Baby Boomers

Righty: I'm a Baby Boomer myself, but I blame my generation for virtually all the cultural evils that have spread like some insidious virus throughout the Western world since the 1960s: drugs, permissiveness, crackpot "liberation" movements, chronic self-absorption, political correctness and some of the ugliest music in history. We're still paying for those excesses today. What happened to all those wild, long-haired, pot-smoking rebels who came of age in the late sixties? They're either acquiring million-dollar vacation homes or buying their wheat-free organic granola at the local food co-op. Rich or poor, the common thread here seems to be pathological self-indulgence. Most Boomers can't see beyond their own navels. We have yet to produce a single writer, artist, composer or statesman of genuine greatness. Even our generation's culture heroes (think of Dylan, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, Jane Fonda, Woody Allen) are pre-Boomers to a man (or woman). Well, at least we can claim George W. Bush as one of our own.

Lefty: Maybe we Boomers haven't produced many cultural giants of our own, but we've produced an incomparably more just and progressive culture than the one we inherited from our parents. Look at the strides we've made in improving life for women, gays and people of color. Look at the extended lifespans, the loss of rigid class divisions, the world-changing brilliance of our technology. (You wouldn't be posting your opinions here, Righty, if you hadn't been standing on the sturdy shoulders of farsighted Boomers.) I guess the common thread here is an all-encompassing sense of community; instead of the individual genius, we've produced a democratic culture that cherishes contributions from ordinary people like you and me. Can't you take generational pride in an achievement like that? Oh, and don't forget that the Clintons are Boomers, too.

The New Moderate:

Let me confess that I never took to the streets with the scruffy collegiate revolutionaries of my generation. My parents had decent values and generally lived up to them; I didn't feel the need to act out my adolescent angst in the form of political rallies, psychotropic drugs or excessive cranial foliage.

Years later, I used to lament my abstention from the woolly excesses of sixties culture. Why couldn't I have lived in a commune or at least enjoyed a few wild weeks of free hippie love? Why did I hold fast to buttoned-down bourgeois values, when everyone around me was letting it all hang out? But now I think I was wiser than I thought, if that makes any sense.

What I loathed about the Boomer counterculture was its inordinate love of bad-boy, in-your-face, confrontational behavior coupled with belligerent left-wing fanaticism. Granted, the revolutionaries never succeeded in storming the barricades; they simply hunkered down on campus, where they now enjoy life as comfortably tenured radicals who reject all ideas that grate against their ideological agendas. And of course, our culture is still hopelessly smitten with bad boys (even when those bad boys happen to be girls).

What began as a healthy skepticism toward corrupt authority degenerated into a generalized contempt for all authority: religious, political, social, moral, cultural, parental. We toppled ancient idols and gloated over the wreckage. We still dwell amid those ruins today, but we haven't erected anything more impressive in their place.

What I liked about the Boomer counterculture -- its playful spirit, its freaky humor and expressiveness, its love of adventures both physical and intellectual -- seems to have died a slow death as the working world purged us of our romantic inclinations. Most of us seem to have sold out without the least whimper of regret; we became militant moneymakers. And so our Boomer playfulness eventually found expression in more mundane outlets: the cultivation of rarefied restaurant cuisine, a quirky preoccupation with lifestyle (there were no "style" sections in our newspapers before 1970), an obstinate refusal to age on schedule, and of course, a never-ending preoccupation with our own feelings. No other generation ever took to therapy with such enthusiasm, or needed to.

Why, then, has so much of Boomer culture tended toward anti-playfulness? Consider the Boomers' transformation of parenting into a joyless science, the rampant careerism, the intrusion of work into personal time, the rejection of goofy fun and games in favor of dinner-party correctness, the unhealthy obsession with health and fitness. It all confirms my suspicion of a strong fanatical streak in the Boomer psyche.

In the end, after the last Boomers have turned to sawdust, how will history look upon us? I suspect we'll be known as the Peter Pan generation. We attacked life with all the gusto and petulance of children, we believed the world revolved around us, and we despised old age. (The Baby Boomers will probably gain distinction as the first generation in history to advance from adolescence to old age without an intervening interval of maturity.) If we never achieved greatness, or even goodness, at least it can be said that we expanded our horizons beyond our parents' humble meatloaf and mashed potatoes. That appears to be our legacy, for better or worse, and it looks as if we'll have to be satisfied with it.

Summary: With their self-absorbed view of life, the Baby Boomers have done ample good and probably more harm. In the end, they renounced greatness for the comforts of their self-made lifestyles.

The Class System

Righty: Until recently, class was society’s instrument for creating order and stability. Instead of jockeying for status and playing catch-up with our neighbors the way we do today, people lived according to their designated station. Everyone coexisted in harmony: the upper class patronized the tradesmen, and the tradesmen hired workers. The beauty of the old class system was that nobody had to feel inadequate about failing to achieve. The desperate status anxiety we see today is the direct result of lowered class boundaries. So is the decline of taste and manners. Eighty years ago men used to attend sporting events wearing jackets and ties. Today we dine out at fine restaurants in t-shirts and khakis. Everyone used to look to the upper class for pointers on the social graces. Now we have affluent suburban kids copying the style and lingo of ghetto "gangstas." We can date the decline of Western Civilization to the overthrow of class distinctions sometime around the end of World War II. It’s been all downhill ever since.

Lefty: Good riddance to the rigid social hierarchy that kept talented people in their place for untold generations. Class was an evil that persisted only because it had persisted. Until the French Revolution, nobody challenged the injustice of a system that automatically favored the idle descendants of medieval knights over the hardworking peasantry and middle class. Today, thanks to the efforts of social progressives over the past two centuries, my family and I are able to send our older kids to private school and hire a full-time nanny to care for the baby. The disappearance of class has liberated all of society from bondage.

The New Moderate:

If both Righty and Lefty believe (as they seem to) that the class system is dead, they’re deluding themselves. Yes, manners have declined and class boundaries have blurred, but nobody with a sharp eye for distinctions can deny that we still sort people according to social rank. In fact, as economic pressures continue to split the middle class, like a great ice sheet, into upwardly mobile and downwardly mobile segments that drift inexorably northward and southward, we’ll be evolving into a two-tier society of haves and have-nots.

Our class distinctions, based solely on income, are already more pronounced than at any time since the Gilded Age, when millionaire robber barons presided over society and the average working chump labored for a dollar a day. But even the Gilded Age had its comfortable middle class with its clapboard houses and picket fences.

I grew up squarely in the middle of the mid-twentieth century middle class. We lived in a split-level house and survived modestly but securely on my father’s income. We attended the local public schools. My father drove a Pontiac and bought his clothes at Sears Roebuck even after he started earning a handsome salary. On special occasions we’d dine out at the local Howard Johnson’s. (Fondly do I remember those golden fried clams and peppermint ice cream cones.) Vacation meant the shore or the mountains, or occasionally an educational jaunt around New England or Virginia. No Caribbean island-hopping or African eco-tours for us. And we never knew what we were missing. This was the way most of America seemed to live at the time.

Whatever happened to that old middle class? As male yuppies mated with newly liberated female yuppies and both prospered in their careers, they departed for a favored land of nannies and prep schools. At the same time, the less fortunate middle class kids had to settle for McJobs at the local Blockbuster. Now that so many white-collar jobs are being outsourced to India or points beyond, it looks increasingly certain that these kids will never again enjoy the comforts of bourgeois life.

Our class divisions will grow even more distinct as high-achieving "haves" continue to merge their DNA with others of their ilk, producing a formidable superclass of genetically endowed achievers. The old upper class married for social respectability, which didn’t always translate into brains or talent. (Male preppies with formidable minds would often wed pretty but intellectually indifferent daughters of good families. And no doubt many a Bryn Mawr grad ended up with a hearty goofus on a trust fund.) By contrast, the new upper class marries to produce offspring with perfect SAT scores. Be very afraid.

If you want to see what America’s future superclass looks like, just scan the marriage announcements in the Sunday New York Times. These are the chosen ones -- an amalgam of breeding, brains, education and achievement. Everyone else might as well move into trailers.

A large and stable middle class is essential to the well-being of any developed nation. Without it, our society will eventually consist of nobles and serfs -- the surefire formula for a new Dark Age.


Summary: We’re kidding ourselves if we think the class system is dead in America. If anything, class distinctions will become even more pronounced as achievers marry achievers.