The Nation's Pulse/Late Boomers

...Hence the most famous of the yuppie passions, the passion to be seen at this week's restaurant of the century...

...They grew up at a time when there was so much fat in the American economy that people in their teens and early twenties could lay hands on enough money to create styles of life all their own...

...urphy's August 15 story notes that most Americans in Kuwait City got their news from Cable News Network—"via satellite dishes in their buildings...

...What America was greening into, thanks to the young, was an Eden of lofty sentiments...

...Nevertheless, the money fever remains, and that is what creates the very nearly sensual lust for a house that "House Lust" so lovingly describes...

...In the same fashion, the hippies, the New Lefters, the Jesus People, the New Agers—all were able to live communally at young ages and to develop distinc32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1990 tive codes of dress and decor (and language), and thereby to create styles of life in precisely the sense that Max Weber originally intended that term...

...Many of the popular ideas on the campuses seemed to be Marxist, Revel said, but on close inspection they turned out to be sentiments floating fuzzily in "a Marxist mist...

...Mark it down: she will justifiably win a Pulitzer...

...A plutographer is one who merely wants to live a life that looks like, that graphically depicts, the life of the plutocrat, without any of the plutocrat's responsibilities...

...that in the United States had arisen a new man...

...To Reich homo novus baby boomis had far more than a superior intellect...

...For reasons that needn't detain us here, McLuhan thought it was not the sense of sight but the sense of touch that TV engorged and enflamed...

...I first noticed this among the surfers of Southern California...

...To him, this explained another boom boom boom of the Boomers' youth, namely, the sexual revolution...

...Sweetness and light" was another Arnold coinage...

...Murphy's copy was compelling...

...The dark night of fascism was forever descending upon America, but it touched ground only in Europe...

...But has American television been good for America...

...Each has taken a good deep whiff of the surplus wealth of the American economy (to draw from the vocabulary of those late twentieth-century reactionaries, the Marxists) and decided to use it to create a life few young people have ever dared live before...

...As a footnote, I would add Dirty Dancing...

...Bruce Bawer mentions The Graduate and Easy Rider as the first in a long line of movies of this sort...

...At the end of Dirty Dancing, the middle-aged paying customers at a resort hotel realize the errors of their osteoporotic ways and join the teenage kitchen and maid-service help in an orgy of groin-socketed lambada . . . as we fade out . . . Fr here was, indeed, something entirelyy new about the boomers, although it had nothing to do with human evolution...

...A hundred years ago, in his analysis, a new creature had arisen...

...PRESSWATCH DESERT AIR by Terry Eastland rr he "Crisis in the Gulf," as the .i...

...The Persian Gulf story clearly has been good for American television generally...

...One result of this notion was a new kind of drama in which the heroes and heroines are young people who possess superior knowledge and feelings and the old either learn from them or look ridiculous and backward...

...That little fact introduces the most important aspect of the Persian Gulf journalism—the television treatment...

...The novus one also had more profound feelings, an exquisitely richer sensory and emotional appreciation of the world and its possibilities...

...In my opinion, myth is not too pompous a word for the aura that shone 'round about them...

...But the media consumer must be extra wary of coverage that has so little hard news to treat, and therefore depends so heavily on opinion to fill the void...

...Some of the vehicles have been crushed by tanks...

...it broadcasts from points worldwide...

...W hile Murphy's work could not easily be contradicted, the same could not be said for much of the early commentary, whether by "experts" in and out of government or by reporters, columnists, and television anchors...

...Here, said Revel, was one of the greatest mysteries of astronomy...

...In the right place at the right time, Murphy courageously pursued her story...

...But these children also grew up during perhaps the greatest economic boom any major nation has ever experienced, and during a time when the United States swelled up into one of the two giants who trod the globe...

...Reich's true literary ancestor, however, was not Rousseau but Matthew Arnold...

...Which brings us, finally, to the yuppies...

...From amidst all these booms and heavy footfalls emerged such fabled babies as the hippies, the New Left, the Vietnam Generation, the Jesus People, the New Agers, and the Yuppies...

...Hussein well understands that in the modern age television is an instrument of war...

...But Charles Reich's passion for homo novus was unconditional...

...media styled it early on, has generated mega-coverage since the August 2 invasion, but the Washington Post deserves special credit for having had the foresight to send its Cairo correspondent Caryle Murphy to Kuwait on July 26, a week beforehand...

...You can get CNN not only here but abroad...

...Or this, from her August 22 filing: "Cars driving on the main highways give off a low hum from the washboard-like ruts caused by the tread of heavy tanks that have passed through the city in the past three weeks...

...THE NATION'S PULSE LATE BOOMERS by Tom Wolfe A s Bruce Bawer has written, no generation in history has ever been more lavishly analyzed, dramatized, mythologized, and agonized over than the Baby Boomers, the Americans who were born between 1945 and 1965...

...The Post was the only U.S...

...news organization to position itself for firsthand coverage of what transpired...

...But in subsequent days, as the story moved through the various diplomatic and military phases, CNN was all over the map—Oman, Jerusalem, Baghdad (everywhere but Kuwait...

...Surfers were not merely athletes but people who in many cases were able to live communally, in apartments and abandoned buildings, in the same towns as their parents, for days, weeks, sometimes months at a time...

...The money came from home—many hippies and New Lefters were remittance men—and it came from the government in the form of welfare and entitlements, to use the going word...

...First, I should acknowledge the unique position of CNN, made apparent by the Gulf coverage...

...CNN, of course, wasn't in Kuwait when the Iraqis invaded, nor was anyone else, save the Post's Murphy...

...The Boomers' boom was a boom in the birth rate following the Depression and the Second World War...

...Arnold, who gave us the terms "culture," meaning the arts, "philistine," meaning someone who doesn't get it in the arts, and "commuter," meaning a philistine who works in the city but lives outside of it, was another believer in rapid changes in human evolution...

...They are available in few hotels outside the U.S., and they don't have the sameinternational programming capability...

...That is why he made the videotape, shown in its entirety by CNN, in which he praised the English-speaking hostages in his presence as "heroes for peace...

...providing more footage than anyone else...

...One of the foundations of Marshall McLuhan's communications theory was his belief that heavy exposure to television had altered, literally altered, the Baby Boomers' "sensory balance...

...Eventually, she says, "you come to realize that you will never again achieve the standard of living you had in junior high school," when you lived on a lovely, leafy plot of ground in your own house...

...These were "the people of sweetness and light...

...Homo novus had a utopian vision which was neither Marx's vision nor Jesus' but an entirely new one...

...Take Hussein's hostage video...

...And he was right...

...The people of sweetness and light were the same as Coleridge's "clerisy" of fifty years earlier, who, said Coleridge, had replaced the clergy as the creators of moral values...

...He was talking about the relative importance of their senses of hearing, seeing, tasting, smelling, and touching...

...A plutocrat is one who rules through money...

...Even after Murphy lost direct contact with the Post when telephone lines were cut on August 3, she continued to move about Kuwait City, gathering information on the Iraqi occupation...

...CNN is what you tune in if you want continuous, up-to-date coverage, especially if the story comes from overseas...

...Hussein wanted to reach a mass audience, and he wanted to reach it not on a rational but on an emotional level...

...After all, Saddam Hussein wasn't hiding his wrath toward Kuwait under a bushel...

...After the first two weeks of the crisis, Don Kowet, media writer for the Washington Times, asked devilishly how correct had the commentators been...

...This essay is adapted from his introduction to Beyond the Boom: New Voices on American Life, Culture, and Politics, edited by Terry Teachout, to be published this fall by Poseidon Press...

...In my opinion boomers want to be not plutocrats but plutographers...

...Murphy was the only reporter on the spot when the invasion occurred...

...The roads are littered with the debris of warfare—burned-out armored cars and trucks—and with dozens of cars abandoned in panic...

...R evel's sense of irony saved him from going utterly overboard...

...At bottom, the yuppie is not terribly different from the hippie or the New Lefler...

...Consider the erroneous predictions of two knowledgeable journalists...

...ABC, CBS, and NBC, which also made all the available Middle East stops, have enjoyed ratings spikes of their own...

...In early August, Karen Elliott House wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Saudi Arabia would not allow "an Americanpresence in the kingdom...

...Also, CNN does international programming...

...That being the case, it was time for the old to learn from the young...

...It was not at all ironic...

...Murphy fled Kuwait on August 26 upon learning Terry Eastland is resident fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.0 that Iraqi soldiers had stepped up their search for foreigners...

...And on CBS's "This Morning" show, New York Times correspondent Thomas Friedman said the Tiirks and the Saudis would not close their pipelines...

...In a marvelously funny essay called "House Lust" Maggie Gallagher says that most boomers, far from moving up financially, are sliding downward...

...Reich wrote a book entitled The Greening of America, which for about twenty months was hailed as a Social Contract for the twentieth century...

...It ran them without her byline, explaining to readers: "The following is an eyewitness account of events in Kuwait this week...

...Homo novus he called this creature, as if only Latin could adequately capture the evolutionary importance of the phenomenon...

...Jean-Francois Revel made a tour of American college campuses at the height of the New Left and hippie or psychedelic movements of the late 1960s, and wrote a book entitled Without Marx or Jesus, in which he said Tom Wolfe is the author of The Right Stuff, From Bauhaus to Our House, and The Bonfire of the Vanities...

...Today we use the simpler term "intellectuals...

...The answer: not very...

...It is also why he allowed Dan Rather of CBS—and Jesse Jackson, the latest claimant to the title "journalist," who traveled to Baghdad as a talk show host—to interview him...

...The Post asked other news organizations not to disclose who this eyewitness was...

...For a time they were seen as completely new creatures in the history of evolution...

...if you have a dish, you can get it, since the signal isn't scrambled...

...At the heart of yuppie life—and yuppie was, whether we like it or not, the social term to come out of the 1980s—was not the acquisition of money but the lust for money and, above all, the kind of public display that money makes possible...

...And you don't have to subscribe to pick it up...

...addam's Video Spot Rated a 1..3 Flop," said a headline in the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1990 33...

...By contrast, the three networks generally don't do continuous news programming...

...Others could easily have done so...

...For example, on the campuses homines novi often said that the dark night of fascism was descending upon America...

...The yuppies' problem is that they have no Aldous Huxleys, Reichs, or Marcuses to adorn them with wreaths of moral and intellectual respectability...

...By means not disclosed, she sent several lengthy pieces to the Post...

...None did, nor did any complain of censorship...

...But does television understand this...

...In addition to the traditional upper classes, which he called "the Barbarians," and the middle classes, which he called "the Philistines," and the lower classes, which he called "the Populace"—even in the nineteenth century intellectuals didn't dare give the lower orders funny names—there was a new class that was now visible, gliding above the old order...

...Far be it from me to argue against commentary...

...One way or another it was inhaled from the breathtaking surpluses of the economic boom which began about 1943 and which, despite the heavy weather of the year 1990, has not ended yet...

...Consider this, from her August 11 "eyewitness" piece: "People are burning their garbage in the streets...

...It's no surprise that CNN has achieved its highest ratings ever during the crisis...

...Awakened by the sound of Iraqi artillery shells the morning of August 2, she went right to work, filing by-lined stories for the Post's August 2 and 3 editions...

...it's in 250,000 hotel rooms outside the United States...