Baby Boom or Bust?

There's been some talk about whether Obama's glorious  emergence this week means that Gen X has arrived politically, or whether Obama, born in 1962, is a Gen X'er or a Baby Boomer. This recalls for me the incisive remark of Michael Kinsley during the 2000 election campaign. In one of the debates, Dubya said something like "us Baby Boomers should impart the wisdom we've gained to our children." Kinsley's comment was that "anyone who uses the term Baby Boomer seriously has no wisdom to impart to anyone."

Tribal loyalties/hatreds and Pop Culture pundits aside, the Baby Boom generation was primarily a statistical rather than simply cultural phenomenon and, IIRC, its ending with the birth-rate of 1964 was announced at the time, when 1965 birthrates went back to pre-1946 levels. And this statistical phenomenon had an enormous, material impact on society. Certainly, when I was in graduate school in the mid 70's, it was widely noted (and with alarm, believe me) that the Baby Boom was tailing off - meaning that fewer college freshmen were entering college in the mid 70's than in the mid to late 60's (you do the math). And there were certainly many other effects beyond the one that hit me and my friends so hard back then.

Generational narcissism, for that matter, is more the norm than the exception in American history and consciousness, starting right with the Puritans and going right up to today's Xtian fundies with their fervent desire that there be no world at all after them. Within so-called generations, there are enormous differences according to all sorts of things (probably most important are perennial differences in temperament). My own Greatest Generation parents were older than just about any of the other kids' parents and that made a difference right there. And the idea that people 18 years apart were not part of the same "generation" would have seemed strange to generations of American families where early marriage and large families meant that 20 years between opposite-end siblings was not unusual at all.

Generational antagonism is just not new - and the reality is that there's always a large grain of truth carried along in the spew of venom. My parents' generation fought The Good War, for sure, but believe me, they had to be dragged kicking and screaming into it (see the Gallup polls on the eve of Pearl Harbor) and many, many of them were eternally pissed off about it - Bob Dole is far from an exception in his lack of interest in the "cause" - and they really should have worried more about Civil Rights than about commies here and abroad. My generation, for that matter, includes David Duke and Mickey Kaus and Madonna - and I flat out refused to see The Big Chill.

So I don't whine about stuff (too much) or grouse about graduating from college in the middle of the oil crisis of the early 70's or long very much at all for the truly-horrific 60's. I just work to hold onto my cushy job (hah) and keep it from the scrabbling hordes of rageful, frustrated Gen X'ers living in their group houses and all. But hey, if they had any cools about them ...