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Sunday, January 15, 2006

Howard Fineman is a Little Weaselly Idiot, and other Tales of 21st Century Journalism
Posted by Jill | 8:16 PM

It's very fashionable to bash baby boomers these days. In fact, it's always been fashionable to bash baby boomers. When we were kids, our parents did it, now it's later generations.

Oh, how they hate us. They hate us because we got laid without worrying about AIDS. They hate us because many of us were able to sail right into the workplace into a decent job market. They hate us because we had decent drugs that while illegal, rarely resulted in serious legal problems. And of course they hate us because they think we're "stealing" their money for Social Security.

It's tough being so hated. We're even hated by our friends. For example, I can't even visit a blog like Geek Philosophy, which is written by one of my friends, because it's like being the one black guy at the KKK rally; or the liberal Jew at Justice Sunday. "Oh, well, I'm not referring to YOU. You're different."

Yeah, right.

Anyway, Howard Fineman is buying into all the worst and dumbest cliches of boomerhood in this article. It's the same old stuff, that boomers are self-centered, self-indulgent hedonists who never thought about anyone but themselves and now our very existence if threatening the future of the nation. He paints us as sellouts one and all, selfish beasts who ought to just kill ourselves at age 70, as Christopher Buckley postulates in a new novel, Boomsday. Fineman even has the gall to paint George W. Bush as being the same as Bill Clinton because while he's not getting blowjobs (that we know of), his profligate spending makes him an archetypal boomer. Yes, stereotypes of boomers are really all-purpose, one-size-fits-all, hate mechanisms.

May I remind everyone that said baby boomers have been paying into the Social Security system for the last 30 years? If you want to talk about "stealing the money", let's point our fingers at Washington, shall we?

Ah, but most of the politicians today are baby boomers, right? Arguably, yes -- though old war horses like Ted Kennedy and Arlen Specter and Orrin Hatch are hardly boomers. But let's look at some voting patterns, shall we?

The baby boom is usually considered to be the years 1946 - 1960, which means that in 2004, the baby boomers ranged from ages 44-60. So lets' start with voting patterns in the 2004 election:

Age 18-29: 45% Bush, 54% Kerry
Age 30-44: 53% Bush, 48% Kerry
Age 45-59: 51% Bush, 48% Kerry
Age 60+: 54% Bush, 46% Kerry

The youngest voters were the most solidly pro-Kerry group, which is interesting when you consider that this is the group most likely to scream about baby boomers "steaking our money". But look at the age 45-59'ers: That's a 3-point split, folks. That's hardly "tacking to the right", as Fineman calls it. In fact, it's about the split you get when you add together everyone between the ages of 18 and 64 -- all working age people.

As for being the most self-indulgent generation in history, I might point to some of the young people growing up today -- the kids in the McMansions who have their own private bathrooms because God forbid a kid should have to share a bathroom. You know the ones -- the ones whose daddies buy them a Lexus when they get a good report card. Now, you might argue that the parents of these kids are the same baby boomers that are the target of such bashfests, but I sure as heck don't hear these kids turning down the car and buying a used Saturn instead in the name of altruism.

Here's the bottom line, folks -- every generation is the product of its time. We were lucky enough to live in a time of prosperity and relative peace -- despite the fact that we had "duck and cover" drills because of long-forgotten scares like the Cuban Missile Crisis. But like today's twentysomethings, we saw our peers sent off to die in an unjust war, and we did what was necessary to end it. And no, we didn't spit on veterans coming back, contrary to popular belief. And while we didn't see them as victims too, we vowed when we took to the streets in 2000 against Bush's war, not to make that mistake again.

And yet, this time of propserity saw people living in what most middle-class kids would think of as relative poverty today. Most families had one television set, and it was in the living room. There was no cable TV. Most houses were 1000 - 1500 square feet with one bath or one bath and a powder room, not the 4000+ square foot behemoths middle-class kids live in today. Most families had only one car, and it was often bought used. The houses in which the World War II generation raised its baby-boomer children are now being razed by not just boomers, but also gen-Xers with small children, because the 3-bedroom ranch of 1960 just doesn't cut it anymore. So just who's self-indulgent here?

On the other hand, out in the largely homogeneously white suburbs, we had safe neighborhoods where kids could play unattended without parents worrying about kidnappers and pedophiles and other monsters. We also had neighborhoods where homeowners would not sell to Jews or African-Americans.

I'm getting really tired of reading articles which try to paint the baby boomers as one big homogenous mass. For every Abbie Hoffman there was a George W. Bush, just as today, for every Ezra Klein, there's a Ben Shapiro; for every Ks there's a Jonah Goldberg.

Things haven't really changed that much, and boomers really aren't any different from any other generation. Young people always regard themselves as special and unique. It's part of being young. The only reason my generation was so noisy about it is because there were so many of us. And that's hardly our fault.
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