Beyond the Boom
Murtaugh, Daniel M.
Washington and Rome had bided their time and, by removing his "canonical mission," without a substantive peer-evaluation of his ideas, reduced a profound theoretical debate about the limits of...
...For example, when many of these baby boomers were in high school and college, the bullies and enforcers of unreflective conformity were antiwar and black power activists...
...The disputants played with compromises...
...In his autobiography, God, Country, Notre Dame, Father Hesburgh says that a cardinal or CU's president should have simply stood up and said that in this case academic freedom is more important than orthodoxy...
...Taking his own experience in college and after as part of his evidence, he argues that the energies that were invested in the movement politics of the Left and the Right will shift in the nineties from politics to culture...
...but Curran would accept no compromise that allowed an outside authority to limit a theologian's freedom...
...Let me locate them and myself chronologically...
...This impoverished notion of politics finds its sourest expression in "Portrait of a Washington Policy Wog" by David Brooks, a genuinely repellent and insecurely ironic portrait of a mid-level cabinet officer...
...This also fed into the Reagan revolution, as several of the writers acknowledge, but without the regret that I feel...
...234: Commonweal eighties into a rudimentary form of religious enlightenment...
...The worm is already filled with enough disorder...
...They doubt that they can be summed up by any generalization, but none of them can entirely resist trying to do so anyhow...
...We are given no alternative vision of the art of government against which this cankered order can be measured and found wanting...
...There is much here that is encouraging and much that is oddly disheartening...
...Vigilante describes "The War Against the Yuppies," in which the opening shot is the insistence of popular culture that such a creature actually exists...
...Instead, they dream in cramped rented apartments of the lost Edens of their middle-class childhoods, of roomy houses shaded by matemal ells and carried by a single paycheck...
...It is a sad irony that his hard-fought case ended up proving what he had fought to disprove: that at a leading Catholic university a scholar really is not free...
...I come from the far side of the boom, having graduated from college six months before John Kennedy was assassinated, a fault line in my life that these essayists know mainly as written history...
...They are bright and articulate...
...Theological education in an ecumenical setting where Roman Catholic students are the largest group in the student body Special faculty resources include the Stillman Professor of Roman Catholic Theological Studies & the Counselor for Roman Catholic students Rigorous academic & practical preparation for lay & scholarly ministries, enriched by the resources of the Boston Theological Institute For in[ormation on admissions eP [inancial aid: Admissions Office, Harvard Divinity School, 45 Francis Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138 9 (617)495-5796 5 April 1991:235...
...Contempt taints everything in the Policy Wog's life his work, his colleagues, the senators with whom he dines at testimonial banquets, the doltish PACmen who pick up the tab, his home address, the pictures on his wall, and most of all himself...
...Except for the odd investment banker among them (who may have taken a header since this book came out), most late boomers' high-sounding salaries are a smaller percentage of the cost of any dwelling that they might aspire to own than their parents' salaries were...
...But something stirs in the embers...
...Terry Teachout's "A Farewell to Politics," already referred to, is the most detailed and intellectually compelling exposition of the (to me) disheartening theme announced in its title and variously expressed throughout the book...
...The new ideological battle lines will be drawn in the arts, in scholarship, and in the domestic arrangements of our lives...
...Maggier Gallagher makes a serious point with admirable good humor about the supposed affluence of her generation...
...Teachout concedes that "local politics, the nuts-and-bolts kind, has begun to engage my interest, a sure sign of advancing age...
...Having created this straw man the media attack him and, more insidiously, cater to him, especially in the spate of nervously trendy magazines (W, Details, Vanity Fair, Spy) that began to jostle for attention and brandy ads in the eighties...
...Numbing, self-loathing careerism, we conclude, is as as good as politics can be...
...They wouldn't say it...
...George Sim Johnston analyzes the emptiness where religion used to be in the lives of yuppies and says some very shrewd things about the fuzz with which they try to fill it in...
...The two best essays are those of Teachout and Richard Vigilante...
...The authors in this Collection are late boomers...
...Several of the most appealing essays have to do with the struggle to maintain private gardens in a modern urban environment...
...Content to leave "politics to the professionals," conservatives like Teachout will "return to debating first causes, the proper role of any intellectual movement, be it of the Left or of the Right...
...Furthermore, the bullies often formed alliances with the teachers, some of whom were brought into the classroom by the availability of 2-A draft deferments...
...The best and brightest children have always defined themselves against the bullies and conformists, and so it is not hard to understand why many of this generation joined the Reagan revolution...
...Reagan ran for president but against government...
...Given this sorry definition of the public order, what better course is there than to turn like Candide and Cunegonde to the tending of private gardens...
...Vigilante's logic sometimes wobbles, as when he argues almost in one breath that yuppies are mythical and that the strongest criticism of them comes from within their own ranks, but his defense of bourgeois values, frankly acknowledged and persuasively defined, is heartfelt and stirring...
...He brought to a compelling focus forces that, for a time at least, subverted the notion of politics as a calling to public service...
...John Podhoretz and Bruce Bawer take movies as their point of departure, but their true subject is childhood and adulthood, specifically, how popular culture encourages us to prolong childhbod and evade the responsibilities of child rearing...
...As a consequence, many of these appealing twenty-five- to thirty-fiveyear olds define their life since college as "a farewell to politics" (the title of Terry Teachout's closing essay...
...Donna Rifldnd and Roger Kimball document the decline of moral seriousness and the rise of political-cultural faddism in literature and scholarship...
...Washington and Rome had bided their time and, by removing his "canonical mission," without a substantive peer-evaluation of his ideas, reduced a profound theoretical debate about the limits of freedom to a case of contract law: in effect, if CU's charter gives the pope a veto on theology professors, you lose...
...And so they don't own...
...When I disagree with them, I imagine, with some relish, an argument from which I could expect to learn a great deal...
...Susan Vigilante writes with arresting earnestness of the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, a rediscovered guide out of the varied addictions of the "Straighten your tie, Stephen...
...The baby boomers, born in the fifties and sixties, can be divided into early boomers, whose males were draft-eligible in the Vietnam war, and late boomers who were new voters during the Carter administration...
...Stay tuned...
...I feel a little young to be the father of any of them, but history shifted into passing gear in the sixties, leaving some discontinuities between my experience and theirs which seem almost generational...
...My difficulty with the analysis of this experience in many of these essays is that the bullying and the conformity are defmed as politics...
...Poseidon Press, $18.95 Daniel M. Murtaugh his is a collection of essays by a group of baby boomers who meet regularly to share beer, pretzels, and ideas in a borrowed townhouse in New York...
...That is the disheartening part...
...I have nothing remotely like this in my experience...
...PRIVATE GARDENS, PUBLIC DUMPS BEYOND THE BOOM New Voices on American Life, Culture & Politics Terry Teachout, Ed...
...That notion is almost entirely absent from this book...
...It is good for someone like me to be reminded of this...
Vol. 118 • April 1991 • No. 7
