Charles, Clinton and the Boomers
EMERY, NOEMIE
Charles, Clinton and the Boomers By Noemie Emery Charles, Prince of Wales, has a Character Problem. He whines. He complains. Baring the scars of emotional trauma, he traces his woes to the doings...
...Both belong, it appears, to a Lost Generation done in not by war, but by peace...
...even the absence of struggle...
...Clinton and his staff (which, one writer said, has more veterans of therapy than military service), and writers like Rich and Quindlen as well, see history as something that earns its importance in the way that it happens to them...
...Boomers make crises of life's incidentals...
...separates Bill from Jack and Ike...
...The differences here merit discussion, for they concern the mood of the age...
...Reagan legitimized himself as a national leader when he made jokes in the operating theater, a response that comes more easily to those who place the focus of the universe outside themselves...
...In the absence of real ills, small ones became giant, or were invented completely...
...If he reaches the throne, he may never possess it...
...Kennedy and Roosevelt, who knew physical pain, did not share it with others...
...Born safe-born healthy-they were not yet born happy: Into the void cleared by the absence of exterior challenge flowed an intense preoccupation with the self...
...It is also a marker, to define generations...
...What does the Prince share with the not-quite-the-president, beyond mothers fond of the races, and marriage to iron-willed blondes...
...The prime boomer traits, of complaint and exposure, run counter to monarchs, and men...
...In November 1994, when it became clear that the advanced Quindlenization of their putative heirs had brought the House of Windsor and Democrats to the point of extinction, Reagan, nearing his 84th birthday, announced himself in the early stages of a frightening disease...
...31 in 1960, when he was arrested...
...Teddy Roosevelt took the oath at 42...
...They had in on a tide of material plenty: inventions, gadgets, and toys...
...Finding oneself became a life's work...
...a promise that proved to be true...
...The Crisis of Meaning...
...Flora Lewis once wrote of international politics...
...It was the mark in effect of the stoic persuasion, essential to presidents, and kings...
...Born post-war, and post-atom, their wars were either cold or small...
...Oddly, they rouse, in their disdain for pity, the affections the boomers so crave...
...Given the world, the boomers turned inward, defining external events by their personal impact...
...The main traits that mark the boomers-introspection, self-importance-are powerful solvents of moral authority, of the gravitas needed to lead...
...The idea was that things were fine...
...What they know does not matter...
...Older people-FDR and Ike...
...writers like Lewis and Reston-saw themselves as moving through history, validated by their performance in it...
...Kennedy, when elected, was years younger than Clinton...
...It was the message of a man who knew himself, knew the world, knew the difference between them...
...Post-penicillin, post-polio, they were borne by medicine past the infectious diseases that had borne off the old, and the young...
...The generation with the least to complain of became the most intensely self-pitying, the most easily frightened, the most readily fazed...
...The ironic edge of Jack Kennedy, who detested emotion, tapped the gusher of tears at his death...
...He will never, to many, be King...
...Martin Luther King was not yet 30 when he began his civil rights protest...
...They are the one thread that binds heroes together, uniting as one a diverse group of people, excusing a wide range of sins...
...He died in 1952 at 53...
...There was in his letter no visible pity, but concern for others, hope for the country, trust in the future, and fate...
...These attitudes tend to erode both presence and character...
...They bring adolescence into middle age...
...The generation without struggle invented the Midlife Crisis...
...It is not sins of the flesh that keep them less than respected, but failings more subtle in manner...
...but if not, he would manage to bear them...
...Normal transitions became awesome hurdles, consuming acres of newsprint...
...like hunger, or Hitler, or war...
...Leaders make crises small change...
...Charles's grandfather, George VI, was 40 when he became a war leader...
...Quindlen's beat was to discuss herself...
...It separates Charles from his forebears, who lived through the bombings...
...It is what they feel-or rather, what they feel-that counts...
...War is a metaphor for trial and challenge...
...So were Relationships...
...Post-Depression, they were spared true privation...
...Noemie Emery is working on a study of the selling of political families called Sex, War and Wives...
...Age was a crisis...
...Near the 50th anniversary of the D-Day invasions, which drained the young blood of three nations, the rock musician, Kurt Cobain committed suicide at 27, having found a soft life too trying to bear...
...Which is why Charles will not be king, even if crowned, and Bill Clinton will not be president, even if reelected...
...Some were even adulterers, proving that this is not the key part of the character issue: Their problems are less with Camilla-and Paula, and Gennifer-than with their excruciating efforts to explain...
...The central idea- that history exists in its impact on boomers-was expressed best by Clinton, seen by both Rich and Quindlen as a generational model, when he told a group of military veterans he would have liked to have had their "experience," as if it were another form of Outward Bound...
...When Andy Rooney remarked that other young victims could have made use of the years he discarded, he was scolded by Anna Quindlen, then the doyenne of the New York Times Op-Ed page, for failing to appreciate the stress placed on the sensitive by the strains of American life...
...Quindlen's place on the Op-Ed page itself was a sign of the Times, as a one-time forum for policy matters becomes an encounter session for the sensitive and not-so-very-young...
...In this he resembles Bill Clinton, his counterpart and contemporary, who, three years into office, has not yet been President...
...With Frank Rich, and others, she was invited by the Times' boomer publisher to turn the page into a support group where boomers dissect their impressions, only marginally connected to events...
...Moist boomer pleas bring disgust and derision...
...Baring the scars of emotional trauma, he traces his woes to the doings of others, and, so doing, erodes his own case...
...Everything thus becomes cause for self-pity...
...Lewis, and others, had specialized knowledge...
...Clinton thinks himself ill-served as a leader in lacking a crisis to rally the country...
...All were adult, in ways that the boomers seem unable to emulate...
...In the same way, the modern young lack the defining prospect of imminent danger, which gave shape to the lives of Anne Frank and young soldiers...
...In time, as the boomers approach their fifties, political fallouts ensue...
...The Identity Crisis...
...Clinton still clings to the role of the student, a role that John Kennedy shunned...
...39 when he was shot...
...When Quindlen and Rich, a one-time drama critic, write of foreign affairs, military affairs, or elections in Oregon, they know no more than their readers, which is somehow the point...
Vol. 1 • September 1995 • No. 1
