Generations are a market segmenting device. The intent is to seel different things to different age groups. It works only to the extent that there is something distinctive about and age group. Today, as distinct from 1960, age cohorts actually have less in common because of the fragmentation of media.
This diary is a response to Death and the Whiniest Generation.
In the words of Crosby, Nash, Stills, and Young:
Treat your children well,
Their parents' hell
Will slowly go by
And feed them on your dreams,
The ones they pick're the ones you'll know by...
There's more.
There was no Baby Boom generation until we became an independently wealthy market segment in the 1960s. We were a separate market segment, not because our allowances were unreasonably high or our part-time jobs unreasonably good, but because there were so many of us.
And marketers started early. As soon as there was television, there was Howdy Doody and the Lone Ranger and endless repetition of the Our Gang movie shorts from the 1930s. There were the Davy Crockett coonskin hats. Television could sell and sell and sell and could create markets where up to then there hadn't been one--children asking their parents. But this was also the culture of Joseph McCarthy and the atomic bomb and science will save us and America is the greatest country that ever was because we won World War II and Eisenhower. We were sold the culture of anti-communism just like we were sold Sugar Corn Pops. We learned over and over again about freedom, liberty, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, Lincoln, Wilson's Fourteen Points, FDR's Four Freedoms.
And then something happened. Our big brothers and sisters, who were not boomers, began listening to rock and roll music. Elvis became the white face of a black musical style, which made it less possible for parents in the South to tell their childrens "Stop listening to that N----- music."
And the news media began hyping "juvenile delinquency" and urban gangs were romanticized in many cultural forms, the most astounding being Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story. It was an urban cowboy story. It also had a satirical view of America and policemen. And in some homes it was OK to see because it was Leonard Bernstein, the guy who tried to introduce young people to Classsical music through the televised Young Peoples Concerts. And if you were really TV-addicted boomer, you saw plays by Paddy Chayefsky, the (made-for-TV) original version of Rod Serling's Requiem for a Heavyweight, and the striking play about awareness of death Flowers for Algernon. And in the South you saw country music and everywhere Dick Clark in American Bandstand. It was culture that was being marketed--films, plays, music. Even "high-brow" culture; the Mona Lisa and Venus de Milo and even Jackson Pollock's modern art became icons through repetition in cartoons and comedy sketches and settings for songs on variety shows. Rodin's The Thinker is a silent character (actually a prop) on the TV show The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, which also had a sympathetic look at the Beat "generation" in the form of Bob Denver playing the Beatnik Maynard G. Krebs.
Life magazine, the photo magazine (for people who can't read, as the joke goes) hyped Eisenhower but nothing like the way it hyped John F. Kennedy. Before the assasination, Life magazine made Kennedy a public icon. Life magazine created "Camelot". And our junior high teachers made sure that we saw the Kennedy inauguration live on TV. "Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country." In one way or another those words spoke to the search for what we were about. Few kids in my class sought to be insurance salespeople or managers or traveling salespeople. For those whose dads were those things, they saw the toll it was taking on their family. For those whose weren't there was the feeling that they would just be doing what their parents did -- farming, working at the plant, driving a truck. The latter were and are the majority of Americans regardless of generational culture. They set the agenda, not the "generations". It is only the better-off boomers who can indulge in those things marketed to a generation. Most boomers did not start jogging in the 1970s, become YUPpies in the 1980s, become soccer moms, invest in dotComs, or worry about their long-term investments in the 1990s. And most boomers are not obsessed with the "culture of life/culture of death" malarkey that the Republicans whomped up in the Schiavo case. Even among Southern Republican boomers, not many are obsessed.
We've been peddled death before. At the turn of the 1960s, there were a whole bunch of "sweetheart death" songs, most notable "Teen An-gel". In the midst of the so-called counterculture an often repeated factiod was the among Boomers, most expected that they would die before 25, and most saw a bleak life past 30. As an expression of anxiety about the state of the Cold War, they may have been correct. But as a statement of a Boomer death wish, that applied to very few of my fellow Boomers.
The older of us have dealt with death already, unlike the Jessica Mitford generation that tried to perfume and embalm death away. The oldest of us were 18 when John Kennedy was assassinated and 23 when Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. And in these events, we faced the fact that democracy could die. I remember very well the soldiers of the 82nd Airborne patrolling the streets of Baltimore after the riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King. But most Boomers were not in cities that were occupied by the Army and National Guard.
A large number of us knew someone whose name is on the Vietnam Memorial Wall. We buried miscarried babies. We buried spouses who had cancer. We are now attending to the deaths of our parents and discovering the distinct feeling that we're next.
And the marketers have discovered us once again. They are pushing nursing homes as the dotCom of the 2010s-2020s. They are pushing long-term care insurance, and universal design remodeling of your home, and health care devices, and new pharmaceuticals for heart disease and obesity, diets and supplements to rejuvenate skin, spas, retirement vacation. And the collapse of Social Security because there are just too many of us compared to younger workers. And they are caricaturing us as the whiners, the spoiled generation, the old Hippies. There is nothing like insulting the customer.
In fact, most of us are not whiners despite the fact that we (except for the upper income group among us) have not done as well as our parents. Most of us are making less than we did in our first job, adjusted for inflation. Total real income has grown; our share has not. Why because there are too many of us, because we sought to include more and more people in the job market. That is who we really are. Minorities, women, and immigrants have all come into the workforce and have deflated wages and salaries. We thought that it was right and proper. We did not whine even when an employer used affirmative action as his reason for not hiring us--but later hired a white guy for the position. We did not whine when we lost guaranteed benefit pensions and were stuck with 401(k) plans. We did not whine when health insurance was slowly taken away from us. Why? Because we were glad to have a job, any job at all.
But we were the culture, supposedly, of "Do your own thing." We now have a diverse and fragmented culture. There are many 11-million copy markets among us. So Tim LaHaye has found one and mined it over and over and over. So has Stephen King and John Grisham and Toni Morrison. So has Oprah and Martha Stewart and Dr. Phil. So has Jerry Springer and NASCAR.
My hope lies in the Kossack trans-generation. Tell your children to learn from their grandparents; they understand your children's parents in a different way. We are all in this together.
