The '60s Kids and the Crash
O'Rourke, P. J.
P. J. O'Rourke THE '60s KIDS AND THE CRASH It's all over now, baby boom. ver since the stock market went to 1—r the bathroom last fall, a lot of us have been pretty busy—talking our broker pals...
...Shoot MTV videos for Handel and Rimsky-Korsakov...
...When we took up Hula Hoops, the planet bobbled in its orbit...
...the Me Generation, a.k.a...
...Fitness is another trend pioneered by the Boom...
...So we whiled away the seventies in an orgy of hedonism and self-absorption, bouncing from ashram to bedroom to disco to gym at a speed made possible only by ingesting vast quantities of Inca Scratch-N-Sniff...
...Everybody born between WWII and the early sixties is finally going to have to grow up...
...We could have it all—career, marriage, job, children, BMW, Rolex, compact disc player, another marriage, more children, and a high-growth, high-yield, no-load mutual fund...
...That didn't work...
...We'll be all over network TV again...
...That was good, I think...
...It took thousands of doctors and psychiatrists to decide whether we should suck our thumbs or all our toes, too...
...We vote in local elections...
...Will anyone feel sorry for us...
...Life's big VISA card bill has come due at last...
...W ait a minute, I hear dissenting noises...
...We invite each other over to afternoon teas and discuss the novels of Thomas Mann...
...It's time for us to pause, time to reflect, time to . . . OH, GOD, DARLING DON'T DO IT WITH A GUN—WE JUST REDECORATED THE BATHROOM...
...Maybe drugs make you a better person but only if you believe in heaven and think John Belushi could get past the doorman...
...Our intellectual insights led to a school system that hasn't taught anybody how to read in fifteen years...
...That's because old-timey feminists used to worry about boring things like voting rights and legal status...
...We're jerks...
...And having sex with everyone we could think of—this broke up our first two marriages and gave most of us chronic venereal diseases and the rest of us obituaries...
...How did we wind up so old...
...Civil...
...We've been so busy that we may not have noticed Black Monday, Blue Tuesday, Black and Blue Wednesday, etc...
...Greenjeans and Mrs...
...But Boomer Women put some real life in the issues by emphasizing upscale grabbiness, pointless careerism, and insane arguments about pronoun antecedents...
...Well, some of the Beatles' songs are really great...
...Contributions such as . . . uh . . . urn . . . BZZZZZZZZZ Time's Up...
...And just a couple of years ago we were...
...the Now Generation, a.k.a...
...Nothing was too good for us...
...Millions of us are leading empty, useless, pitiful lives and lifting weights and eating fiber to make those lives last longer...
...Our transistor radios drowned out the music of the spheres...
...Do a feature movie about the life of Euripides with the sound track in ancient Greek...
...When we came of age in the 1960s, we found the world wasn't as perfect as Mr...
...Of course, the collapse of the Reagan Pig-Out wasn't the only thing that did us Boomers in...
...The problem is, we've spent all our money on cocaine and Reeboks and we can't afford it...
...We'll be famous...
...the biggest, richest, best-educated generation in the history of America—the biggest, richest, best-educated spot in this or P J. O'Rourke, a frequent contributor to The American Spectator, is author of Republican Party Reptile...
...We're clowns...
...Spock Brats...
...That was a big success...
...W ait a minute...
...Finally, there's our creativity—our wild, innovative, original artistic gifts—surely a legacy to the ages...
...So broke...
...I had the new L. L. Cool J Bigger and Deffer tape turned all the way up on my Walkman...
...And . . . and . . . New Coke...
...We take up the cello...
...the generation that was going to change the world...
...All we've done for the disadvantaged is gentrify the crap out of their neighborhoods...
...the Dr...
...Harriet Truman, for instance...
...We'll be crazy serious—international superstars of, like, heavy, pensive eggheadery...
...But now our economy has the willi-waws, and our Youth Culture has arthritis, Alzheimer's, and gout...
...Then, darn it, the Communists took over South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia and killed everybody they could get their hands on just like General Westmoreland, that pig, said they would...
...It seems like that boring middle-class suburbia where we grew up was swell after all...
...It is true that our generation was the first to take feminism seriously...
...So I don't think we can count the Peace Movement as a major contribution, especially not as far as the former citizens of Phnom Penh are concerned...
...And we'll change the world...
...And now we're about to lose our jobs...
...church, every Sunday...
...Our political commitment, however, really changed things...
...As long as we didn't mind also having a national debt the size of the Crab Nebula, an enormous underclass making its living from five-cent beverage can deposits, and currency that the Japanese use to blow their nose...
...I mean I was very stoned when I read it...
...We're forty and still wearing jeans...
...ver since the stock market went to 1—r the bathroom last fall, a lot of us have been pretty busy—talking our broker pals down from window ledges and convincing friends in the junk bond business to shut off the Porsche and open the garage door...
...You can tell by the quality of the Presidents that we used to have, such as Truman and Eisenhower, compared to the quality of the Presidents that we got as soon as the Baby Boom was old enough to vote, such as Carter and Reagan...
...Actually, for a while, it looked like we could have it all...
...And then there was us, just being ourselvesinding out who we are," "getting in touch with our feelings," "fulfilling our true inner potential"—frightening stuff...
...Also, the computer revolution—we invented a brilliant matrix of complex and intricate software programs which allow us to compile, cross-reference, and instantly access all the nothing that we know...
...And our idealism has made a difference...
...We call it The New Seriousness...
...Although, technically, the Beatles aren't part of the Baby Boom...
...time to evaluate the contributions that we, as a generation, have made to a world which presented us with so many unique advantages...
...It's all over now, Baby Boom...
...One smile at Davy Crockett and the forests of the temperate zone were denuded in the search for raccoon-tail hats...
...We are the world," we shouted just a couple of years ago...
...But the Civil Rights Movement was founded by people a lot older than us...
...There was massive drug-taking, which turned out to be a bad idea...
...Ever since Live-Aid all the Ethiopians have had to do the 16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1988 Jane Fonda work-out to keep from larding up around the middle...
...The Baby Boom has reached middle age...
...We'll make a fortune...
...The Vietnam war only lasted another eight or ten years, once we got the Peace Movement going...
...We admire Woody Allen's recent movies...
...Gotta call Merrill Lynch and buy stock in the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra...
...We're the generation whose heroes were Howdy Doody, Jerry Rubin, Big Bird, and Ivan Boesky...
...There are76 million of us...
...Even this proved unsatisfying, so we elected President Reagan and tried our hand at naked greed...
...Do we have any skills or anything...
...We'll be selling kiwi fruit on the street and rattling microchips in a tin cup and people will laugh...
...Rights, you say...
...So fat...
...Nobody takes us seriously .. .those guys...
...We deserve the stock market crash, and herpes and the Betty Ford Clinic, besides...
...We've been making pests of ourselves for four decades, hogging the limelight, making everybody feel un-hip and out of it...
...We get those stupid half-glasses and wear them way down on the end of our nose...
...Sorry, I couldn't hear you...
...The earth has had a belly-full of us...
...Complain, play Donkey Kong, and roll joints with E-Z Wider papers are the only things this generation has ever been able to do...
...Cleaver said it would be, and we threw a decade-long temper tantrum...
...Serious...
...We were the generation of hope...
...That's it...
...We spent the entire 1950s on our butts in front of the television while mom fed us Twinkies and Ring-Dings through strawberry Flavor Straws and dad ransacked the toy stores looking for 100 mph streamlined Schwinns, Daisy air howitzers, Lionel train sets larger than the New York Central system, and other novelties to keep us amused during the few hours when Pinky Lee and "My Friend Flicka" weren't on the air...
...Is he still alive...
...We threatened to hold our breath (as long as the reefer stayed lit) and not cut our hair until poverty, war, and injustice were stopped...
...Let's face it, our much-vaunted rebellion against bourgeois values meant we didn't want to clean the bathroom...
...We fire David Letterman and replace him with Jean-Paul Sartre...
...The New Seriousness—it's bitchin', it's far-out, it's rad to the max, it's us...
...Everybody's going to want a books-on-tape cassette of Bertrand Russell and A. N. Whitehead's Principia Mathematica for their car...
...We screamed at our parents, our teachers, the police, the President, Congress, and the Pentagon...
...marked the end of an era...
...And there's that first Tom Robbins novel, Another Roadside Attraction...
...The media will wig-out...
...A sniffle from us and Life magazine was sick in bed for a month...
...What went wrong...
...So confused...
...You'll notice that now we're all running out to see Fatal Attraction so we can moon over a nuclear family and cheer for traditional morals...
...Oh, man, this will really bug the squares...
...Well, somebody like that...
...All we had to do was hold a sit-in and governments were toppled from the Peking of Mao Tse-tung to the Cleveland of Dennis Kucinich...
...any other galaxy...
...Our every childhood fad had global implications...
...Dig this—we start going to church, not Moonie church or born-again church but real Episcopalian...
...Neo-poverty means curtains for the Yuppies, a.k.a...
...Gotta go now...
...rr he truth is our generation was 1 spoiled rotten from the start...
...What we do is we all start wearing dumpy corduroy sport coats and cheap, shiny navy-blue wash pants and Hush Puppies...
...We Boomers did start the Peace Movement...
...We do the London Times crossword puzzle in ink...
...All our mystical enlightenments are now printed in Hallmark greeting cards with pictures of unicorns on them...
...We read Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, Kant, all THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1988 17...
Vol. 21 • February 1988 • No. 2
