Generational Helots

Gen X critiques the Millenials

2012-01-15T21:29:00.000-08:00

This Saturday Night Live skit is a great Dig at Millenial vices by some Gen Xers

http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/you-can-do-anything/1379100/

The Millenials have another vice -herd mentality, which can be dangerous with a demagogue in politics...

SOLITUDE is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/opinion/sunday/the-rise-of-the-new-groupthink.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

Generational War

2012-01-12T19:53:00.000-08:00

Working on a longer piece about the Silent Generation's role in all of this -they are likely to be the only generation in US history without a President, being sandwiched between the huge egos of the GI's and the Boomers... but thought this was an interesting, blunt statement:

Older voters, for obvious reasons, don't really care that the country's finances are unsustainable (they'll be dead by the time it matters). Older voters also have a big personal stake in things staying pretty much the same (they're now transitioning from paying for government to getting paid by government).
Younger voters, meanwhile, don't like the fact that the country they will soon inherit is charging headlong toward a cliff. They also don't like the super-high unemployment rate, record-high student-loan debt, and the fact that the American dream that their parents enjoyed seems to be evaporating.
In other words, what Ron Paul is now tapping into is a developing war between generations, one that will only get more intense in the coming decades.
Half of voters under 30 just just voted for Ron Paul. Half.
The Washington establishment (and America) dismisses that at their peril.

Newt Gingrich and Boomers' Daddy Complex

2012-01-09T22:09:00.000-08:00

Newt Gingrich’s remarks at a New Hampshire debate crystallized something about baby-boomers, more specifically, activist baby-boomers.

Newt said, “My father was in fact serving in Vietnam in the Me-Kong delta at the time he (Congressman Paul) is referring to. I think I have a pretty good idea of what it’s like as a family to worry about your family getting killed.”

This is from an ideologically activist baby-boomer. His activism is of the “Right”. It is militaristic, full of braggadocio about United States military power and the use of force. At a previous foreign policy debate he mentioned that his father was a life-long infantryman which caused Newt to realize that National Security was so important that he should… study it. So he got a PhD and was in graduate school during the Vietnam War, which his sort described at the time as a crusade against Communism, a vital National Security issue I would imagine.

What makes all of this exemplary of baby boomer activism, which we usually associate with the left (for example the Democratic Convention in Chicago, Berkeley protestors, etc.) is the underlying assumption that the GI Generation will always be there. Newt’s Dad will be fighting the Commies so he can study policy. Forever. Conversely, on the left, the economic engines (GM, HP, IBM) and civilizational pillars (marriage, civil liberties, work) will always be there but we can liberate our sexual desires among this economic plenty and seek a more just allocation of the economic fruits and the pleasures it can buy.

The sort of left of the baby boomers, progressives, are trying to make the world one big pre-school playground where everything is equal and fair, and everyone is a great artist and really good at playing with sand… literally retarding any progression at all… and then the sort of right wing opposition to them, self-labeled conservatives, who have little awareness of anything cultural or essential that they want to conserve, just want to make sure that everyone doesn’t sin. So they pass laws outlawing sin, imagining that this will make everyone go to some sort of bland bourgeois heaven, a cul de sac in the clouds that backs onto an absolutely divine golf course.

Because they both assume that what their daddies built will endure to under gird and fund their a priori ideological missions, both are intellectually static, and stasis is death.

The GI generation is almost completely gone and the institutions and prosperity they built are crumbling. Will any Boomer grow up and lead the rebuilding?

Probably not, they are so obsessed with their fathers’ legacies –either in awe of or hateful of them, that they are currently paralyzed in infantile inaction –just look and the Super Committee.

Mortgaging the Kids

2012-01-09T21:14:00.000-08:00

When All You Have Is a Hammer

2011-12-30T22:07:00.000-08:00

I had a simple carpentry problem.

I called a carpenter that was highly recommended as the leading carpenter, as the only really acceptable carpenter.

He brought a hammer and was very charming. He seemed Carpenterial.

I showed him the first of my problems: a nail was sticking out.

He hammered it. Then he hammered it some more. He gave me the card of a friend of his to replace the dry wall he had destroyed.

Then I showed him a sagging shelf.

He started hammering. Then he hammered some more.

I questioned if this was the best way to fix a sagging shelf. I said that surely there are more sophisticated tools for dealing with this problem besides the hammer. Didn’t he have hundreds of tools in his heavy box in his truck?

He called me a naïve nut job, with an unrealistic understanding of the world and the true dangers that faced my home. He said that this was what all sophisticated carpenters knew was the best way to handle carpentry problems.

He destroyed my shelf. But within minutes, when my back was turned, his son had replaced the fine, hundred year-old, hardwood shelf, with a particle board shelf, sloppily painted and not level. He presented me with a bill for $10 million.

Then the carpenter found other problems in my house: first a dirty window. He hammered it.

I protested that I did not need any more of his help.

He accused me of not loving my house enough and questioned whether I had the right even to live there.

He did not like the paint in my son’s room. He hammered the walls until they came down.

This continued until my house was destroyed despite my protests. He hired his cocaine-addicted fraternity brother to redesign my house for repair and presented me with a bill. He said that if I did not pay he would also repair my car.

He said he did not like the look on my face and approached me with his hammer.

As he proceeded to repair my face with his hammer I wondered how this parasite had gotten into my home, how anyone this crude could have been so highly recommended as my only choice. I scolded myself for listening to the experts and for not hiring good ole Ron down the street.

At that point my wife intervened and exercised her second amendment rights, only wounding him. I summoned all of my remaining strength and threw the bums out.

Soon after we were indefinitely detained…

Our house was given over to refugees from a previous carpentry campaign and one child was apprenticed to the carpenter, while the other child was sent off to work, to pay off the bills of our carpenter and his associates.

New Foundations?

2010-03-16T10:45:00.000-07:00

A Generation X Representative is the only one with a plan to avoid the enslavement of us and our descendants from the entitlements of the G.I.s and the Boomers. A telling quote:

Ryan comes from a family of industrial earth-movers—the business, now run by his cousins, was started by his grandfather, and he helped out as a kid. They clear away obstructions so new foundations can be laid.

Wait, there's more:

According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which produces Congress's official projections about the long-term fiscal effects of legislation, Ryan's Roadmap for America’s Future would zero out the deficit, balance the budget by 2063, and reduce Medicare's expected share of the economy in 2080 from a projected 14.3 percent of GDP to a mere 4 percent. The Roadmap also calls for a substantial simplification of the tax code and a replacement of the corporate income tax with an 8.5 percent business consumption tax. CBO's projections are inherently uncertain—even the most competent economic forecasters can only guess at how the world will change over 50-plus years. But the result is, at the very least, a compelling conservative vision of the country's fiscal future.

Guess what? The Leadership of neither party is interested...

Here's the Newsweek article:

Here's the Plan:

Birthright Sold

2010-03-03T22:26:00.000-08:00

"Plato reminds us that democracy follows plutocracy as its antithesis when the younger generation realizes that their elders have sold their birthright."

No More Intergenerational Theft!

2010-03-01T18:14:00.000-08:00

"I admire the courage of the junior senator from Kentucky," he said. "Somebody has to stand up finally and say, 'No more inter-generational theft!'"

And with that, the Senate adjourned for the weekend.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/26/jim-bunning-repeatedly-bl_n_477910.html

Agree with the sentiment, but it's like emptying the ocean with a bucket

Indications of the Fourth Turning

2010-02-19T21:38:00.000-08:00

"These kids are so over-scheduled and tired"

The Race to Nowhere is an important indication of a major cultural and societal shift that is taking place. Generational experts Strauss and Howe called it the Fourth Turning and, from the Financial Crisis of 2008 to the election of the first self-consciously styled "Post-Boomer" president in that same year, the secular crisis of generational realignment they predicted in the 1990s seems to be taking place. In discussing this generational shift Howe has this to say:

"We think that generations move history along and prevent society from suffering too long under the excesses of any particular generation."

What is interesting about The Race to Nowhere is it focus on meaning, especially over a decade after the Boomers par excellence, the Clintons, sought to imbue us with the Politics of Meaning. Because this time Generation X is seeking to articulate the meaning. The film is also a sign of potential generational cooperation.

This film indicates that adults, especially Gen Xers, are reacting to the excesses of how the Millennials have been raised, while at the same time listening to some of the idealism of the Boomers, and attempting to bring some practical reality and implementation to Boomer ideals.

The hyper-scheduled herd of Millennials that the Baby Boomers first began raising and planning for in the 80s, with their Baby-on-Board signs and vicarious goal-setting, are developing some ominous habits of shallowness and depression. As Strauss and Howe indicate in their book, The Millennials Rising, the great Civic potential of the Millennials can develop either virtuously -in a "let's all pitch in and solve problems together" kind of way, or they can develop the vices of the herd, steamrolling all in their path so that everyone gets the trophy to which they have been told they are entitled.

The last time this generational alignment happened in this country, when the newest Artist generation was age 6 and under, was 1931. In that year, unemployment rose over 16% two years after the crash of 1929 and many auto-manufacturers went out of business; roughly 2500 banks went out of business. President Hoover said in March that "prosperity is just around the corner.

"Artists are, "subtle, indecisive, emotional and compromising, often having to deal with feelings of repression and inner conflict. They grow up as the over-protected children of a Crisis, come of age as the sensitive young adults of a High, rebel as indecisive midlife leaders during an Awakening, and become the empathic elders of an Unraveling. The Silent Generation is an example of an Artist generation. The Homeland Generation is expected to emerge as the next generation of this example."

We can see the similarities in the times, and the concern and care for the next generation. As Howe says:

This generation will have no memory of anything before the financial meltdown of 2008 and the events that are about to unfold in America. If our research is correct, this generation’s childhood will be a time of urgency and rapid historical change. Unlike the Millennials, who will remember childhood during the good times of 1980s and ’90s, the Homelanders will recall their childhood as a time of national crisis.

In a time of crisis, how do we change a road to nowhere, into a road to somewhere. And how can we ensure that somewhere is not anywhere?

In the Coming Chaos Gen Xers Will Shine

2008-02-06T19:34:00.000-08:00

The Bank Implode-O-Meter

Save Our Generation

2008-01-16T12:26:00.001-08:00

Boomers Not So Bad?

2008-01-14T19:52:00.000-08:00

Bastiat said that democracy was the idea that everyone could live at the expense of everyone else. It took our GIs, who "Triumphed over Evil", to create the Programs where they could live at the expense of those not even born yet.
We can understand the various constituency lobbyists fighting each other over the federal largess, but Gen X and the Millenials weren't alive to hire a lobby to fight against the mortgaging of the future.

Notes from a Kucinich rally:

Listening to people talking, and what they were talking about, was predictable. An old lady behind me proudly and loudly voiced, "Oh, and who would vote for that Ron Paul. I mean his foreign policy is okay, but on domestic issues (what can you give us?) he is just awful. He's for nothing, no programs." The rest of the chatter was the usual: free prescriptions, free glasses, no medicare co-pays. The old people never cheered for Kucinich's education promises, which included free daycare prior to the age of 5, a new Head Start program launch, and free college. The old people mostly sat quiet for that. But the younger Moms and Dads shouted and whooped. "Free" stuff!

Programs! Get Yer Programs Here!

Enslave the Young!

2008-01-10T13:59:00.000-08:00

Gramma and Grampa voted for the welfare-warfare state they created.

So Frustrating

2008-01-04T12:52:00.000-08:00

The pace with which our elders drive our culture off of a cliff is so frustrating we just couldn't blog for a while. We had a Google news update set for "Baby Boomers" and the daily influx of trite BS mixed with apocalyptic impending bankruptcy was... frustrating.

But here's a good quote from a website comments section, bitter enough for us:

The Baby Boomers are now reaching retirement age, and they’ll be up in arms demanding their Solid Gold Goodies: Medicare, SocSec and unlimited free time to enjoy their ill-gotten gains. Given the Human propensity to seek out “something for nothing” and the self-centered narcissism so characteristic of the 1940-1960 generation, I find it extremely difficult to believe that Imperial central-government spending will not skyrocket out of control between now and the date the last Boomer goes to the fires of Hell. At the very least, working Americans will be facing European-level taxes to pay for all these freebies... This means that the Solid Gold Goodies will disappear by about 2025. GenXers, take note.

Eating Their Young

2007-09-22T06:50:00.000-07:00

Intergenerational Equity

2007-08-14T11:02:00.000-07:00

Presidential Candidates need to make "inter-generational equity" a top priority, says US Comptroller General David Walker, comparing the current government situation, bankrupting the future, to the Fall of Rome in the Financial Times.

“One of the concerns is obviously we are a great country but we face major sustainability challenges that we are not taking seriously enough,” said Mr Walker, who was appointed during the Clinton administration to the post, which carries a 15-year term.

The fiscal imbalance meant the US was “on a path toward an explosion of debt”.

“With the looming retirement of baby boomers, spiralling healthcare costs, plummeting savings rates and increasing reliance on foreign lenders, we face unprecedented fiscal risks,” said Mr Walker, a former senior executive at PwC auditing firm.

Current US policy on education, energy, the environment, immigration and Iraq also was on an “unsustainable path."...

“They need to make fiscal responsibility and inter-generational equity one of their top priorities. If they do, I think we have a chance to turn this around but if they don’t, I think the risk of a serious crisis rises considerably”.

Learning from Mistakes

2007-08-10T20:44:00.000-07:00

is not a Boomer trait apparently... So maybe they will bring back the draft that they all had such a good time agreeing about back in the glory days of the late 60s and early 70s.

They haven't raised a healthy group of civic-minded Millenials, all full of self-esteem, duty, and groupthink for nothing.

A group of political leaders with visions of utopian transformation worldwide, a generation of children who have been educated into historic and philosophical illiteracy, and diversity-trained into a saccarine group ideology of never ever committing the evil crime of exercising their judgement. Mix, stir, add a little FEAR for flavor. Viola! Fascism!

STEALING FROM THE FUTURE

2007-08-06T13:09:00.000-07:00

STEALING FROM THE FUTURE is a sub-title from the article "Another Reason For Those Empty Houses" in Businessweek about the current "Real Estate Crisis".
Stealing from the future? But I always heard that the future is now. And since the future is now and we are apparently stealing the future, does that mean that we are stealing the present? Who controls the present controls the future, so the thieves have the present and the future... No wonder I live in the past...

Sacred Cow Slayer

2007-08-04T10:04:00.000-07:00

It was thought that one of the advantages that Boomers brought to society was the slaying of sacred cows, "questioning authority" (until they become the authority). It was hoped that by discarding the artificial constructs of their elders they could get to some sort of essential ordering of society.

But the Boomers, as Visionaries, as Idealists, impose their own contrived visions upon us. For example, Republicans want to legislate everyone into heaven, and Democrats want to legislate heaven on earth.

Growing up in the ideological, moral and emotional chaos in the wake of the Boomers, Generation X has developed a very practical way of life, not seeking to cure the world of its ills but seeking to take care of the immediate problems around them. Boomers have concerts to raise awareness to stop world hunger, Xers go to the neighborhood soup kitchen.

But in their very practicality Xers are the more serious and dangerous (for Boomer idealogues) Sacred Cow Slayers. Thomas Woods is one of the most prolific and articulate of these. As the reviwer in The American Thinker describes him and his work:

[W]hen you stumble upon an objective historian, with pronounced analytical skills, who can write with clarity, panache, and precision then the "good American" must read his work. One such historian is Tom Woods.

Woods' books include The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History and now 33 Questions About American History You're Not Supposed To Ask. Here's a good Cow Slaying Quote from the Introduction:

This book...poses 33 questions about American historyfor which the typical answers are either misleading, grossly unsatisfactory, or clearly and demonstrably wrong. Worse than the standard answers to these questions is that many of them are simply never raised in the first place, since they may give rise to forbidden thoughts that run counter to established opinion.

As the review in The American Thinker continues:

Tom Woods's book will disabuse those Americans who are naïve enough to think that they live under the protections guaranteed in the old Constitution. Those protections are long gone, replaced by a pernicious democratic socialism that more closely reflects the dystopian horror of George Orwell rather then the federated republic of George Washington.

Pragmatic Revolution, Gen X Style

2007-08-03T12:26:00.000-07:00

From the Right Angle at Human Events: a great piece on generational differences between Boomers and Gen Xers. Two great quotes from the article:

My parent’s generation had grand visions of communal living and transcendental experiences. My generation embraces mass produced consumer goods and free trade economics. Remaking the world is not on our agenda. No, our anger is rooted in pragmatism. Our money is being taken from us to fuel entitlement programs that many of us expect to be bankrupted by the time we need them.

We want the ‘baby boom’ generation to stop sleeping at the wheel because it is our generation that is the roadside crew cleaning up the mess their idiocy is leaving behind.

If the Boomers are like the previous Idealist Generation, Xers are like the previous Reactive Generation, those youth of the Roaring 20s cynical of Wilsonian Idealism called the Lost Generation, the F. Scott Fitzgerald generation, who became the practical leaders through WWII -Patton, Ike, Bradley etc.

The Last Idealist Generation

2007-07-30T13:59:00.000-07:00

Strauss and Howe show that generations conform to four basic archetypes cycling through history. They are smart enough to note that cycles do not straight-forwardly repeat themselves, that we are not caught in an endless loop, nor is history a mere linear progression.
But today's Boomers are the same archetype as those who ran the show in the 1930s, creating the forms of governement and business that dominated the 20th Century, "My Century!" according to Al Pacino as Satan in The Devil's Advocate.

"It's the 1930s All Over Again" says Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.

Jittery stock markets, an economy drunk on credit, and politicians calling for varieties of dictatorship: what a sense of déjà vu! Let us recall that the world went bonkers for about ten years way back when. The stock market crashed in 1929, thanks to the Federal Reserve, and with it fell the last remnants of the old liberal ideology that government should leave society and economy alone to flourish. After the federal Great Depression hit, there was a general air in the United States and Europe that freedom hadn't worked. What we needed were strong leaders to manage and plan economies and societies.

And how they were worshipped. On the other side of the world, there were Stalin and Hitler and Mussolini, but in the United States we weren't in very good shape either. Here we had FDR, who imagined himself capable of astonishing feats of price setting and economy boosting. Of course he used old-fashioned tricks: printing money and threatening people with guns. It was nothing but the ancient despotism brought back in pseudo-scientific garb.

Again, will the current Idealists, the Boomers, look to the outdated modes of production and organization of the past or look forward and let people be?

The Astronaut Farmer

2007-07-27T20:00:00.000-07:00

The tag line of this movie is "If we don't have our dreams, we have nothing." In many ways this movie points hopefully to a revitalization of baby-boomers to rediscover the animating spirit of their generation. It is also hopeful in that the protagonist, played by Billy Bob Thornton, does it one his own, contrary to Boomers' youthful dreams of forcing everyone into their Age of Aquarius (on the Left) or into Moral Rectitude (on the Right).

One aspect of his relentless pursuit is the potential bankruptcy of his family. He had had to leave NASA in his youth to go back and save the family farm. But will his pursuit of his dream threaten the farm again? Will he suffer every Boomer male's nightmare and Become his Father? Will he enslave his children in the debt accrued for his dream?

It is touching to see his wife back his dreams and push him to pursue them, especially since "Husband and Wife" relationships are so often portrayed by Boomers as whimsy vs. narrow scold, as practicality vs. dreams, as rivalry not teamwork. G.K. Chesterton said:

"Women are the only realists; their whole object in life is to pit their realism against the extravagant, excessive, and occasionally drunken idealism of men."

And this movie does a great job of capturing the great tension between these male and female aspects while at the same time showing the love and respect for each other within the whole family. The movie indicates that family life can pull Boomers out of their adolescent narcissism while at the same time anchoring their dreams.

The movie also articulates well two aspects of Baby-boomer masculinity. Most Boomer men are shown to be compromised bureaucratic hacks, their souls sold. Farmer is still following his dream, his vision, despite setbacks and costs. On reviewer of the movie on IMDB said

My brother in fact didn't like this movie because he said it wasn't possible. I don't remember him having this much trouble with "E.T." or "Forest Gump". My brother gave up his dream of being a writer, he now teaches high school drama.

In Casablanca we are told that if you scratch a cynic you will find a romantic underneath. The Boomers men here represent the excesses of relentless dreamers and the deficiencies of dreamers burnt out.

Of course there are no Gen Xers in this movie, except for some of the FBI and police roles, who interestingly scorn their spiritually bankrupt superiors and hope for Farmer's success. The children in this movie are Millennials, as if the Boomers psychologically can't acknowledge the generation raised in the moral, political and emotional chaos of the 70s and 80s that they spawned. Again it is interesting that the Gen X characters are law enforcement, as if a generation raised in chaos wants desperately to create order somehow, at least in their own lives, reluctantly taking part in imposing it on others.

The Space Age of the Boomers' youth that is representative here of their dreams, and of man's ability to accomplish the most daunting tasks, is also deeply symbolic of the mechanistic, impersonal and unemotional, industrial and technological world that the GI generation built after WWII. It is both the "emotionless" world of their parents that the Boomers reacted against, diving headlong into an excess of emotionalism at the other extreme -"Follow your Bliss" and all that good stuff- and the root of their aspirations to perfect the world through the application of science and technology.

According to some psychologists, when we are "wounded" at one stage of our development this affects all later development. In order to be whole and fully-developed we have to go back to that stage of our development and work on those character issues. Unless we do this we will continue building on an unsure foundation, like a "Leaning Tower of Pisa" of personal character. The Astronaut Farmer is clearly about Baby-Boomers going back to work on the issues of when they lost their souls, when they were first broken.

Farmer gave up the dream of his youth, the technological wizardry to transcend Earth's boundaries to tend to the practical matters of hearth and home. But he continues to try both to take care of his family and to follow his dream.

In the end his wife pushes him to continue, despite a major setback and massive strain on the family finances, because she does not want him to wound his son as he had been wounded himself. We can see the family, through generational levels, working out the pursuit of their dreams and their practical responsibilities.
In order to do this, however, they spend the inheritance from her father. What the maternal grandfather (Silent Generation or GI) had left for the family, especially the children, is used to go to space.

This is the most troubling aspect of the movie. If Boomers need to go back to the time of their "loss of soul" in order to be more fully integrated and alive, in order to be good parents and adults for the Millennials, does in necessitate spending the Millennials' inheritance?

Will the Boomers look to the outdated forms of work and life of their youth, a "soulless, mechanical, and institutional" world created by the GIs, against which they reacted so wildly in the 60s, to reinvigorate themselves? Or will they look forward as adults who can create their own visions of work, society and life for their families?

Recently Andrew Sullivan commented on the Presidential campaign in similar terms. He asked if Boomer Hillary Clinton was trapped in the paradigm of 20th century foreign policy, a foreign policy put in place by the GIs and if maybe Gen X Barack Obama or Silent Generation Ron Paul are looking to a new paradigm for the 21st Century, a paradigm that may reinvigorate adults but will not bankrupt their children.

And it is a predictable Beltway meme that Clinton did better than Obama this week because she showed "experience" and he showed "naivete". But I wonder if that's the case. I wonder if the country hasn't shifted sufficiently to make total disengagement from Iraq thinkable and Clinton seem a captive of past presumptions about American power and how it should be wielded. Iraq has made the case for a "humble nation" more eloquently than Bush in 2000 ever could.

Boomer Burt Rutan went to space, the Big Dream of boomers in their youth, but he did it on his own in Spaceship One.
Boomers can create the future without looking to the outdated modes of production of the GI hegemony, without bankrupting the rest of us for their dreams.

What Boomers Offer?

2007-07-26T16:29:00.000-07:00

An author offers the possibility that the Boomers might be of some use before they die. And this is indicative of a fundamental change that is happening among Boomers. They will feel at a loss and unfulfilled if they die without ever having acted the adult, without ever having passed on to the youth any skills or wisdom.

Some of the greatest skills—and life lessons—this industry has acquired have been the product of great mentoring, rather than expensive training. In fact, the current baby boomer generation has taught younger generations volumes about preparing for the future and striving for improvement.

Hopefully Boomers can finally be at peace with themselves and where they are. If they continue to see "Youth" as an abstract consumer object to be fought over in some zero-sum game with the younger generations, they will never be whole and they will "die before they get old"

Read it all

Boomer Mission

2007-07-25T10:11:00.000-07:00

While Boomers spent so much energy breaking down the social and cultural institutions that nurtured them in their youth, they now find themselves having to raise their own kids and are revitalizing the civic groups that they once scorned.
This is how Civic generations like the Millenials get formed, by Boomers energizing civic groups such as Kathy Cloninger and the Girls Scouts.
These civic groups can then go either terribly wrong into a herd mentality, or can grow well, building community and the strong civil institutions that Tocqueville knew made Democracy work.

Great Blog

2007-07-18T11:31:00.000-07:00

Check out The Brazen Careerist Blog. Brilliant insight into the changing dynamics of the work world with Generation X and the Millennials.
Especially these two entries:

Yahoo column: Why we should be grateful for Generation Y

and

Twentysomething: Start a company in 3 days with 70 friends

which is a fascinating look at the new "decentralized" workspace. Now if we could just decentralize ourselves out of Social Security...

Boomers find obstacles to volunteer success

2007-07-17T19:39:00.000-07:00

Many baby boomers, the 77 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964 who are part of a large demographic shift, are defying the stereotype of being the "me" generation, said Greg Baldwin, president of VolunteerMatch.

"Boomers are far more interested in volunteering than they're given credit for," Baldwin said. "They're far more interested in using their career and non-career-related skills. They have higher expectations for their volunteer experiences than some of the younger users we're sampling."
Read entire article:

All the Great Themes Turned into Theme Parks

2007-07-15T20:58:00.000-07:00

Just for ha-has, a clip from a great movie about Gen X and being fed up with Boomers and their "causes".

See the whole movie (Pump Up the Volume), it's great.

Nightmare of Their Own Creation

2007-07-15T18:53:00.000-07:00

"We're getting old!" and The Who told us to hope to die before we got old! Boo Hoo... Age gracefully ladies:
But we know that women tend to handle things better than men in these regards. You might see 50 guys with gray ponytails before you see one Boomer matron in a Mini. Boomer men need to mentor or something, and take responsibility...

Boomer Fight!

2007-07-15T17:07:00.000-07:00

Jim Webb vs. Lindsey Graham: One is on the career entitlement fasttrack, the other has worked in the private sector, as a soldier, as a writer, as an historian, and has poured his heart out in books about culture and history.
The only Idealist boomers worth their salt are the ones trying to pass on the best of their culture to the youth like Webb.

This is one thing I really take objection to — may I speak? — is politicians who try to put their political views into the mouths of soldiers," Webb said over his opponent's interruptions. He placed his hand briefly on Graham's back, then jerked his thumb in the Republican's direction.

"Have you been to Iraq?" Graham demanded.

"I've covered two wars as a correspondent," Webb said. "I have been to Afghanistan as a journalist."

Graham: "Have you been to Iraq and talked to the soldiers?"

Webb: "You know, you've never been to Iraq, Lindsey."

The Republican pointed out he's been there seven times.

"You know," Webb said dismissively, "you can see the dog and pony shows. That's what congressman do.

Read it all: Tempers flare on Iraq

Stasis

2007-07-10T06:26:00.000-07:00

There is a new movie coming out called Hairspray. A remake of an older version about young Baby-boomers and the transformative powers of partying to Rock and Roll to "change the world." It is advertised with a review which states, "Hairspray is this generation's Grease!"
Let me get this straight: a remake of Boomer movie about Boomer youth is called the Grease -another Boomer movie about Boomer youth- for this generation?
What a great example of stagnation and stasis in culture, stuck forever like a CD skipping, on the Boomers and their developmental fixations.

From "Me" to "We"?

2007-06-26T07:33:00.000-07:00

Can the Baby Boomers exit their self-absorption and offer generative advice and mentoring to the youth? Phyllis Goldberg seems to think so:

The Baby Boomers or so called 'Me Generation,' on some level, weren't all that different. They were often seen as egocentric and self absorbed, as having a sense of entitlement. But, along the way, they developed the capacity for self reflection. Now, entering the retirement years, they are serving the greater good and are often referred to as the 'We Generation.' Paris Hilton can learn a lesson or two from the changes in their attitudes and behavior.

Read What the Baby Boomers Can Teach Paris Hilton.

Gen Y Voter

2007-06-21T10:13:00.000-07:00

Writes a 22 year old Millenial (aka Gen Y) on the Boomer-dominated media and politics:

I would have assumed censorship of this kind is acceptable only in communist countries, but in the United States of America? So I ask the older generation: How are young people supposed to get excited about politics, when the moment we actually do, our hopes are crushed by media censorship and unfair bias? My hopes right now are limited that my generation will grow up to experience a true democracy.

Is the Silent Generation candidate, Rep. Paul (R-TX), making waves with the young and Boomer-nauseated?

The Adolescent Squeeze

2007-06-21T05:57:00.000-07:00

From Psychology Today:

Before 1850, laws restricting the behavior of teens were few and far between. Compulsory education laws evolved in tandem with laws restricting labor by young people. Beginning in 1960, the number of laws infantilizing adolescents accelerated dramatically. You may have had a paper route when you were 12, but your children can't.

Gen X started in 1961, so restrictions on the youth are implemented just after the Baby boomers have their freedom, fun and growth... Reminds us of Jon Stewart interviewing David Steinberg on The Daily Show: Steinberg gets famous just in time to exploit that fame in the Sexual Revolution, Stewart gets famous just as AIDS breaks...

As Tom Wolfe said, we are in for The Great Relearning, or the 20th Century's Hangover...

Narcissists Running

2007-06-20T09:20:00.000-07:00

Is the third Narcissist of the most narcissistic generation from the most narcissistic city in the world going to run for President too? Since the Boomers are Visionaries of a highly ideological nature let's see what Ideological Visionary Utopias they have to offer: Hillary is a Communist, Rudy is a Socialist, and Bloomberg is a Fascist of the Mussolini variety? What about a Roosevelt?

Keep in Line Slaves!

2007-06-18T11:33:00.000-07:00

Yikes! Kids can't high five, shake hands, or hug in Fairfax County (VA) Public Schools. Reports The Washington Post:

All touching -- not only fighting or inappropriate touching -- is against the rules at Kilmer Middle School in Vienna. Hand-holding, handshakes and high-fives? Banned. The rule has been conveyed to students this way: "NO PHYSICAL CONTACT!!!!!"School officials say the rule helps keep crowded hallways and lunchrooms safe and orderly, and ensures that all students are comfortable.

One size fits all to keep the future wage slaves in line, taking orders to pay for the retirement of their elders. Government Education: Creating compliance and timidity for the future!

Selling Our Children into Slavery...

2007-06-18T09:10:00.000-07:00

Sacred cow smashing Baby Boomer Justin Raimondo writes (emphasis ours):

As Ron Paul tirelessly points out, the American welfare-warfare state is built on the shifting sands of an economic pump-priming perpetual motion machine, i.e., government debt. We are selling our children into slavery and bankrupting the nation: this is the price of empire, at least in purely economic terms.

Raimondo continues:

We defend Japan and South Korea, allowing them to shelter under our military umbrella while they export finished goods to the American market – and lend us the money to build an empire of bases around the world.

Both parties in power, Democratic and Republican, will crusading visionary Baby Boomers in the lead, be it Bush or either Clinton, are selling out our future for their grandiose visions of utopia. If it is welfare or warfare both Right and Left are selling out the youth and the future.

Remember the old joke about why kids and grandparents get along so well? Because they have the same enemies. Maybe Gen X and the Millenials should ally with the avuncular Congressman Ron Paul, who is from the Silent Generation and who is ringing the alarm bell that the Baby Boomers in charge are going to bankrupt the future for the young...

Creating a Trembling Generation of Weaklings

2007-06-15T11:39:00.000-07:00

According to Strauss and Howe, the current gurus of looking at history in terms of Generational Cycles, there are four types of generations that have cycled through U.S. history. They are the Idealist type (e.g. Baby-Boomers), Reactionary (e.g Gen-X), Civic (e.g. G.I.s and Millenials) and Adaptives. The Silent Generation is the adaptive generation born between the G.I.s and the Baby-Boomers. Similarly those born after the Millenials are the new Adaptives, starting roughly in 2001.
Now the poor Silent Generation was born too late to "save the world from evil" and too early to live a "politics of meaning". They may even be the first generation in American history to not have a member become president. By being overprotected in their youth during fearful times of Depression and War, and being overshadowed by their elders who "saved the world from evil" and went on to build the American economic dynamo after the war, the Silent generation could only tweak the structures built by the G.I.s and egg on the younger Boomers with folk music and beat poetry. They were miserably overshadowed and simperingly rebelled by being the first generation to start divorcing at a high rate in order to experience the liberation of the sexual revolution that the younger Boomers were enjoying. And they spawned the first wave of bitter Gen-Xers who grew up in the chaos of their sexual escapades.
The new Adaptives look to be shaping up as a similar bunch of wimps as their Boomer parents overprotect them. If only kids could breathe through bubble wrap I'm sure neurotic parents would use it. Not only are there evil terrorists around every corner and contagious diseases on every flight, but every box of kids' cereal contains "obesity fascism" seeking to destroy a kid's chance of becoming thin and famous! Kellogg:

The company said it won't promote foods in TV, radio, print or Web site ads that
reach audiences at least half of whom are under age 12 unless a single serving
of the product meets these standards:
—No more than 200 calories.
—No trans fat
and no more than 2 grams of
saturated fat.
—No more than 230 milligrams of
sodium, except for Eggo
frozen waffles.
—No more than 12 grams of sugar, not counting sugar from
fruit, dairy and vegetables.Kellogg said it would reformulate products to meet
these criteria or stop marketing them to children under 12 by the end of
2008.

Do kids start smoking just because they don't buy into the idea that this flesh is all there is? It is one thing to say that the body is a temple, it is quite another to treat it like a museum and not disturb, touch, enjoy, any of the exhibits. Stasis is not living, but maybe Boomers think that by trying to induce stasis in the body and the culture Woodstock will always live and the Beatles will always be germaine...

The Opposite of Sanity

2007-06-08T08:41:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I heard Baby Boomer tool Trent Lott on the radio suggesting that the Senate should just pack up and go home if they couldn't vote on certain legislation.
We should be so lucky! This from a guy who titled his book on a life in politics Herding Cats. It's so cute and funny trying to get everyone on the same page to spend their descendants into poverty. What anecdotes he must have about the pork barrel. How's your pension Trent?
But good news! They are going about "the people's business" and gave themselves a higher debt ceiling. I'd love to legislate my own credit increases and then pass off the payment obligation to others after living a life high on the fat. From NPR:

Like many cash-strapped Americans who have maxed-out credit cards, the federal government has hit its limit for borrowing funds to keep operating. If the limit isn't raised, the government likely will run out of borrowing authority within days, risking a shutdown.

Can I have my tax refund in Euros please?

Cheating the Prophet

2007-06-06T12:22:00.000-07:00

G.K. Chesterton, in the early 20th Century, described the humorous tendency of men to predict the future based upon current trends. (Most people believing in linear "Progress" or "Cycles") In the first chapter of his great novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, he wrote:

The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games to which it is most attached is called, "Keep to-morrow dark," and which is also named (by the rustics in Shropshire, I have no doubt) "Cheat the Prophet." The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun...

... But the way the prophets of the twentieth century went to work was this. They took something or other that was certainly going on in their time, and then said that it would go on more and more until something extraordinary happened. And very often they added that in some odd place that extraordinary thing had happened, and that it showed the signs of the times.

Paul Craig Roberts pokes a similar hole in some of our economic prophets:

Economists are governed by the illusion that America's post-World War II prosperity is based on free trade. It is not. America's postwar prosperity was based on the destruction of the economic capability of the rest of the world by World War II and communism-socialism. America was prosperous in its trade because no one else could produce anything.

Now the spoiled scions of that unique monopolistic moment in history for the United States to get rich, the Baby Boomers, are steering the ship of state assuming, with all the sagacity of adolescents who know everything, that trends will continue and they can mortgage our inheritance on their foolish visions of a temporal utopia.

Generations at Work

2007-06-05T12:00:00.000-07:00

Major corporations are taking seriously the different attitudes that generations have towards work and the place of work has in life. From Deloitte:

Baby Boomers in general really wanted to climb up the “corporate ladder” as high as they could; such ambition was seen as a key measure of business/career as well as personal success. Later generations are redefining what ambition and success mean to them. Increasingly these definitions don’t include trying to climb very far up this ladder much less all the way to the top...

... Gen X and Gen Y favor family and personal time over the rewards that usually accompany increased job responsibility. Today’s men and women are working hard but are often not willing to work harder. They are wary of the perceived costliness of trade-offs they would have to make by advancing into jobs with more responsibility.

Boomers won't get out of the way for Gen Xers to rise up anyway so we might as well focus on our families, creating communities. But Boomers were similarly thwarted by the "institutionalized" generations -Silent and G.I.- those drones of the big corporations of the past like GM and IBM.
Boomers began operating outside of those constrained corporate cultures -inventing "junk bonds" (a derisive term coined by stodgy elders) and personal computers...
Generation X is likewise stepping out of the Boomers corporate model and charting it's own path...

Bicentennial Baby

2007-06-04T11:13:00.000-07:00

We came across a great blog tracking the Generations X and Y, or the 13th Generation and the Millenial, if you want to follow Strauss and Howe's formulations. It's called Bicentennial Baby and the latest post discusses a study showing that Gen X men will make less money than Boomer men did, that for the first time a generation will not do better than it's parents -financially that is.

But the author also points out that Gen Xers are far more interested in establishing a stable family environment at the expense of promotion and more money. This makes sense if you understand that one's "mission grows from one's wound", that the first generation of latch-key kids does not want to subject their children to the same suburban vacuum of parental presence, nurturing and authority that we grew up in...

It is the Gen X parents and adults doing the little things at the local level that will nurture the new Millenial generation, hopefully in a positive, civic way.

War-Serfs?

2007-05-25T15:40:00.000-07:00

Helots, Slaves, Serfs... that's all the young are, it seems, to Boomers in power. Once again the Onion nails it:

"Bush's New 'War Czar'
President Bush has appointed Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute as
"war czar." What will Lute's duties entail?
+Living high off the sweat and labor of the war serfs

Read the Onion.

From the Latin Word for Slave...

2007-05-24T14:14:00.000-07:00

Instead of the subtle oligarchy of dark business suits, Democratic Candidate for President John Edwards has come right out and said it, overtly revealing Boomers' oligarchical tendencies. As if the enslavement of the youth to pay for their narcissistic and self-serving programs, wars, and entitlements weren't enough, Boomers are now advocating mandatory enslavement for their Government programs. Said Edwards in N.H.

One of the things we ought to be thinking about is some level of mandatory service to our country, so that everybody in America -- not just the poor kids who get sent to war -- are serving this country.

We've heard about National Service before during Boomer-par-excellence Clinton's term. It's always couched in the kindest do-gooder terms of "service". But the word serve comes from the Latin word servus. And servus means slave.

Millenials and Gen-Xers do plenty of service, on their own, in small ways, in their communities. Voluntarily.

If they want slaves they may get Spartacus...

What We Will Owe!

2007-05-23T12:31:00.000-07:00

Congressman Ron Paul: "We are leaving a $60,000,000,000,000 obligation to the next generation."

So True

2007-05-23T06:58:00.000-07:00

Came across this quote from P.J O'Rourke:

Social Security is a government program with a constituency made up of the old, the near old and those who hope or fear to grow old. After 215 years of trying, we have finally discovered a special interest that includes 100 percent of the population. Now we can vote ourselves rich.

which reminded us of Frederic Bastiat's great line:

Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.

It took the efficiencies and foresight of the politicians of the 20th Century to live at the expense of the future and one's descendents...

Slaying Sacred Cows

2007-05-22T11:56:00.001-07:00

One of the distinctive marks of the Baby Boomers in their youth was their disdain for tradition. They readily broke with old taboos to forge ahead into a new Age of Aquarius. Although, as Tom Wolfe notes in The Great Relearning, the Boomers found out that some of those old taboos had been there for a reason and the hippies in Haight Ashbury soon found themselves suffering from many hygiene-related diseases.

In 1968, in San Francisco, I came across a curious footnote to the psychedelic movement. At the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic there were doctors who were treating diseases no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot. And how was it that they had now returned? ... The hippies, as they became known, sought nothing less than to sweep aside all codes and restraints of the past and start out from zero... And now , in 1968, they were relearning... the laws of hygiene... by getting the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot.

Nonetheless, this aspect of the Baby Boomer psyche, may have its upside for those of us who follow. They may slay many sacred cows, clear the decks of false pieties and decaying intellectual assumptions.
Think of Jon Stewart on the Daily Show or Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report who are merciless in skewering the quasi-religious platitudes of modern politics.
The Onion is clearly a Gen-X phenomenon in its deep cynicism. May both work together in generational cooperation to unburden us from the civic institution worship of the 20th century.

Nick Carraway Heads Back to the Midwest?

2007-05-21T13:07:00.001-07:00

At the end of The Great Gatsby and the materialistic and careless orgy of life out East, Nick Carraway comments about Tom and Daisy:

It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people, Tom and Daisy -they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made...
I shook hands with him; it seemed silly not to, for I felt suddenly as though I were talking to a child.

According to Strauss and Howe we are coming upon a "Generational Constellation", an alignment of Idealist, Reactive, and Civic generations similar to those aligned during the secular crisis of the Great Depression. And one cannot but think of some of the worst aspects of the Baby Boomers when confronted with Fitzgerald's words, realizing that Fitzgerald was of the Lost Generation, a generation reactive to the visionary spasms of their immediate elders, like Gen X to the Boomers.

Following the "Realignment of America" posted below, maybe many folks know what Carraway knew, like lost pets fleeing an earthquake: to head back to the heartland before the coming crash and smash-up that the Boomers will leave us to clean up...

After all, we noticed on the Drudgereport that we are in a new Gilded Age ...

UPDATE: Check out Lisa Bornstein in the Rocky Mountain News who writes: "Move along, you boomers, what have you truly done?"

Racial Generation Gap

2007-05-17T06:12:00.000-07:00

Reports Sam Roberts in the NY Times... New Demographic Racial Gap Emerges. Quoting Mark Mather of the Population Reference Bureau,

There’s a fairly large homogenous population 60 and older that may not be sympathetic to the needs of a diverse youthful population,” Dr. Mather said.

But older generations might not ignore the younger generations altogether since:

...older voters may be persuaded that their pensions and other benefits depend on the income and taxes generated by a better-educated work force.

They' will pay for, or agree to tax others to pay for, just the sort of education they deem fit, as long as it generates revenue for their retirement...

Reinventing Middle Age

2007-05-16T12:08:00.000-07:00

Daphne Merkin in the New York Times asks fellow Boomers, "How old are you anyway?"

Behind all this busy reinvention of the wheel of life, of course, sheer dread lies in wait: the fear that we’re fast gaining upon that demarcation line where you stop being young...

Are you kidding? Approaching the end of youth? No wonder Miata's still sell... Yes, you're getting old. Actually, you got old. Grow up and stop worrying about being "hip".
Merkin continues with the typically self-absorbed and entitled Boomer trope that they "do everything their own way".

Fueled by an increasing fear and demonization of Old Age, ours is a generation bred on the notion of doing it our way, right up to our method of retirement. Given this curious and entitled perspective, middle age becomes a life raft that we can’t afford to fall off.

You can't afford your retirement? Neither can we! Is the unique Boomer way to retire the establishment of entitlement programs for themselves funded by deficits to be paid off by future generations? Curious and entitled indeed.

And of course we couldn't finish the article without some Sour Grapes!

Being young was never as great as it’s made out to be and being middle-aged is not as bad as all that.

Too bad for us who are now young when being young isn't as great as it once was... like in the 60s.
Boomers would be well served to take up mentoring, it's the only thing that will get them out of themselves and in service to others. They have been so good at slaying sacred cows, of calling into question assumptions and traditions, maybe they can provide leadership and direction, a paradigm shift, instead of dwelling on their crows feet...

Debt and Default are Inescapable Concepts

2007-05-14T14:40:00.000-07:00

Gary North notes that we always owe debts -to our parents, to our children. He says:

Debt is inescapable. The question is this: Who owes you what, under which conditions? Find out now, before the debt comes due. Default is your enemy.

North then quotes David Walker, Comptroller General of the United States, in his appearance on 60 Minutes:

Walker says we have promised almost unlimited health care to senior citizens who never see the bills, and the government already is borrowing money to pay them. He says the system is unsustainable.
"It’s the number one fiscal challenge for the federal government, it’s the number one fiscal challenge for state governments and it’s the number one competitive challenge for American business. We’re gonna have to dramatically and fundamentally reform our health care system in installments over the next 20 years," Walker tells Kroft.
And if we don’t?
"And if we don’t, it could bankrupt America. . . ."

North continues:

We have therefore witnessed a massive creation of unfunded debt in the West. The magnitude of this unfunded liability is so large that the end is sure: default. The only question is the form this default will take.

I began with a statement: "Debt is an inescapable concept." To this, I now add a corollary: "Default is an inescapable concept."

We are a generation of slaves to the entitlement programs of our ancestors. Millenials and Generation X will be paying the bills when those who incurred the debt are pushing up daisies... or retired in Sedona.

The Realignment of America

2007-05-09T14:01:00.000-07:00

Michael Barone has a great article in the Wall Street Journal about new demographic trends:

They're fleeing hip Boston and San Francisco, and after eight decades of moving to Washington they're moving out. The domestic outflow from these metro areas is 3.9 million people, 650,000 a year. High housing costs, high taxes, a distaste in some cases for the burgeoning immigrant populations--these are driving many Americans elsewhere.

Young Boomers and Gen-Xers trying to stake out more livable and local communities?

Shushing the Baby Boomers?

2007-05-09T13:19:00.000-07:00

A New York times article states that Barack Obama, self-identifying as a "post-boomer", says that it it time for the Baby-boomers to get over themselves.

Although it does have a nice quote from Joe Klein, author of Primary Colors that, "We baby boomers have been dreadful in the public arena." (hear! hear!), nonetheless the article is merely condescending to the youth who have to follow in their dreadful wake.

It provides no insight into a positive agenda that the younger generations might have different from the wild visions and grand strategies of the boomer prophets of utopia. The article even quotes former Clinton staffer Chris Lehane about the "BigIssues" facing us now:

But 2008 will represent a hinge moment in generational politics, not just because of the prominence of a post-boomer candidate but because this will be the first cycle when a whole new range of issues as big, if not bigger, than the big issues that defined the boomers will be front and center: Iraq, the war on terror, global warming, energy, technology and globalization.

Thanks Chris, but we're sick of the "big issues". We're content to run Google, volunteer locally and raise families, all the while paying for the visionary utopian catastrophes of the left and right, voted for and funded before we could even dissent while those who dreamed up those Big Issues indulge in a decadent retirement on our backs as well.

The Coming Entitlement Meltdown

2007-05-07T10:01:00.000-07:00

There seems to be only one presidential candidate who is concerned about the enslavement of the youth to the fickle policies and spending of today's politicians. Says Congressman Ron Paul:

The politicians who get reelected by passing such incredibly shortsighted legislation will never have to answer to future generations saddled with huge federal deficits. Those generations are the real victims, as they cannot object to the debts being incurred today in their names.

Read the entire article: The Coming Entitlement Meltdown .

Sewing the Seeds of... An Interesting Civic Trend?

2007-05-02T06:58:00.000-07:00

People coming together to learn, or relearn, traditional arts in a community setting. Such a venture as the Stitch Lounge brings together the generations Millenials through Boomers...

From the Christian Science Monitor: The iPod Generation in Stitches.

More broadly, sewing lounges and clubs offer people a social network and personal contact that many don't get in the high-tech age of IMing, online chat rooms, and blogging.
"I think young people are looking for new social outlets, and sewing certainly does that," says Sharon Wirth, who teaches an introductory sewing course at Iowa State University in Ames.

"We want people to find their own place in the sewing community," says [Hope] Meng [co-owner of the Stitch Lounge].

As we go global, we will also go local? High tech while looking back towards traditional roots...? Hopefully such ventures will lead to a rebirth of Civil Society that Alexis de Tocqueville noted was America's great strength.

Too hard on Boomers?

2007-05-01T06:34:00.000-07:00

Some have commented that we might be too hard on the Boomers. While we have been focusing on some of their vices -the narcissism that comes with grandiose visions- we also want to acknowledge the vices of Generation X -cynicism- and the Millenials -contented group-think.

So let's look at a Boomer (a young Boomer to be sure) with a vision -maybe not the most personable guy in the world but someone looking to change the world for the better with a broad vision. Of course he'll need Xers to implement it... and Millenials to buy it.

The following quotes are from an interesting article in Washintonian magazine about Steve Case, founder of AOL. And may indicate a direction that Boomers can move as leaders in the society...

“You know, the healthcare system in this country is broken,” he said. “I’ve got a decade or two left to try to fix it.”

He [Case] began to think about creating a new America Online, but this time an online community devoted to healthcare, insurance issues, and “interactivity” that would disseminate information from top centers such as the Cleveland and Mayo clinics.

Case vows to change the experience his brother Dan [who died of cancer] had to endure: duplicative forms, lost medical records, long waits for tests, and confusion over the availability of new therapies. “I don’t want to just complain about the healthcare system,” says Case. “I want to do something to fix it.”

Starting Revolution might be challenging and fun, but will it restore his lost luster, to say nothing of that lost billion? No one who watched his success with AOL in the early days would bet against him. But few who saw his performance after the Time Warner merger would bet on him.

Are the Practical Gen Xers Taking Over?

2007-04-30T13:04:00.000-07:00

After four presidential terms of incessant puerility, from Clinton's sex-obsessed band geek perpetual adolescence to W's school-yard strutting and taunting (do you ever get the feeling that every time W steps up to the mic he's winking at some prep school buddies saying 'can you believe I'm pullin' this s@#t off?'), maybe the Boomers are exhausting themselves with the winner-takes-all national culture war that they have been waging since the 60s.

The Atlantic Monthly suggests in A Separate Peace, that "The way to end culture wars is to slug them out state by state."

No doubt a practical and real attempt at a solution by Gen X who have been pawns in the ideological battles of the Boomers for too long...

GENERATION KILL: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War

2007-04-30T12:19:00.000-07:00

Although the Millenials are often compared to the G.I.s as a Civic type of generation, there are some differences that a century of entitlements have wrought at their expense. Here are some quotes from the book, Generation Kill by Evan Wright :

Culturally, these Marines would be virtually unrecognizable to their forebears in the "Greatest Generation." They are kids raised on hip-hop, Marilyn Manson and Jerry Springer. For them, "motherfucker" is a term of endearment. For some, slain rapper Tupac is an American patriot whose writings are better known than the speeches of Abraham Lincoln...

These young men represent what is more or less America's first generation of disposable children. More than half of the guys in the platoon come from broken homes and were raised by absentee, single, working parents. Many are on more intimate terms with video games, reality TV shows and Internet porn than they are with their own parents.
Before the "War on Terrorism" began, not a whole lot was expected of this generation other than the hope that those in it would squeak through high school without pulling too many more mass shootings in the manner of Columbine.

But since the 9/11 attacks, the weight of America's "War on Terrorism" has fallen on their shoulders...
Even though their Commander in Chief tells them they are fighting today in Iraq to protect American freedom, few would be shaken to discover that they might actually be leading a grab for oil. In a way, they almost expect to be lied to...

Be Free? No, Behave!

2007-04-30T06:15:00.000-07:00

Of course the cradle-to-grave entitlements of Europe are under pressure due to Europe's declining birth-rate. So it is no surprise to read that the Spanish Government is seeking to indoctrinate the youth with their "Education for Citizenship" program since the retirees will need willing wage-slaves to support them.

Like Generation X and the Millenials, the youth of Europe have had their inheritance voted away before they were even born...

But, objects a Spanish Cardinal: "[The Archbishop of Toledo, Cardinal Antonio Cañizares] stressed that the purpose of the course material “is not that we be good, but that we behave well..."

It makes one think of the children obediently being ground down at school in Pink Floyd's "The Wall"...

The children march in unison to the same beat, rolling through a machine only to emerge as putty-faced clones void of individual distinction who ultimately falling blindly into an oversized meat grinder, metaphorically pulverized and minced into the same ground beef-like form as the preceding victim.

Read the entire article: Education for Citizenship leads to totalitarianism, says Spanish Cardinal

Boomers Die and Take Jobs with Them?

2007-04-23T19:05:00.000-07:00

The American Association of Community Colleges reports that:

Allied health programs also were the most frequently
added programs in recent years at 26.2%, and industrial skilled trades were the most frequently discontinued programs, also at 26.3%.

Community College programs are more reactive to the job market than four year colleges and everyone knows the growing need to care for the aging Boomers is now upon us. But when the factories are closed down and the industrial jobs are gone, they won't come back easily.

It is our concern that this trend at community colleges represents a short term boom in changing the bed pans of aged hippies, while sacrificing long term vocational excellence. Eventually the Boomers will pass away and this boom will be bust. What then?

Read the entire report:

UPDATE (04/24): We came across this quote from Camille Paglia today regarding some generational aspects of the Virginia Tech shootings that seemed germain to this particular post:

“There is nothing happening educationally in these boring prisons that are fondly called suburban high schools. They are saturated with a false humanitarianism, which is especially damaging for boys.
“Young men have enormous energy. There was a time when they could run away, hop on a freighter, go to a factory and earn money, do something with their hands. Now there is this snobbery of the upper-middle-class professional. Everyone has to be a lawyer or paper pusher.”
Cho is a classic example of “someone who felt he was a loser in the cruel social rat race”, Paglia says. The pervasive hook-up culture at college, where girls are prepared to sleep with boys they barely know or fancy, can be a source of seething resentment and alienation for those who are left out.

Read the entire article.

Baby Boomers in Charge

2007-04-23T11:44:00.000-07:00

Because the baby-boomers never grew up they insist on treating everyone else like children, writes A.D. Lelong from New York. A more apt description of the vices of the boomers as self-centered authorities, both juvenile and patronising at the same time, I have not heard.

Imagine a world where all adults are put into a giant playpen, and guarded by adolescent babysitters. Welcome to the world of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. It is a world where all adults are treated like children. Where dangerous things are labeled, 'keep out of reach of children.' It is a world where they are not permitted to exercise responsibility. It is a world where only "experts" can be trusted.

Read the entire article.

Generational Warfare

2007-04-23T11:25:00.000-07:00

The Washington Post's Book World has a review by Judy Budnitz of Christopher Buckley's satire Boomsday.

Here's the set-up: One Generation is pitted against another in the shadow of a Social Security crisis.... Incensed by the financial burden soon to be placed on her age bracket by baby-boomers approaching retirement, she [protagonist Cassandra Devine] proposes on her blog that boomers be encouraged to commit suicide.

Read the entire review.

This reminds us of the great, dark and cynical Gen-X satire from 1999 in the Onion that the Long-Awaited Baby Boomer Die-off To Begin Soon.

The selfishness that has been a hallmark of the Boomers will continue right up to the very end, as they force millions of younger Americans to devote an inordinate mount of time and resources to their care, bankrupting the Social Security system in the process," Clausewitz said. "In their old age, the Boomers will actually manage to take as much from the next generation as they did the previous one, which fought WWII so that their Boomer children could have Philco TVs and Davy Crockett air rifles.

Of course this is the vicious side of Gen-X cynically excoriating the vices of the boomers.

Making Kids Worthless...

2007-04-18T15:16:00.000-07:00

...is an interesting study by Oskari Juurikkala of some of the economics underlying why the Baby-Boomers are going to bust Social Security, and why those of us left will pay the burden...

Here is one of the assumptions:
People will always have children,' assured Konrad Adenauer, the German Chancellor, in 1957. He was convinced that the future of the brave new pay-as-you-go social security system would not be undermined by demographic changes.
And here is an unintended consequence:

Instead of caring for their own parents and close relatives, those of working age are compelled by force of law and gun to pay for the retirement of everyone else. To put it plainly, social security replaces children and the family as the main support in old age by literally socializing the traditional duties of the family. Why have children when the state will take care of you in your old age?

Entire Article: Making Kids Worthless: Social Security's Contribution to the Fertility Crisis

Silent Operators Plundering the Future

2007-04-17T05:37:00.000-07:00

The Washington Post has been running a series on Gerald Cassidy and the development of D.C. lobbying.
Cassidy is on the tail end of the Silent Generation.
According to Strauss and Howe there are four types of generations throughout American history. The Idealist (Baby Boomers), the Reactive (Gen-X), the Civic (GIs and Millennials), and Adaptive (Silent).
While the Civic types build institutions, the Adaptives operate within those institutions and systems, often making them more human and livable. Cassidy is a fascinating example of a Silent operating within the framework of the corporate/political process system developed by the GIs in response to the secular crises that defined their formative years -the Depression and WWII.
Cassidy's company invented the earmark appropriations which have often come under fire in the media. Whether a good thing or bad Cassidy's story is nonetheless a good example of an Adaptive type operating within a Civic system.
But what will be the next Civic system of the Millennials? Current paradigms may not apply...

Two-a-Days

2007-04-16T19:20:00.000-07:00

In 1999 the Onion, in characteristic Gen-X fashion, asserted that the Columbine jocks had safely resumed their bullying. It seemed harsh and cynical, even for the Onion. But it was profoundly prophetic.
Gone is the grungy, slacker outsider, in are Two-A-Days, which follows the lives and exploits of the state champion Hoover High football team and their cheerleader girlfriends. And don't forget MTV's other reality shows such as The Hills and Laguna Beach.
MTV, the oracle of youth culture has suddenly made heroes of the very ones who were always teen movie villains only a decade ago.
After years of subverting the high school hierarchy with awkward outsiders overthrowing the entrenched jockocracy (See: any 80s/90s movie where outsider gets girl and everyone learns important lessons), the rightful order of American culture returns. On top are the strong, the rich and the beautiful. Why the change?
Strauss and Howe have written extensively about the Generational Cycles in American History. According to them the new Millennials (1981/2-2001) are a civic generation like the GIs who came of age during the Depression and fought in World War II. The Millennials are like the "Greatest Generation".
But did the GIs enter the world with $150,000 in debt already on their heads? The GIs may have grown up poor, but were they born with Less than Zero? The GIs were able to vote themselves a New Deal, a Social Security paid for by the youth.
But now the youth are fewer, and those perpetual adolescents, the Baby-Boomers are set to retire.
So of course we need Two-a-Days. In Two-a-Days everyone and everything is in order. They follow the rules and are rewarded. They follow the rules and they are winners. They are a team. And the next Civic generation will be all about teamwork.
The desiccated, old American order that the Boomers destroyed must be reestablished by the Boomers themselves. (See: The Organization Kid.). The youth can no longer "Question Authority" when there are payroll taxes to pay.