By Victor Greto
It happens all the time to people who stare at themselves too long.
They notice stuff: pores, wrinkles, dark, moist circles under the eyes, less hair that’s turning gray.
So, it was bound to happen – in spades – to that inevitably aging but perennially navel-gazing generation known as the Baby Boomers, whose members were born from about 1946 through the early 1960s.
Dr. Spock pampered them during the 1950s and 1960s. They reached teenage apotheosis at Woodstock in 1969. They turned inward in the 1970s when they had to face the real world. They became thirty-something yuppies during the 1980s. They rode the high-tech boom for much of the 1990s.
But now, as both America’s bloated cultural stomach and the millennium turned, it seems they’ve finally finished a decades-long romance with themselves.
Seems, I said.
And not a decade too soon.
At least their parents had the patience to wait more than 50 years before they were sentimentalized into a greatest-generation mist of hero worship.
As books, magazines and newspapers report, members of the Boomer generation are attacking themselves.
With, typically, self-indulgent glee.
Books such as David Brooks’ Bobos in Paradise and Joe Queenan’s Balsamic Dreams: A Short But Self-Important History of the Baby Boomer Generation, as well as magazine and newspaper articles reviewing both the books and the generation, purport to show us their scars.
Brooks’ book is especially interesting, as it tries to culturally define the Boomers.
Still, you can’t fool me.
Boomers ragging on themselves are like a psychotherapy patient’s monologue: It’s out of context, one-sided and safely revelatory.
That is, it’s just another way of getting attention.
It’s sort of pathetic, especially for those of us who’ve been unfairly lumped with them.
I was born in 1962, which, technically, makes me a Boomer. But I don’t think so. I have no more in common with these forty- and fifty-something clowns than I do with their twenty-something kids.
I’m stuck on the edge.
And it’s so nice out here.
There are many of us borderline generational brats, who aren’t part of the World War II generation, or the Boomers, or Generations X, or Y, or Next.
It gives us a great perspective on things.
For example, it helps us realize that cheap and easy generational labeling has been imposed upon us by media-types – like myself – who tend to think in shorthanded categories.
Why?
Because it makes things simple for them.
But not for anyone else.
When people begin believing the categories, when they identify themselves, say, with the Woodstock Generation or the Greatest Generation – or whatever – they’re ignoring the reality of the majority of people within the parameters of those alleged generations.
The majority that didn’t make it to Woodstock, didn’t march in war protests (even though now some of them say they did), didn’t walk in Civil Rights marches.
Perhaps some of them were home watching it all on the tube, secretly listening to Perry Como, maybe struggling to put food on the table, working from paycheck to paycheck.
Or they were giddily creating their own realities, outside of our categories.
Lucky them.
That Trans-generational Independent Generation.