jeopardization of undercover status of Officer [redacted] at premises at which drug possession search warrant had been issued upon.” Personal information in the files included such items as “Puddles staff member [redacted] states his opposition to prejudice, poverty, war, and injustice. In the opinion of undercover Police Officer [redacted], staff member [redacted]’s motivation is to annoy his parents.”

  The Baby Boom starts to produce rather than consume American culture when we get to be in our late twenties—about the same age I was when I saw a sidelong reflection in the window of a storefront bay and, not realizing I was looking at myself, thought, “That guy is getting a little old for the embroidered work shirt, frayed jeans, and barbers-on-strike look.”

  Speaking of twenties, let me apologize for what I said, fourteen chapters ago, about the twenties being a failed experiment at having a sixties. The sixties was a failed experiment at having a sixties. Think how things would be if they’d turned out the way, for a moment, they looked like they might—a February Sunday spent in Dirty Eddie’s unheated geodesic dome eating macrobiotic brown rice and drinking Mu tea while watching Hacky Sack Super Bowl VIII.

  The Baby Boom’s influence, as opposed to existence, begins to matter in 1974. Younger Baby Boomers are mostly in high school and junior high. The very youngest are ten and thus approaching the mental age for which our generation is famous. Older Baby Boomers have finally cleared the bongs and empty Mallomar boxes out of the finished basement at my house. Bill Clinton is running for Congress, so there’s ample sexual tension, a key component of Baby Boom life. Stephen King (born 1947) publishes Carrie. Steven Spielberg (born 1946) makes his big-screen debut, The Sugarland Express, with its eerie prefiguring of the highway pursuit of O. J. Simpson (born 1947). And Spielberg is working on something that will demolish the intellectual pretensions of an entire art form—Jaws, the movie that destroyed cinema.

  Demolishing pretensions is a hallmark of the Baby Boom. Note the lack of artistic pretensions, or art, in the 1974 recording of “Hey Joe” by Patti Smith (born 1946). This is supposedly the first example of punk rock. Uncoincidentally, the same year, “Rock the Boat” is the first example of disco to hit number 1 on the pop charts. National Lampoon’s circulation peaks. And what will become Saturday Night Live is being planned at 30 Rock. The irony pandemic has begun.

  Some aspects of a Baby Boom world are not yet evident. Bill Gates is still cutting classes at Harvard. Steve Jobs is knocking around India looking for transcendental iPhone apps. But Pong machines are showing up in bars. The long night of electronic “Roamin’ in the Gloamin’” is beginning to fall.

  And the Baby Boom’s politics are beginning to take form, of which there is none aside from Middle-class Resentment. Once being big ideological left-wingers blew up in our faces we were hopelessly split. One could consult the polling data on this subject. But a generation that is expert at lying to ourselves isn’t going to have trouble pulling George Gallup’s leg. The first thing that happened after the Twenty-sixth Amendment lowered the voting age to eighteen was a landslide victory by Richard Nixon.

  Baby Boomers who are younger or female tend to vote for the Silly Party. Baby Boomers who are older or male tend to vote for the Stupid Party. Then there are the Independents, proud of the fact that they don’t know which is which. The Baby Boomer presidents that we’ve had so far—Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama—are spread as far across the political map as you can get without going to Pyongyang.

  Sometime around 1974 I actually did read a little Karl Marx. Karl was a bit of a Baby Boomer before the fact—­middle-class attorney’s son, sometimes sudent radical, unpublished novelist and poet, “underground” journalist, sponger on a crackpot rich buddy, and talking through his hat. Karl Marx was a very smart man. Das Kapital is a very bad hat.

  Given all the liberties the Baby Boom has taken, we ought to be libertarian. We should be adhering to the “Clinton Rules.” That is to say, the rules the Clintons exemplified: Mind your own business, and keep your hands to yourself. Hillary, mind your own business. Bill, keep your hands to yourself.

  But the libertarian creed of individual dignity, individual liberty, and individual responsibility comes with that responsibility kicker. And there’s the Atlas Shrugged doorstop, which got some Baby Boomers all excited and the rest of us wondering who hid the Strunk and White. Plus a wholehearted embrace of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of dimly lit enlightened self-interest can end up making somebody sound like a selfish, loony old bitch such as Ayn Rand. Better if we all just claim we’re “a social liberal and a fiscal conservative.” And never mind what the farm boy said when he saw the circus giraffe. There ain’t no such creature.

  What we actually are is antinomian. It’s a theological doctrine. The Baby Boom is not a generation much given to studying theology. But we seem to have figured out this one. Antinomianism is the belief that faith (the Baby Boom has a lot of faith—in itself) and grace (the Baby Boom has been graced with a lot of good things) allow men (and, let us hasten to add, women) to be (according to Webster’s Third International) “freed not only from the Old Testament law of Moses and all forms of legalism but also from all law including the generally accepted standards of morality prevailing in any given culture.” That’s us in a nutshell.

  For a term used by theologians, antinomian is unusually clear-cut: Latin anti- “against” Greek nomos “the law.” Antinomianism was carried to an extreme by the third-century gnostic Christian sect known as Ophites. (Gnostic is another good Baby Boom word, from the Greek “know-it-all.”) The Ophites revered Cain, the Sodomites, and the Genesis serpent and thought that the good guy in Exodus was the pharaoh. That’s us when we’re carrying things to extremes. We’re a generation that is often accused of carrying things to extremes. In fact we’re a generation that carries things as far as we want to, until we get tired of carrying them, then we drop them on the rest of you. But we’ve never dropped our antinomianism. “No Rules” is the motto of a popular Baby Boom steak house chain.

  It may seem to be a contradiction that a generation opposed to personal restrictions of any kind has, since coming into political power, created a welter of legal and regulatory intrusions on private life. My kids have to wear hockey helmets to play puff billiards. But we’re a contradictory generation.

  And it’s fun to make rules—for other people. Our spouses would kill us if they caught us with a Big Gulp, we gave up smoking, and we’re fifty-plus, so what do we care about 64-ounce Mountain Dews, lighting up within 10,000 feet of a building entrance, and not being able to buy a beer even though you’re old enough to vote, get married, fight in Afghanistan, and be executed by lethal injection? And too bad about peop
le who have to take their shoes off at airports because they aren’t flying private.

  Besides, it’s the job of politicians to pass laws. And the Baby Boom is very good at politics. We’ve vaulted the threshold. We’ve mastered the skill set. We have the enormous power of bullshit, using bullshit in the political science sense, as a technical term meaning “political science.”

  Other generations say Baby Boom politics are polarized. Don’t they know their history? What’s happened to the American educational system? (I mean, other than that we took it over?) Now, 1861—that was polarized. MoveOn.Org? Tea Party? We have game on. We’ve got tremendous depth of bench. The point spread is zero. We came to play. We’re great at politics. Other generations are just jealous. We’re so good they can’t forgive us.

  “I can’t forgive myself,” said Joe Brody. It was sometime in the late 1970s. I was at his house out in the woods in New Hampshire. It was late at night. Joe’s kids and wife were in bed. We’d had too much to drink. Joe said, “I can’t forgive myself for what I did in Vietnam.” And he began to cry.

  And I thought, “Oh, Christ.”

  It was only a few years since Lieutenant Calley, given life in prison for the My Lai massacre, had had his sentence commuted by Richard Nixon. I didn’t want to come off as less sensitive and understanding than Richard Nixon, but . . .

  We needed more to drink. “Joe,” I said, “we’ve known each other for twenty years. Whatever happened, I understand.”

  Joe said, “It was my second tour. I had this platoon, all draftees. I mean by then any idiot could figure out a way to dodge the draft.”

  “I understand.”

  “Every day when we’d go out on patrol we’d just go out. I’m so ashamed of what happened.”

  “What happened?”

  “We’d just go out.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I hid them. We’d go out on patrol, and as soon as we were far enough away I’d stick everybody behind a dike in some rice paddy, and we’d sit there smoking cigarettes and listening to Sly and the Family Stone on the ghetto blaster, and when we came back I’d lie about all the hooches we’d searched and bad guys we’d had firefights with. I’m a marine, damn it. I don’t know if I can ever forgive myself.”

  If I’d been thinking quick, I would have said, “If Henry Kissinger can forgive himself for getting the Nobel Peace Prize, your ass is golden.”

  . . . . that desire to do good without too much personal inconvenience that lurks in most of us.

  —Barbara Pym,

  The Sweet Dove Died

  17

  RIPENESS IS ALL

  Everything’s all right. It turned out okay. Better than okay. Life has been much more fun since the Baby Boom took over. “Mommy, why are there scarves tied to the bedposts in Daddy’s and your bedroom?” And there are plenty of fun tales to be told about the Baby Boom in the 1980s, the ’90s, the ’00s, and today. But we’re saving them for psychotherapy sessions. If you go to a psychotherapy session and just sit there saying nothing it makes it seem like something’s wrong with you, psychologically.

  By the end of the 1970s the Baby Boom character had been formed. Our last youthful exuberance, “Punk,” came just before Generation X’s first youthful exuberance, “Goth”—a subtle shift from “fuck you” to “I’m fucked” that indicates the Baby Boom will remain in control for a long time to come.

  Our passionate belief in change hasn’t altered, going from “spare change?” to “Hope and Change” with stops along the way for “you’d better change your ways,” “change of life,” and “any change in a wart or mole.”

  We’re still opposed to prejudice, poverty, war, and ­injustice —when they happen to us. But at least we’re opposed to them. There have been times and places—the 1960s South, Benedictine monasteries, the 1860s South, and divorce court—where previous generations made strong arguments in favor of the aforementioned, which you won’t hear us doing. At least not very often except in divorce court or during hostile corporate takeovers or when Iran has nuclear weapons or looks like it maybe does or wants to.

  If the Baby Boom went around being prejudiced against races, religions, ethnic groups, genders, and sexual orientations, date night would be pretty much down to a dose of Cialis and a box of tissues on the bedside table.

  Who would invest in our BabyBoondoggle IPO if poverty meant nobody had enough money to buy the worthless stock?

  War is wrong—itchy uniforms and ugly shoes.

  We don’t like injustice. We don’t like justice either. Because we’re the generation that’s not judgmental. And who the hell put traffic surveillance cameras at every goddamned intersection? (Oops. That was us. We put surveillance cameras everywhere when we remembered how Joe Brody and Billy and Bobby Stumf and Johnny MacKay and Steve Penske and Jerry Harris and I were going to vandalize North Side High’s football field with weed killer.)

  The Baby Boom has had politics figured out since at least 1980. An American and a Russian are talking about Ronald Reagan and Leonid Brezhnev. The American says, “I hate Reagan so much I pissed on his limousine.” The Russian says, “I hate Brezhnev so much I shit on his limousine.” The American says, “Well, to tell the truth, Reagan wasn’t in the limousine when I pissed on it.” The Russian says, “Well, to tell the truth, my pants weren’t down.”

  The key is inept leadership. This makes things easy on followers. The Baby Boom has always gone in for following inept leaders. Follow Keith Richards and you can wind up in some sort of trouble. Follow Napoleon and you can wind up in Moscow.

  Prior generations didn’t have politics figured out. When my godmother was a freshman in high school she began to read the Atlantic Monthly in the school library. One night at dinner she announced, “I think Coolidge is a dope.” Her father made her stand in the front hall closet for half an hour for showing disrespect to the president of the United States. I have it on good authority that President Reagan told the limousine joke himself.

  Prior generations didn’t have diversity figured out either. There was another joke, considered quite hip in 1962, and the laugh line was almost the same as what the serious pundits were saying about who was most likely to be elected president in 2008. A man dies and goes to heaven but doctors resuscitate him and he comes back to life and everybody wants to know what’s God like. “She’s black.”

  Being different wasn’t always considered normal, if not obligatory. Not even in the freewheeling sixties. When Tim Minsky was a senior at Yale he shared an off-campus apartment with a roommate who was diabetic. This was before the ready availability of disposable needles and the roommate was supposed to boil his syringe after every insulin injection. One of the kids with whom Tim and I had gone to high school, a serious type named Danny Phelps, was applying to grad school at Yale and stopped by to visit Tim. Danny glanced into the pot of water boiling on the stove and gave Tim a puzzled look.

  Tim said, “Danny, there’s a confession I’ve been wanting to make for a long time. I’ve never told this to anyone. I’m a heroin addict.”

  Danny sat down at the kitchen table, burst into tears, and said, “Tim, there’s a confession I’ve been wanting to make for a long time. I’ve never told this to anyone. I’m a homosexual.”

  If Tim had been thinking quick he would have said, “So’s Anderson Cooper and Barney Frank and Rufus Wainwright and Alexander the Great and Gomer Pyle and the mutant superhero Northstar in Marvel Comics’ X-Men (a perfect Baby Boom touch—identity politics for secret identities). But Tim couldn’t think that quick because none of those people were out of the closet in 1968. Tim didn’t know what to say and felt like a jerk.

  And feminism is so far along among Baby Boomers that women aren’t even bothering to make men feel like jerks anymore, outside of marriage. As far as I can tell “third wave feminist
s” are having a screaming senseless argument with themselves about whether women can be simultaneously managing director of the International Monetary Fund, chancellor of Germany, Nobel laureate, Supreme Court justice, author of the best-selling book series in history, CEO of Xerox, and mother of three when there are only so many hours in the day. I understand that House Minority leader Nancy Pelosi is lobbying Congress to lengthen the day to seventy-two hours. Meanwhile Baby Boom men are left to wonder (but never aloud) whether—hand that rocks the cradle and all that—feminism hasn’t always been a matter of women having a leg wrestling match with their own other leg.

  There are some things the Baby Boom has done that we’re not proud of. We used up all the weird. It has always been the special prerogative of youth to look and act strange, to alarm and surprise their elders with peculiar dress and manners. Cicero mentioned it. “O tempora! O mores!” So did my mom, although in English. But the Baby Boom exhausted the available supply of peculiar. Weird clothes, we wore them. Weird beards, we grew them. Weird words and phrases, we said them. Weird attitudes, we had them. Thus when it came time for the next generation to alarm and surprise us with their peculiarities they were compelled to pierce their extremities and permanently ink their exposed flesh. That must have hurt. We apologize.

  The Baby Boom unleashed the safety hysteria on the world. I recently bought a stepladder so festooned with stickers warning of the types and kinds of peril entailed in operating this device that it lacked only bold capital letters stenciled in signal orange upon each stepladder step: DO NOT STEP ON LADDER.

  I cannot get into my car without setting off a panic among admonitory bells and buzzers cautioning me to buckle this, close that, and lock the other thing.