When I happened across a diary from Lying eyes in the wee hours of the morning, I couldn’t help but fire this off. Basically, the diarist very politely (and dripping with condescension) asked "young people" to "back off" and please let Hillary win this one, huh? Willya? Please? I mean, isn’t it the Boomers’ time, now that their parents are mostly dead or in that home out by the Interstate?
I felt compelled to write in response, not to her particular diary, but to the idea that the two frontrunners represent a generational divide – one is almost tempted to use the term "gap", if the Boomers hadn’t trademarked it for their own justification for political rebellion in their youth. The fact is that while both candidates have their share of supporters from across age and class and gender, Clinton is most clearly the candidate that represents the interests of the Boomers, while Obama has the interests of Gen Xers and those that follow. There is an essential divide, here, and it’s important to call it out.
I’m favoring Obama now. I’m impressed with his drive, his determination, his coolness under fire, his tirelessness, and the way he inspires people to get up and do what needs to be done.
You couldn’t get me to vote for Hillary if you poked me with poop on a stick. My reasons are manifold, but they can largely be summed up in generational terms.
After the Greatest Generation went and begat the Boomers, they proceeded to dominate electoral politics for the next forty years, until their kids were old enough to agitate on their own. And agitate they did: as Lying Eyes points out, they were inspired by JFK and MLK and RFK and all those other great initials. Plots and assassinations and an unpopular war, a Cold War and Mutually Assured Destruction, and Civil Rights and the Counter Culture . Viet Nam and Kent State and Watergate and the Pentagon Papers. They had a panorama of ideals and causes to inspire them in glorious Technicolor.
And so they, in turn, got married, had kids. Us. We didn’t get "Ich bien ein Berliner" and "I Have A Dream". We got TV in the Den while our folks argued about stupid shit in the Kitchen. A lot of us got blamed for being the problem in our parents’ lives, and a lot of us got bitter at the constant string of new step-siblings and step-grandparents that Serial Monogamy produced. While we were being latchkey kids and learning how to survive more or less without parental guidance, we were usually best viewed by our parents as pawns in the Great Divorce Game.
By the time we were old enough to start forming political opinions, many of us barely knew our parents, and had radically divergent viewpoints. While the adults were grumbling about gas prices and Reagan and how ungrateful we were for how hard they had fought for us, we were learning the intricacies of Pac-Man and discovering Hip Hop or Punk Rock or whatever the hell else would keep us from being in the line of fire when the Grown Ups had one of their frequent freak-outs.
The Boomers are a schizophrenic, narcissistic generation that was more privileged than any before it; they had to work less to get more than their fathers had, and then derided their fathers for their submission to a corporate structure that provided them with their privilege. The "Me" Generation didn’t realize that it even had kids until they started showing up in movies. If it hadn’t been for "Ferris Bueller’s Day Off" I don’t think my next-door neighbor would have realized that his son was skipping school to smoke weed and play video games three days a week. He tried to get involved, then, after years of ignoring him in favor of his job. By that time it was too late, of course.
And that’s pretty much my message to y’all Boomers as you watch your generation’s candidate begin the long, slow, messy death-spiral, and Obama’s true strength is revealed. It’s too late. If you wanted us to listen, you would have started talking to us in 1977, not 2007.
You see, after Bush, Sr. brought the WWII generation’s time at bat to a close, Hillary’s husband got elected. Like a new dad, he was bright and happy and confident and at first you started to warm up to him. But then things didn’t happen like he promised, and the lying started. And that’s one thing my generation cannot stand. We’ve been lied to our entire life by Boomers – teachers, bosses, parents, relatives, Guidance Counselors, doctors, therapists, you name it. When Clinton came to power it was slick and cool, kinda – especially after Mr. Thousand Points Of Light. Hell, he was on Arsenio – like Mom’s cool new boyfriend, we were prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt. He said he’d be different than the Iran-Contra crowd.
But then the first week in office he went back on a major campaign plank and instituted "Don’t Ask Don’t Tell". He sold out a solid lobby, one that had worked tirelessly for his election, and did it without blinking an eye. And that was just the beginning.
Say what you want about Bill Clinton – and you will – but there’s no denying he had style. He also had sleaze. But you can put up with a fair amount of sleaze if you get hit with enough style and enough cool stuff.
Clinton got lucky and became president at the beginning of the longest sustained period of economic growth and a skyrocketing productivity ushered in by the microcomputer (Remember when they were "micros", with 8 ½" floppies that were really floppy? My first was a TRS-80 . . . sigh . . .). I don’t fault him for riding that wave for all it was worth, but the fact is the cool toys didn’t make up for his lying, they just kept us distracted. A labor shortage and an economy where college sophomores are dropping out, logging on, and publicly offering their brains for cold, hard cash? SIGN ME UP!
Boomers laughed at us, even as they coldly exploited our knowledge of the technology and our creative skill at turning it into bucks. They got greedy. Get the pasty-faced nerd in to set up the system, pay him what a senior-level secretary makes, tell him he’s brilliant, and then milk his brain like a giant leech. Stupid kids, they’d laugh, as they drove their new Infiniti’s to their new guarded gate community after golf.
We shrugged it off. We were doing some amazing things, and getting paid for it, and best of all the stupid Boomers didn’t understand one word in three out of our mouths. You want rebellion? The free-wheeling structure of the Internet is a legacy of Gen-X rebellion against our technophobic parents.
Monica pretty much ruined the ride. It wasn’t that we objected to his affair – Goddess knows we’ve seen plenty of them over the years – but the way he tried to wiggle out of it made us ashamed and icky-feeling. Sure, no man should be impeached for a humble blowjob, but DAMN. You just expect such a thing to be handled better. And as sad as that was, it wasn’t until Bill (rightly or wrongly) sicced the Justice Department on Microsoft and made the market all fuzzy and indeterminate and caused all those sweet IPOs to dry up, well, a lot of us went back to delivering pizzas and moved back in with our parents because some Boomer asshole in a $500 suit came into your cube and told you to clean out your desk. That was fine. By then we had home Internet connections.
And then you did this to us: George Walker Bush. Thanks. A lot.
You didn’t back Gore because you didn’t think he was hip enough – W had religion and oil and money, three things y’all love. Even you guys were put off by Monica, and Hillary’s reaction to the whole thing, and when this idiot ideologue without an idea – from Texas, no less! – got up there in front of you, he was a breath of fresh air. That hard-assed second husband you fled to after the first one left you for a pretty young secretary. He wasn’t smart, or funny, or nice, but he had money and security’s important, kids, you told us. A little Bible never hurt anyone. He was just another stupid step-dad . . . but he came with that creepy Uncle Chaney and the way he just looks at you . . . .
Y’all just thought Bush was so much cooler than Gore. We weren’t thrilled with Gore, either, but he at least was willing to talk to us about something we were genuinely concerned with: the Environment. Boomers were great with whales and nukes and snail darters and spotted owls, but when it came to the important shit – like the Earth’s life-support system – y’all had better things to do. That problem was too big, too vague, we’ll come back to it when it matters. And look who was pushing it: that nerd Gore. In 2000 you had better things to do, as a generation. We, as a generation, were just happy to have jobs and were just starting our own families (and doing it all wrong, as you continually reminded us).
You gave us Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld, and then 9-11 happened and y’all thought it was great we had a posse of tough-ass cowboys leading us against the nasty old terrorists. That was something we could all get behind. And Iraq . . . well, even if Bush’s logic was flawed, you reasoned, Saddam Hussein was a bad man and it was probably a good thing to keep an eye on all that oil . . . can’t argue with that. And when we did try to argue with that, we were unpatriotic in a time of war.
And then Gitmo.
And then Abu Gharib.
And then extraordinary rendition and waterboarding.
And Halliburton.
Blackwater.
Need I go on? Or have you gotten the point?
So Clinton, Bush, and now you want to saddle us with another Boomer, and another Clinton. Couldn’t even change the brand name. And we’re looking forward to that, as a generation, with the same enthusiasm as spending three long weeks with a bossy maiden aunt while our dad and our new step-mom send us postcards from the Bahamas. We can see that she doesn’t have OUR interests at heart, despite her hollow-sounding speeches about young people (mostly young women – she doesn’t seem to have much to offer to young men.) The things that we want – truthfulness, accountability, responsibility, hope, inspiration – those things aren’t in her playbook. Political favors, corporate sponsorship, power lunches, those are what we see in Hillary. And we’re not impressed.
I mean, why would we be?
Voting records? Speeches? Conventions? I mean, what the hell has she done? She’s a rich white Boomer lady who has spent more time in limousines than Paris Hilton. She wants to fix health care not so our kids will be well taken care of, but so that her Boomer buddies can live on and on and on and on, keeping her voting base alive. Sure, she (or her campaign, if you want to quibble) brought up Obama’s drug use. That’s the kind of thing her generation does. It’s the moral equivalent of a control-freak mother searching your room and going ballistic over a bong you haven’t even used in like a year. All she has to do is whisper "drugs" to her neighbors and she’ll feel justified in going to all sorts of extremes.
She has raw, naked ambition, a calculating mind, and a heightened sense of self-interest. She knows what’s best for America – just ask her. Ask any of her campaign. And if you happen to have a counter proposal, you get sent to your room because you obviously don’t know what the hell you are talking about – ARE YOU ON DRUGS?
Obama, though, has the leadership to inspire us. He is our candidate, the one that represents Gen-Xers and our interests. We aren’t worried about hanging with him for the next eight years, because we don’t think he’ll lie to us. Much. On purpose. Or treat us like we’re stupid. Threaten him with the Mean Ol’ GOP Gorilla all you want, but we aren’t stupid – hey, we built the internet. We know how badly the GOP is listing when Mike Freakin’ Jesus Huckabee is their best shot. The Conservative Revolution is over, and everyone knows it. I think Obama’s skin is thick enough to last through a whole campaign without screwing it up.
Besides, he has us to help him. And that’s where y’all Boomers are screwed. Because we aren’t stupid, we’re smart. We don’t buy into ideology blindly. We’ve become too jaded with the likes of Madonna and marketing in general to mindlessly follow without investing some research. We think, we research, and when we feel we have some leverage and a decent chance of doing something, we act. Not very gracefully, perhaps, but we are learning we can move mountains when we work together at the right place at the right time. And that’s what we’re doing for Obama, now. Not Hillary.
Hillary is Boomer-style politics with all of its quaint accoutrements. She epitomizes all those things we can’t stand about the technophobic, self-involved, self-important Boomers. She underestimates us – and that is our greatest strength. She treats us like we’re stupid little kids when we have kids of our own. And we’re sick of it. We don’t have to take it any more. And we won’t.
Name a liberal cause, you can find fact and figure in Hillary’s campaign to show what a steadfast supporter she’s been. It doesn’t matter. We know its BS. We can smell BS a mile away, after what y’all have put us through. We don’t want the BS any more. We want someone who is going to act with the future of our country in mind. Is Hillary going to do anything about the environment? I can see her saving an owl or a snail darter or a whale, but is she going to go before her corporate pals – the same pals who have been bankrolling her since the 90s – and look them in the eye and tell them they need to cut their carbon emissions by 90% in the next decade? Hardly. She’ll do the Boomer thing and study the matter and kill time and re-draw the problem and all the other crap they think of to put off doing anything helpful, and then it will be too late for our planet.
Obama, he could look them in the eye and tell them: that’s the way it has to be. Deal with it. And we’d back him because we trust him a damn sight better than we do Hillary.
So when you come before us and whine about us not giving your candidate an even shot, you should realize something. Y’all might be our parents, but as a generation you really haven’t done much to make us like you, and where you want to go in the future. The future we envision is much, much different. Obama and Edwards might not have the vaunted "experience" you keep prattling on about, but we’re willing to risk that in searching for a leader worth following.
And what you are about to find out is that when we want to do something like, say, organize an overnight grass-roots political movement utilizing every subtle tool at our disposal, raising millions of dollars and talking to thousands of people in calm, sympathetic tones about why Obama is a better deal than Hillary, well, we’re going to do it. And we’re gonna freakin’ ENJOY THE HELL OUT OF IT, because when we’re talking enthusiastically to someone about registering to vote for the first time or building an absolutely hysterical viral video on the cultural farce that is the Clintons or organizing a sudden Obama flash-mob to appear in a crowded urban area, well, we’re really just trying to get back at our collective parents for all the insane bullshit they put us through. We’re not over it yet. That's how we were raised. Sorry.
Instead we’re inspired. And that’s something Hillary and the other Boomers just never seemed to manage to do for us. We don’t want to wait until 2016 because Hillary is bound to screw things up just as badly as the last two Boomers, and frankly we can’t afford to wait that long. So no Hillary. That’s the way it has to be.
Deal with it.