Baby Boomer To Wit: Fuck You

A smart lady corresponds:

"Your posts about how the boomers should all die right now to make way for the younger folks really perplex me. They should have the Who's 'My Generation' playing in the background -- oh, wait, that's a Boomer anthem. The 'you old people must die' rant is so classically adolescent that every time you bring it up, it makes me question my otherwise state of fandom. I think to myself, 'Why am I reading this punk?' and then I think to myself, 'Hold on a minute. If I recall correctly, the Wit, pigtails notwithstanding, is pushing 40 herself...' Also, if I recall correctly, the Wit is a Freudian ... so I wonder ... do you hate mommy and daddy? Is that what this is all about?

What do you propose, exactly? Soilent Green? Have you got a black pill you're selling?

And then you'll turn around and get all wet in the panties about Yoko freaking Ono.

And what are you going to do when all this crap comes back to you, as it will, if you're lucky and you live a long life -- because, you see, that's the ultimate revenge of the older against the younger -- the certain knowledge that you will be humbled.

We'll die when we get goddamn good and ready."

Date: Wed, 28 Mar 2007 14:53:35 -0400
To: "Blank Blank"
From: Theresa Duncan
Subject: Further
Cc:
Bcc:
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Basically, I agree that most of what I enjoy in culture is the product of the Baby Boomer era, and that many of the freedoms I thought I was going to be able to take for granted are the result of fights that this generation undertook.

The problem, as I see it, is not the Baby Boomers themselves, but the media's continuing focus on them despite their near total irrelevance as a bloc that is going to move the culture forward even one inch more than they already have. (I hope I am wrong, of course, but I doubt it.)

The problem that I have as a person born immediately after this generation, is that there are 20 million Gen Xers and something like 50 million BBs. It's money and demographics that are muffling people like me and taking up all the space as much as the BBs wide middle aged asses.

To me Oedipal means under the thumb of Mommy and Daddy and getting along with them just fine. Freudians like Kaja Silverman call the obedience and lack of fight and innovation that we are currently seeing among young people "The Tyrrany Of The Oedipal." She, like me, sees hostility and then the eventual overtaking of older stagnant orders as supremely healthy. When you and Mommy and Daddy wear all the same clothes and have all the same records it's not a happy consumerist paradise of unending youth, it's a static hell with no happy Hegelian dialectic.

If you want to fight me, Blank Blank, then you are going to have to have better, newer ideas than me. This fight, which I deliberately provoked, as I already said, would then be not only good for Blank Blank and The Wit Of The Staircase, but for the entire culture.

I also think that the BBs strategies for cultural upheaval and protest were studied closely by Strangeloves like Kissinger and Rumsfeld and their Black Pill think tanks. We have to fight the same motherfuckers that you guys did, but if we use the known strategies that worked back when, we are dead.

The battles of the nineteen sixties are not yet remotely won, and it's the BBs patting themselves on the back like they were that is deadly......for me and you.

And yes, I pretty much hate my parents, and it took me five years of psychoanalysis and nearly $100,000 to grow the nuts to admit it to myself. And now I am blissfully unafraid to challenge even the biggest, meanest, mightiest bad authority.

Younger people were indeed born to kick my pigtailed ass, and if our terminally ailing democratic culture is swept along on their own sexy, slender thighed demands for freedom and money and sex and art and music that are all their own, then whoopeee!

If you think you've got more to say and do as a BB, then Aux Armes! Blank Blank. As for me, I'm here every single day, saying what I think, and then doing what I do.

Peace,
TD

Comments

[tristero]

Wit:
Don't give in on the BB's (or the so-called "Greatest Generations") claims to preserving your/our freedoms and society. Please. That is a bunch of narcissistic crap from a privileged generation that has left a pile of hurt for us GenXers, and everybody else for that matter, to clean up.

The social security system is the metaphor for all that crap that they left us, not to mention a deindustrialized, low-wage economy, in which any sense of communitarian values have been shot to shit by rampant individualism.

Please. Wit. Stick to your guns!

With regards,
A historian, fellow GenXers, and casual reader.

[Steven Augustine]

Being 37 myself, and neither a Boomer nor by any stretch of the imagination "young," though, I can't help feeling that all this youthful innovation I see trumpeted in vague (but excited) terms is a bit of a mirage. I thought the "young" were usually impressionable consumers (or adaptors) of tropes that the crafty selling-class (the "old") generate to swindle them. Would punk, grunge, hip-hop or techno have taken root as world-wide lifestyle choices if not for the Malcolm McClarens and Butch Vigs and all manner of other svengalis, label heads, media magnates and bankers? Aren't the young (beginning with the "teenagers" of the '60s...or would that be the "bobbysoxers" of an earlier epoch?) pretty much mostly good for supplying the raw energy of Youth itself and not much else? Do the young really generate so much that is "new"? Maybe I know too many young people, but they strike me as impulsive, self-dramatizing, short on technical ability and rather lost, in general. Even the occasional Fresh and Uncut Diamond like the young Dylan, or Patti, or Ms. Mitchell, or Rimbaud, Cobain, The Beatles, Ms. Plath, Basquiat, K. Moss, Madonna or Anais Nin and so on needed the mentoring that shaped the explosion of sheer howl into a controlled, sustainable note.

I mean, it's a symbiosis, isn't it (though you seem to want to frame it as parasitism)? The impulse of innocence plus experience's technique? I think this Gen X vs Boomer thing is a false dichotomy popularized, ironically, by Boomer marketing techniques.

[alisonctuck]

Jesus.

First things first. (Wiggle those piggies,
Theresa).

"Yoko freaking Ono"

I ask you. Will the world ever leave that woman alone. I am so glad she called her last album, middle finger firmly pointed upward, "Yes I'm a Witch". By the way, giving a stab to someone re pigtails/ponytails? Adolecent indeed.

One major point. The responses here signify a forgetting. A repeat performance of that which these same people rebelled against when they were young, teenage, themselves. You've forgotten. That will never do.

But this:

"Do the young really generate so much that is "new"? Maybe I know too many young people, but they strike me as impulsive, self-dramatizing, short on technical ability and rather lost, in general."

That just brings tears to my eyes. It's just plain unfair. Steven, I think all those hundreds of young people you know are being way too polite.

I'm 45, a 1961 baby. The tailend of the baby boomers and the youngest of 4. I adore my siblings but I also love the kids I work with who range from 5 - 18 years old, in the public school system of New South Wales, Australia.I've done it for 20 years.

I sit with them and try and listen understand but more than anything, I work hard to inspire them to do what you are encouraging in this very debate, Theresa.

No, of course there's nothing new.

There was nothing new when I was young. But hang on. Yes there was. I still loyally hold to feminism because it found me when I was 16 and I had an (American) English teacher (MALE) who wanted to talk with me and pals about it.

NO, there's nothing new about Iraq. Except, it's happening here and now and this is a different, very different world for young people, than the one that saw Vietnam or WW 2.

Not technical people? Who's the first person I want when I can't work shit out on my computer/xbox/ipod?

An adolescent, that's who.

Get fucked.

Theresa, thank you for your attention to the (always) displaced voice of youth. (Yeah so right isn't it - nothing frigging new).

Mlle D. - it's a worthy fight and always will be.

[Steven Augustine]

I never said that the "young" people I know aren't lovable, special, talented, blah blah blah (insert vacuous PC praise of your choice)...they're musicians. They rock. They roll. They smoke dope, snowboard in the Alps and consider fellatio only slightly more friendly than a handshake. But the only people I can think of who think that the young are cool by *default* simply *because* they're young...are...well...kinda old. And Iggy Pop ain't among them.

[minouette]

Dear Wit,

Your postings on the blight of the Baby Boomers on Western civilization make me smile. We all know that we can thank the BBs for their (previous) contributions to culture, and their once-upon-a-time fight for freedoms. Likewise, "[t]he 'you old people must die' rant" might be adolescent or even cliché, but so is resting on one's laurels. It is precisely what made the BBs so 'special' that makes it all the more necessary to vehemently suggest that they make way, and all the more rare to hear such a sentiment. Never has there been a larger, more smug or self-obsessed group to seize power in the name of rebellion and clutch onto it like life itself. They have dominated our culture from the cradle, and think that their mythical past entitles them to all, including imposing cultural stagnation from above. Freedom fighters always seem to become dictators, after the revolution. Somehow ideals seem to be forgotten along the way.

I can see why the "smart lady" got her back up, but her arguments might have been more convincing minus the cheap shots (Dissing Yoko Ono? While simultaneously claiming generational cultural supremacy?). She seems to interpret your posts quite literally and humourlessly, at least where they apply to the BBs. The issue is not their existence so much as their refusal to acknowledge the existence of anyone else (even their elders, let alone youth). The thought that they might continue to dominate culture for another 40 years is chilling.

I am too young to be a GenXer, and confess that I and my GenY (for a lack of a better term) friends have been known to complain about the GenXers exhibiting the perceived self-absorption of their BB parents. But I suspect that this might make you smile, since you are advocating evolution and renewal, not the right to rule for your and your peers. And I recognize that we too are not as young as we once were either...

Thank you.