Last month I had an extended and rather heated exchange with one of our commenters who made a host of sweeping generalizations about baby boomers, few if any of which were true. I've had conversations with some of my Gen-X friends on this as well, with many of them similarly blaming the baby boomers for their own plight. I've even seen Gen-Xers trying to claim Keith Olbermann as one of their own, even though he was born in 1959 and therefore is indisputably a baby boomer. I hate to tell them this, but no less a Gen-X icon than old Lloyd Dobler himself, John Cusack, only escaped the dread Baby Boomer label by a mere six months.

I'm seeing a lot of this lately; blaming the baby boomers for everything that's gone wrong in this country, hand-in-hand with the idea that Gen-X, Gen-Y, and the Millenials are somehow either a) hapless victims of the evil boomers (largely the province of Gen-Xers who are now reaching an age when the refusal to "sell out" is starting to have the nasty consequences of no savings and no health insurance); b) greedy, evil people who have sucked up all the resources and left nothing for anyone else; or c) an entire generation of hippies who had all the sex and all the drugs and all the fun and then became Republicans and tried to deny anyone else the fun they had.

Over at Americablog, the primary culprit is "Chris in Paris", who yesterday posted yet another of his screeds contrasting the evil, venal baby boomers with the pure, altruistic millennials:

For years we all heard about the staggering retirement costs related to the Boomers but in the last year we hear much more about the work attitudes of the Boomers compared to the younger workers. The UK, probably like the US, is facing a problem with a substantial percentage of school principals heading into retirement. That alone is not necessarily a problem, but the younger generations are showing little interest in taking on the stresses/risks of management. They would just assume make a little bit less money and enjoy time with friends and family.

All of this is connected and surely is a reaction to what many of us saw growing up. How many kids under 30 (and younger than the Boomers) saw parents lose all job security? How many saw parents/family pursue higher positions only to be tossed aside with the first sign of trouble. As much as Boomers like to argue that young kids are just lazy, I simply don't buy it. It's obvious to me that we are in a testing period where employers and employees are trying to figure out the dynamics of the future.

Maybe young workers will have to give a little (leaving home, for example) but I also think that they are forcing employers to update and adjust. More young workers want a clearer division between work and life and they are not going to be intertwined as we saw with the Boomers. This is a healthy change, in my opinion. It's a different world today and that means adjustments are necessary. If the best employers can offer is job insecurity, fewer benefits and pushing workers upwards to their own level of self-incompetence, something needs to give. More power to the youth who are forcing change. Just because the Boomers don't like it or it doesn't fit with their model of life, doesn't mean it's wrong.

The name "Dennis Hopper" always comes up in these conversations as being somehow emblematic of the baby boom generation even though with a birth year of 1936, he's only nine years younger than MY mother and is closer to the WWII generation than to the baby boom. I suppose this is due to those ghastly TV commercials he does for Ameriprise, which annoy even me. But just because someone played a rebel in Easy Rider, a movie that has come to be regarded as THE signature film of the 1960's doesn't make him a baby boomer. And even if he were, the fact is that those born between 1946 and 1964 are as polyglot as any generation before or after them.

There have always been rebels. John Reed and Louise Bryant and Gertrude Stein were radicals, and the bohemian monde was already thriving in Greenwich Village when the Titanic sank. The Beat Generation was already in or close to adulthood and beyond by the time WWII rolled around. William S. Burroughs was born in 1914, Jack Kerouac in 1922; and Allen Ginsberg in 1926. The unfortunate reality, if you look at the American Rebel in the 20th century, is that none of the rebel movements that arose have ever managed to make more than a dent in "the system."

I was born in 1955, which meant that I was in junior high and high school during most of what we think of as the 1960's upheaval. As such, I was too young for a lot of what went on, though there were people my age who ran away from home in their early teens and went to Haight-Ashbury and hung out with those who formed the San Francisco music scene. Many of those either never made it out alive or never really got their lives together afterwards, because teenage runaways rarely do. I went to the antiwar marches, and stuffed envelopes for progressive Democratic candidates, but there really isn't all that much you can do to Change the World when you're a high school student living with your parents.

I was raised by parents whom I've always believed really wanted to be beatniks. They were the kind of Adlai Stevenson liberal intellectuals you had in the late 1950's and early 1960's; cynics about the process who hated Nixon with a passion, read Jules Feiffer cartoons and The New Yorker and had major freakouts, though in different ways, when what we think of as "The Sixties" came around and my sister was just old enough to take part.

I graduated high school into the first of the 1970's oil shocks, and graduated college into another one. By that time, the left was all but dead; traumatized by the assassinations of 1968, the defeat of Eugene McCarthy for the 1968 nomination by the Vietnam-identified party choice Hubert Humphrey and the election of Richard Nixon, the re-election of Nixon in 1972 and Watergate. Vietnam finally ended, however ignominiously, and by 1977 we were too worried about double-digit inflation and getting up at four in the morning to be on the gas line by five to do much of anything by way of activism.

There's this notion Chris and others put forward that the 80-hour workweek is somehow the invention of sellout baby boomers out of pure greed for bigger houses and ever-more electronic gewgaws and STUFF. But the fact of the matter is that at least for people born my year and later, especially those of us on a white-collar track, the defined benefit pensions and job security that our parents enjoyed was already largely gone by the time we emerged from college into a recession caused by the second oil shock in a decade.

I remember a cartoon that made the rounds during the early 1980's. It was called "The Reading of the Will", and it depicted a bequest from the World War II generation to the baby boomers, such as taking all the prosperity and all the Social Security and all the pensions. So the idea that the previous generation stole all the goodies for itself and left nothing for the future isn't new.

During my high school and college years, I knew as many kinds of people as exist. There were the student council liberals in their plaid pants; the kind of guys who went on to run for office on the safest of Democratic platforms. There were the "love it or leave it" chickenhawks -- the guys who were gung-ho about the Vietnam War (though they were relieved when they drew a high draft number) and adored Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. Those are the guys who spawned the likes of George W. Bush and Karl Rove. There were the hippie/politicos; the ones who organized school walkouts on Martin Luther King Day before it was a holiday and arranged large groups to participate in big antiwar marches in New York and Earth Day festivals in the local park. And then there were the drugs-and-music crowd, which I can't say much about because in my school, they tended to be part of the hippie/politico crowd.

I suspect that if you went to any high school today, you'd find the same basic groups, albeit distributed perhaps differently. And among my generation, the YAF chickenhawk crowd is still supporting war, albeit another pointless one, the liberals are largely still liberal, and many of those who did the whole hippie/drug thing are long dead or burnt out.

Are most corporate CEOs today baby boomers? Absolutely; but this is largely a function of age rather than a sign of a mass sellout by the baby boom generation. And many of the names most closely associated with corporate greed, like Dennis Hopper, pre-date or were born in the earliest years of the baby boom: former Exxon chief Lee Raymond (1938), Ken Lay (1942), just-fired Citigroup head Charles Prince (1950), jailed Tyco chief Dennis Kozlowski (1946). Other baby boom CEOs include Apple's Steve Jobs (1955); Microsoft's Bill Gates (1955), who may be loathsome for other reasons and preposterously wealthy, but is also putting a good chunk of his fortune into philanthropy; Echostar's Charlie Ergen (1953), who is a kind of folk hero among his customers; and Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield (both 1951).

The 80-hour workweek, this drive towards "productivity" that has us all spinning our wheels harder for less reward, found its footing during the Reagan years, when the doctrine of "trickle-down" economics had American workers behaving like the Little Engine that Could, working ever-longer hours with ever-less security, repeating "I think I can I think I can I think I can" while deluding themselves that if they just WORKED HARD ENOUGH, they'd get their piece of the Republican pie. And nothing that's happened in the meantime, no matter how much they've been screwed, has dissuaded many from this belief.

Another reason, other than sheer size, that the boomers are being blamed for everything is because of Bill Clinton, the baby boomer president who in his sexual laxity represented everything about the sixties that caused our parents' generation (and those boomers who still adhered to their parents' values) to freak out, and combined it with a nearly pathological desire to be liked and to "play nice with others." This need, combined with a ferocious political "pragmatism" brought us eight years of prosperity, but it also brought us NAFTA and other trade policy that led to the wave of outsourcing of American jobs that we see today. And now that president's wife, whom everyone forgets was a Goldwater Girl before Republicans turned her into Lady Macbeth by way of Janis Joplin by way of Angela Davis, is also running for that office.

Most of us have to sell out eventually. I thought I was refusing to sell out by working in book publishing, for all that the editor for whom I worked was the foremost publisher at the time of conservative screeds by the fathers of the neocon movement. But when I couldn't afford to get my car fixed, I "sold out" and worked for a financial information services company. Later I worked for a company that does business with the company that makes Hummers and now I work for a place that does mental health research, including drug research. I don't have to work 80 hours a week, and while I feel I'm compensated quite fairly, I'm not rich, nor would I be if I did work 80 hours a week. However, when your competition is willing to work 80 hours a week for peanuts, as is the case when jobs are outsourced overseas, taking a month off to go hang gliding in Macchu Picchu isn't going to be applauded by employers, no matter how much Chris in Paris thinks millennials are going to change the nature of the workplace. Far more likely is that millennials and the generation after them will find the screws being tightened even more so by employers.

No doubt it's the fate of every generation to be hated by the one that comes afterward, because unfortunately (as we have found out, much to our dismay and eternal embarrassment), rebels have been trying to change the world for the last century; and not even a large generational population is not going to be homogeneous enough to create any kind of real change all by itself.

Now if the Gen-Xers moaning about how they aren't going to see any Social Security (which by the way, we always knew to be true of us as well) and the progressive millennials thinking that they are going to be able to work 20 hours a week so they can go kite flying every night and still make enough to pay the rent and if they can't it's all the fault of their boomer managers, would recognize that there is greater power when generations get together in the common interest rather than their own parochial ones, perhaps we would have the numbers to make substantive changes. Because a lot of us have been out here trying for the past 30-40 years. We've had limited success at best, but we could sure use the help as we continue.

Of course that would require making an effort instead of complaining and scapegoating Baby Boomers as the source of all our problems the way Republicans have decided to scapegoat Mexicans.

Labels: baby boomers, Generation X, millenials