Assessing the Boomers, 60 Years On

Tom Brokaw spawned a prolific market by celebrating the now aging or deceased Americans – “The Greatest Generation” – who suffered through the Great Depression and then fought in World War II.The former NBC anchorman probably had no idea when he first coined that phrase that imitators would piggyback on the nostalgia, often producing saccharin and gauzy tributes, but his intentions were by all accounts sincere.Unfortunately, Leonard Steinhorn, a professor at American University, felt it was necessary to combat the “hagiography” typified by Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan,” by writing a book that virulently defends his own peers, as if the baby boomers needed any more publicity.“The Greater Generation” (Thomas Dunne Books, 318 pages, $24.95) fails on many fronts: It’s repetitive, filled with shopworn cliches, unnecessarily nasty, and, in some regards, inaccurate. I have no quarrel with Mr. Steinhorn convincing a publisher to authorize and pay for “The Greater Generation,” but his lengthy thesis doesn’t merit more than a mid-sized magazine article, if that.Additionally, I doubt that many of Mr. Steinhorn’s liberal friends will particularly applaud his effort. After all, in the prologue to “The Greater Generation” the author writes: “Today we live in an America that is more free and equal than at any other time in our nation’s history.” As a mid-pack boomer myself, born in 1955, I happen to agree with that assessment, but it’s unlikely that the thousands upon thousands of Americans today who believe the “unelected” President Bush is dismantling the Constitution, trampling on the rights of minorities, and supposedly intent on returning the country to the prevailing culture of half a century ago, find much solace in the words of Mr. Steinhorn.According to his view of recent history, boomers are all “egalitarian,” “freespirited,” tolerant of all religions and sexual mores, consumed by concern for the environment, and dedicated to becoming the most “sensitive” parents in all of creation. In fact, while Mr. Steinhorn gives credit to boomer parents for “protecting democracy overseas,” he says, “Baby Boomers deserve even more credit for enriching democracy and fulfilling its promise when neither war nor catastrophe nor crisis nor necessity compelled them to do it.”The impact of his demographic comrades is so great, the author argues, “in the span of a generation the Baby Boom has overturned decades if not centuries of outmoded norms, attitudes, and discriminatory practices, replacing them with a more fundamental democratic culture that reaches every nerve and synapse of American life.” That’s quite an accomplishment, but I’d argue that cultural evolution plays a bigger part than an undifferentiated group of Americans.Mr. Steinhorn is so myopic that he gives the impression that the changes in America today – integration, greater equality between the sexes, the sudden burst of the counterculture,etc. – were all accomplished by those born between 1946 and 1964. Think of iconic figures in the last half of the 20th century, people who were instrumental in societal turbulence,and an overwhelming number of them weren’t baby boomers. Martin Luther King Jr., the Berrigan Brothers, Bob Dylan, Gloria Steinem, Barbara Jordan, Tom Wolfe, Norman Mailer, Jane Fonda, Jack Kerouac, Hugh Heffner, Jackie Robinson, John F. Kennedy, Andy Warhol, to name just several, all born before the Baby Boom.Mr. Steinhorn complains that while “The Greatest Generation” was noble in fighting fascism, once the war was over the stifling “conformity” of American life resumed.Not once does he cite the overwhelming isolationist views that prevailed in the country until the attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s declaration of war against the United States. Men and women of “The Greatest Generation” weren’t fighting overseas and sacrificing at home to battle the idea of fascism as much as they were reacting against the threat to their way of life.He can’t resist citing the late-’50s sitcom “Leave It to Beaver,”like hundreds of writers before him, as an accurate prism through which to view that society, when “we remember happy families with cheerful wives gazing worshipfully at their husbands, a generation of June Cleavers content with their role as domestic providers and ego massagers for their hard-working men.”The reality, according to Mr. Steinhorn, was that for large numbers of women “domestic bliss was really a domestic prison,” a time when fathers were silent and emotionally distant, which “caused lifelong sadness in their sons and daughters.” The author never discusses his own childhood, so perhaps it was miserable and “unliberated,” but as his contemporary I resent the implication that my own parents were either locked in a “domestic prison” or “emotionally distant.In discussing the late-’60s street protests and demonstrations against the Vietnam War, the writer doesn’t once consider that if the military was all volunteer, as it is today, perhaps the outcry wouldn’t have been as pronounced. Of course, that would question the monolithic “idealism”of an entire generation, something Mr. Steinhorn doesn’t want to touch.And although Mr. Steinhorn says over and over how America today is a beacon of tolerance, he does criticize “modern-day Luddites” such as William F. Buckley, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, William Bennett, and George Will for suggesting a large segment of baby boomers is narcissistic, hypocritical, and “fixated on youth.”He explains that boomers “remained attached to youth” because they want to keep current and “not lose touch” and “repeat the mistakes of their elders. Mr. Steinhorn’s own elitism is evident when he defends boomers for traveling abroad “rather than to Branson, Missouri.”I’ve never been to Branson myself, but as an “egalitarian” boomer, I wouldn’t demean, as Mr. Steinhorn does, those Americans who vacation there.Incredibly, Mr. Steinhorn concludes that the “story” of the baby boomer generation’s enormous significance has been ignored by the press, since it tends to “feast on conflict” and reporters today are “covering the last culture war.” You would think an educated man such as Mr. Steinhorn, an accomplished academic, might realize that the bulk of today’s press is comprised of baby boomers, journalists who were mesmerized by Watergate, rock ‘n’ roll, irony, liberal politics, and lifestyle concerns.“The Greater Generation” adds absolutely nothing to the cultural dialogue of the day. Each succeeding generation in the United States leaves its own imprint, for better or worse, and the baby boomers are no different. To single them out as the saviors of a backward country is just plain silly.

Assessing the Boomers, 60 Years On

Assessing the Boomers, 60 Years On

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