It’s been a tough week, so I say we continue our enjoyable generation-on-generation warfare with a completely masturbatory post (and hopefully subsequent discussion) about the 60s and early 70s.
I was born in 1969, a little after the moon landing, and yet to me, Kennedy’s assassination, the Civil Rights marches, and the 1968 Democratic convention are more real to me than any political event that has happened in my own lifetime (Obama’s inauguration and the fall of the Berlin Wall come close). The French New Wave and early Robert Altman are more real than anything that was made when I was an of age to see adult movies (Pulp Fiction comes fairly close). Ditto for What’s Going On, Exile on Main Street, and the Beatles with popular music (the Clash and the Sex Pistols might come close but not really). There’s no journalism today that has the ring of Hunter S. Thompson or Slouching Towards Bethlehem (not to me). And in terms of scandals, nothing will ever come close to Watergate, even though by some measures what went on under Bush was worse. I’m not really talking about the 60s per se, it’s really about 1962 to 1975.
I don’t mean that cultural and political stuff was better then. More that there was a sense that these were things everyone might attention to, not just weirdos or pajama-clad blogofascists or graduate students or whatever.
I don’t think I’m alone this way. Why is this? Is it that what’s real to people is what happened to them between 15 and 25 and the country was, in effect, between 15 and 25 during that period? Does the Hunter S. Thompson “wave speech” explain it all?
I’ve never understood this and I don’t think it has to do with me or exactly when I was born.
All in all, this is probably an open thread.
DougJ +5
Tenzil Kem
I know the feeling — I’m 35 and in my head it’s supposed to be 1991 forever. Damned if I have any explanation for it, though.
Bill E Pilgrim
Nice post. I think I just answered the points you raise here in my last post in the other thread. But it’s 1 am here so I’ll just point to it and sign off.
Montysano
Hello all. Happy to be back, happy to have a roof over our head. We had a tornado….. yes, in January, 2 weeks after single digit weather…. here in north Alabama. It passed within about 200 yards of our house (here’s the track), but other than being without electricity for 12 hours, we suffered no damage.
Thanks for posting The Wave speech, DougJ; it’s a particular favorite of mine.
used to be disgusted
It’s very simple. Video was much grainier in the late 60s/early 70s. Lighting was awful. People were hairy.
Today’s well-lit, clean-cut talking heads just can’t convey the same sense of authenticity.
robertdsc-PowerBook & 27 titles
Yes.
I collect jerseys from my favorite players and it’s been 10 years since Wayne Gretzky retired, yet I look at my Rangers jerseys of his from that period and still consider them “new”. Strange.
somethingblue
Seriously?
Nixon had people break into the headquarters of another political party, and then tried to cover it up.
Bush had people tortured.
I was only born a year after you, and to me the idea that Watergate is the high water mark for scandals seems (as Yoo and Addington would put it) quaint.
Linkmeister
I was 18 in 1969, and there was certainly a sense that Big Things Were Happening in the country and the world. For example, I got to college in the fall of 1968 and went through fraternity rush, where I met a guy who’d gotten out of Czechoslovakia just as the crackdown on Dubcek’s Prague Spring began.
DougJ
Thanks, Bill E Pilgrim.
DougJ
Nixon had people break into the headquarters of another political party, and then tried to cover it up. Bush had people tortured.
That’s my point. Watergate was seismic culturally and Bush torturing people was not.
Alex S.
I blame Star Wars.
Max
I was born in 1971 to a hippie father (and a mother that went along with it for a second). I grew up hearing about Vietnam (draft dodger father) and the social morays of the 60’s (sex and lots of drugs). He lived in the Haight, and dropped acid with his college profs, yada yada. I appreciated his experiences, but could not relate and was not interested in living in that place in time. Maybe its because he was so adamant that what he went thru was so much more meaningful that the generation I was a part of (Gen X).
The 80’s and early 90’s resonate with me. From the music, to the movies, to the friendships I built and lost.
The late 90’s didn’t really have any impact on me, nor do I have any significant memories or benchmarks associated with them.
I have big hopes for the 2010’s.
I should note that I am not married and without children, so I think that impacts my association with time periods.
dr. bloor
Well, that explains a lot.
I hate to make blanket statements, but your cultural referents impress me as being older than most folks I know your age.
And Something Blue is right. The Nixon crowd was a collection of paranoid, batshit crazy and power hungry thugs, and they don’t hold a candle to the shit that W, Dick Deferment et al pulled off.
Midwest Meg
Well, for the record, I was born in 1957 and Hunter S. Thompson’s wave speech doesn’t do anything for me. As a 1957 boomer, I often can’t related to the people who were born in 1947.
I graduated from high school in 1975; graduated from college in 1979…..one year before
Juan PeronRonald Reagan’s election and the ushering in of the Conservative Revolution, which basically has put our country back 30 years.I get the impression that people who graduated from high school in 1965 (Vietnam war still going on) and 1969 (one year after MLK and RFK were assasinated) had a very different cultural experience.
Montysano
Maybe those events stand out because they pegged the needle in an otherwise quiet media landscape. In fact, they were among the first stories that played out on the teevee. Now, the level of static and clamor is so high that nothing stands out.
But I’m with somethingblue: in terms of scandal, Nixon was a piker compared with Dubya/Cheney.
Tax Analyst
DougJ – I turned 19 during the year you were born. I recall there was so much hope in the air in the mid-sixties. I shared it, but when MLK and RFK were assassinated a whole lot of air went out of that balloon. I recall that there were 500,000 American soldiers in VietNam when I turned draft age and when I tell you that it was a difficult time for me I ain’t shittin’. There had been a feeling that the world could be changed and that we were the generation that could do it, but all those events seemed to say that maybe we couldn’t. A lot of us probably could have (should have) done more, but there’s no question in my mind that cynicism (and paranoia) were creeping in and doing a real number on the amount of energy and risk people were willing to put out there. I saw a lot of people pull back and I guess I probably was doing it too, sometimes without even realizing it.
I generally put aside the negative memories and just try to have a little fun with the positive and strange, funny, weird things I lived through. I can’t think of anything else to do with them.
Lisa K.
Maybe. Republicans will always be embodied by my mortal enemy Reagan to me, who was president from the time I was 17 until I was 25. Of course, they have done nothing to recommend themselves between then and now…but even if they had, thanks to the enormously negative impression that grinning, demented fool made on me during my formative years, I will hate them forever.
ThymeZone
@DougJ:
That’s because what Nixon did got into every household in America, one way or another. What Bush did was ugly but didn’t really scar up the average middle class guy.
The Bush-Cheney administration was the culmination of the Protection Racket approach to government. You folks just keep shopping and traveling and let us do whatever we need to do to keep you safe and warm.
dr. bloor
@DougJ:
Nah, frankly, the tumult was mostly over by Watergate, and its “seismic” aftershock lasted a whole six years until the country elected Ronnie Raygun.
used to be disgusted
I also think it’s crucial that we’ve seen all these clips of 60s political events organized into montages with a 60s soundtrack playing behind them. (Usually Buffalo Springfield.)
That gives us a sense of periodicity, which = historical reality. We lived through Bush, but we haven’t yet seen montages of Bush-era politics with Bush-era music.
Unless you count this.
Montysano
Joshua Norton
Yes, but we know about Nixon et al. because the press wasn’t a wingnut propaganda tool that couldn’t print anything even vaguely derisive about Repigs like it is now.
Nellcote
Not just Prez. Kennedy but the assinations of King, Malcolm, Bobby K, Fred Hampton, Kent State and others helped to create an atmosphere of “wow, they really mean to kill us” desperation to make change. Talk about being terrorized by your own government! Hopefully the era of political assination is over but I can’t say all the people running around with guns these days reassures me.
Have a listen to “Gimme Shelter” to get a sense of the black cloud hanging over the peace-and-love.
Lisa K.
@Montysano:
It wasn’t that he claimed so much more moral high ground. He was just 30 years too early.
DougJ
Not just Prez. Kennedy but the assinations of King, Malcolm, Bobby K, Fred Hampton, Kent State and others helped to create an atmosphere of “wow, they really mean to kill us” desperation to make change.
Yeah, I see what you mean. And I think that is some of it. So many assassinations. Crazy. Awful.
PeakVT
OT: Bernie for majority leader.
Darkrose
I was born 39.9 years ago, and I do have a sense that the perception of Big Events Of Our Time is still shaped by the Boomers in many ways. I still remember my babysitter telling me that Nixon was a crook; the big scandal of my teenage years was Iran-Contra, which just didn’t dominate the headlines in the same way as Watergate.
Mark S.
@DougJ:
God that says a lot about how fucked up our country is.
`````````
I was born in 1983. My first big political event (well, that I was old enough to actually understand) was Monica Lewinsky. Specifically, my reaction was, “Oh, shit, I better get to voting age fast, because the people in charge are fucking crazy.” Then came the Bush administration. Frankly, I’m pretty impressed with myself that I still have the wherewithal to care about politics in any capacity. Most of my friends simply stopped paying attention so that they wouldn’t kill themselves under the crushing weight of what appeared (and appears) to be insurmountable devastation to the country.
For the record, as long as you keep up with the next generation of video game consoles, you never really get old.
(ETA: Aaaack, Robin G again. Stupid cat on keyboard+autofill.)
DougJ
God that says a lot about how fucked up our country is.
Clearly, but it is true.
General Winfield Stuck
Every thing is relative man. You feel this way cause it is a lot harder to get laid in your generation than it was in mine. Herein lies the answer to that id mystery.
edit- and you thought it was something deeper
dr. bloor
@Joshua Norton:
Keep in mind, though, that Watergate and the Pentagon Paper stories were exceptions to the rules even then. Woodward and Bernstein were nobodies chasing down a story that none of the National boys were interested in, and for history’s sake it’s probably a good thing Ben Bradlee was tight with the Kennedys.
PaulW
I blame the cultural and social shifts that each generation brings to the table: the Gen Xers tend to be more self-reliant and libertarian by nature; Baby Boomers tend to be more partisan (either Far Right or Far Left) and focused on culture war issues; Millennials more technologically adept, more culturally accepting, and unfazed about threats regarding COMMUNISM and SOCIALISM (having grown up after the fall of European Communist bloc/Soviet Union).
trollhattan
Punk :-P
Nixon and Bush 43 are hard to compare, but Nixon and President Cheney are a whole other kettle of rotting fish (I first wrote “rutting” which almost seems better). Shredding the Constitution and waging war on the “undesirable” portion of their fellow citizens (a portion that likely exceeded 50% in both cases) to achieve immoral goals is what they shared in common.
I’ll posit Nixon was the greater danger—to the nation and the world as a whole—since his antics could have turned the cold war into a hot one. Measured from the perspective of common thuggery, however, the Bush 43 White House has no equal.
Robin G.
@General Winfield Stuck:
I must take this moment to applaud the Boomer generation for driving pioneering efforts in STD prevention and treatment. We whippersnappers actually do appreciate that one. ;)
John Cole
If shit keeps going the way it is, in thirty years a 40 year old will be writing the same post about 2003-2016.
Except they are really getting the shaft in the music and writing categories. Heidi and Spencer are no John and Yoko.
Church Lady
Doug, I don’t think your cultural touchpoints are the norm for someone only 40. I’m a late boomer (1958) and my siblings are both post boomers (1966 and 1969). While I remember with vivid clarity the Kennedy assassination, Kent State, the Vietnam war and Watergate, just to name a few, what my sister and brother know about those events all comes from high school history books.
Their cultural touchpoints are from the 70’s and 80’s – things like Sesame Street and The Electric Company, Pong, disco, punk rock, MTV and the fall of the Berlin Wall. And I know for certain that neither one of them ever gave a damn about politics until the 2000 election. The only thing that sticks out to them about the Clinton years is the Lewinsky scandal.
To your deep disappointment, I think that they are fairly representative of their age group.
General Winfield Stuck
@Robin G.: Your welcome. Least we could do after spreading it around so much.
swamptroll
I have to chime in here. I was born in 1984, and was 17-25 when Bush was in office.
With very progressive parents, still most of my political consciousness was formed in an environment in which “Bush torturing people was not” much of a problem. Yes it makes me a cynic. http://bit.ly/4uMwyf
The past triumphs of the American political process are about all I could cling to, in terms of “realness.”
I mean I just watched John Yoo on The Daily Show . . . right?
CanadaGoose
I was born in 1942 and WWII is more “real” to me than the Vietnam war which was going on in my twenties.
When I was a kid, I asked an aunt of mine what the “roaring twenties” had been like. Was it like what I’d seen in movies about the period? She said the things shown in the movies DID happen but it was not ALL that happened.
I lived on Haight St in San Francisco in the sixties. All the things in the movie did happen but they were far far far from all that happened.
PaulW
@Darkrose:
The deal with Iran-Contra was how better at stonewalling the Reagan admin guys were. They were able to play out the scandal until nobody really cared, and when needed Bush the Elder pardoned all concerned and killed off the investigation completely.
Iran-Contra also had the advantage of coming out as the same time as the S&L Scandal, when a good number of Democrats found themselves mired in a scandal all their own. So the right of ‘who gets to snark on whom’ kinda got thrown out the window.
What is interesting is how the Beltway media evolved to where they would chase after every potential scandal, making each one a Gate, hoping for the next BIG ONE, so much so that by the time the Clintons left charred but still standing in the wake of BLOWJOBGate, there was genuine scandal fatigue. And then we got one of the worst administrations ever in Bush the Lesser (security failures pre-9/11, chasing after Saddam instead of Bin Laden, formation of two separate quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, torture of INNOCENT men and other human rights abuses, massive deficits that would make LBJ blush, a Medicare package sold to Congress through lies and intimidation, failure to maintain or fix a government bureaucracy across nearly every Executive agency leading up to the clusterf-ck that was Katrina, and so many more), and the media yawned at it all.
Mark S.
@John Cole:
No idea who those people are.
The Grand Panjandrum
@John Cole:
Bring back the draft and college kids will be taking over administration buildings and protesting ROTC on campus. Until then I don’t see it happening. Most young people grow up in relative comfort these days. They have little to fear. Sure it may be tough to get a job but that beats getting shot at.
Drive By Wisdom
Ah, the voices of truth against the evil Richard Nixon. Someone who could have given them what they cannot get even now, 35 years ago.
And in 35 years, they will be whining about Chimpy McHalliburton and crying about HCR.
Nellcote
Hormonal churn. No matter what generation, that’s probably why your favorite music in that period will always be better than what comes after.
Tom levenson
For the definitive work of 60s journalism , no list is complete without Michael Herr’s Dispatches.
I once met Tom Wolfe, and he told me that he saw that as the exemplar of the new journalism as practiced in war. I only wish some of our chickenhawk GOP 101st Fighting Keyboardist friends
General Winfield Stuck
@Mark S.: I’m guessing Heidi Fleiss, could be the Heidi NFL game, but that happened in 68. Spencer For Hire? nope that would be spenser.
dr. bloor
@Drive By Wisdom:
Just so we’re clear, then, you’re OK with totalitarianism as long as the trains run on time.
Demo Woman
@Nellcote: That’s my recollection. When the national guard fired on the crown at Kent State, life changed.
Mark S.
@General Winfield Stuck:
I found the answer, and am now much dumber for it.
I’m old enough to remember when MTV showed twenty minutes of videos a day.
Church Lady
@Nellcote: Unless you happen to be my age. I was 15 in 1973 and 25 in 1983. Right now, other than Don McLean’s “American Pie”, I can’t think of a single memorable song that came out of that time period. For me, the music I remember and identify with is from the 60’s, from Motown to Woodstock.
But I wonder if music association might be generational – my parents were young, only 21 and 25, when I was born in 1958 and they hated Elvis Presley, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, etc. They were swinging to Perry Como, Mitch Miller and later Barbara Streisand. My 22 year old daughter’s favorite music is from the 80’s – I think she has every Journey song ever released on her Ipod.
Honus
I thought about this a few years ago. When I grew up, I started 1st grade in 1961, we all studied the space program, it was new; we were going to the moon. People were shot up into space in rockets. Then the president was assassinated. The Beatles completely changed popular music; before them, there were no guys playing electric guitars with long hair. There was a war on TV every evening, and older guys in my neighborhood were going to it. MLK and Bobby Kennedy got killed. Bob Dylan appeared. African Americans started playing football and baseball and appearing on TV. Soul music, the Temptations, Stevie Wonder, WIlson Pickett, Aretha became mainstream entertainment. Men landed on the moon. This all happened in less than ten years. I can’t think of another ten year period where so many extraordinary events occurred. I don’t think these events seem noteworthy to me just because they occurred during my formative years. If you started school in 1971, or 1981, or 1991, I just don’t think as much was crammed into those decades.
The 1960s were stressful, but they weren’t boring.
General Winfield Stuck
@Mark S.:
.
So am I now.
And I do remember when MTV started, I was living in the dark hollows of east Kentucky in the middle of nowhere, and some guy that lived nearby had what we called then an “earth station” or one of those old giant sat dishes that somehow picked up MTV and CNN and we had wires stretched all over that hollow so 5 or 6 families could get plugged in. Your typical hillbilly high tech.
Task Force Ripper
@Mark S.:
One can only assume you meant “20 hours a day” but either way it’s pretty funny.
DougJ
Speaking of the space program, this may be the best YouTube video I have ever seen.
Demo Woman
@Honus: Joan Baez, Leonard Cohen, Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell and others were instrumental during the resurgence of folk music during that time period.
General Winfield Stuck
@Honus:
I never had a clue what the fuck was going on, and I don’t think anyone else did either. Long as I had good reefer and the possibility for love, I never thought a lot about it.
pdf
I’m 38 and the political issues of the 60s mean exactly jack shit to me except in that they distort the debate over what’s happening now.
Musically speaking, I’ll take rock from 1970-75 over rock from 1964-69 without blinking. You can have the Beatles and the Beach Boys and everything the Rolling Stones did pre-Sticky Fingers; I’ll take Black Sabbath, Grand Funk Railroad, pre-MTV ZZ Top, Humble Pie, Foghat, Free, Deep Purple, Yes, Genesis (up to 1975), etc., etc.
Yutsano
@Mark S.: I used to not know. When I found out I wasn’t anywhere near better off.
Leelee for Obama
I have to wonder if the fact that I, born in 1951, had to wait until I was 21, in 1972, to vote and that late boomers who had the vote at 18 might possibly explain some of the political disparity with Nixon? (and later elections) the draft was over, the war was over most of the right-leaning would have gotten deferments anyway , for college. I wish, how I wish I could bottle the feeling we had back in 1968 that we could actually change the direction of the moral universe. The Obama campaign was close, probably much closer for the younger voters, those of you who weren’t cynicized (is that a word?) by the fall-out after Martin and Bobby were murdered, when the Democratic Convention became a thug-fest, when young people were put on trial for standing up for what they thought was right(the Chicago 8), when college students were shot and killed by National Guardsmen who weren’t much older, but who hated the protesters(some of them) for being Traitors.
Cynic mode in full control, DougJ.
The saddest part of the Watergate v. torture analogy is that without Watergate, there is no GWB and Darth-no need for revenge of the Authoritarians. Unintended consequences.
Keith G
@dr. bloor: I sort of of disagree in a minor way.
We are still paying that bill.
Cheney, Ailes, Buchanan among so many others believed that the sin of Watergate is that the press teamed up with the libs to bring their man down. So much of what we are experiencing today is the harvest of those seeds. The Rebugs have never again showed up bare handed to a knife fight. They bring the whole arsenal and they fire first without asking.
We are baby seals singing Kumbaya. They are not. That was their lesson of 1974. Will we have a lesson of 2010?
Doug I can not offer any sage wisdom to your original query. The 60s were a fucking wonderful time to grow up. I could play anywhere. Family life for the white middle class with kids under draft age was slow paced and so enjoyable (sorry we fucked it up for the rest of you)
But there was a political darkness that was indeed bitter. There was this nuclear bomb thingy and this growing jungle war covered in Life Magazine . The word “Nigger” was not hidden or essentially forbidden for whites. Cities would occasionally burn and people whom we loved, respected and looked to for leadership tended to get shot as did a bunch of college kids in my home state a few years later. There was a strong sense of urgency, maybe because there was so much wrong
By then I was a HS kid discovering I was gay and discovering I needed to start getting good at lying. Cool times, sorta.
I guess its all relative.
suzanne
as someone who turned thirty two weeks ago (god, i am OLD), i am finding that when i experienced something for the first time, it became the standard by which everything else is set. for me, the early 90s (the dawning of my musical/political/artistic awareness) still seem so vibrant and, though i know intellectually that work of equal value is being created every day and important things are happening all the time, the intensity of that time is still very real for me. or maybe i’m just curmudgeonly.
the exception, for me, was 9/11. knowing what we know now about how horrible our “president” acted and what happened in the aftermath, it’s easy for me to forget just how goddamn heartbreaking that day was, how shocking, how just fucking AWFUL in every sense of the word.
the bush scandals, iran-contra, and so on unfolded so slowly that i think that it becomes less sharp in people’s minds. all the assassinations in the 60s-70s had that stunning immediacy that gives you the “where were you when?” quality that becomes such a cultural touchstone, even though those events most likely have fewer long-term ramifications.
but, to this day, nothing chills me to the bone like hearing that “breaking news special report” sound.
rootless_e
i belong to the blank generation
and i can take it or leave it each time
Bodhi
I’m so glad to see Slouching Towards Bethlehem mentioned. I love that book, and love even more her White Album. I would put those two books, along with Tobias Wolff’s much laterIn Pharaoh’s Army, in the top ten of books about the decade of the awakening.
Mrs. Peel
But now-a-days it’s more likely to mean that The Sox Win the Pennant more than anything really important.
DougJ
i belong to the blank generation
Yeah, I actually don’t like Television as much as many others.
arguingwithsignposts
I’m a year older than you, DougJ. I blame cable, 24-hour news and the Internet. Information overload makes it difficult to have those kinds of cultural touchstones these days.
The Republic of Stupidity
@pdf:
And you are MORE than welcome to it!
General Winfield Stuck
The big difference, I think, between all the chaos and sometimes violence of the sixties, and the calmer, but to me, more ominous feeling of now, is that in the 60’s we were still united to a large degree by the WW2 experience. Most of it, aside from Vietnam was just a convulsive social shedding of Victorian Age mores that had been simmering for a long time before. And though it caused discomfort amongst the then old guard, they really had no good argument against the fairness of those changes.
Now we are fiddling with divisions that run much deeper ideologically and there isn’t an over arching sense of common purpose like with WW2 and later development of a more modern infra structure to bridge that chasm of world view and values.
The Grand Panjandrum
@DougJ: I have never seen that one. Thanks. I’ll be laughing for the rest of the night.
Donald G
I was born in 1966 and largely raised on my grandparents tales of the Great Depression in the South. I became politically aware at around the age of ten, a lot earlier than my peers who pretty much aped the political leanings of their parents. In many ways, I am a New Deal Democrat, even if I was born 33 years after the New Deal.
On racial and social issues, I was diametrically opposed to the beliefs of my grandparents, who mourned the loss of Jim Crow.
Most of my classmates in High School were privileged suburban Reaganauts without reservation, primarily concerned with acquiring wealth and status. A quarter of a century later, as I’ve discovered through Facebook, many of them are still proud, Obama-hating Republicans, Christian conservatives and borderline teabaggers. They support things like zero-tolerance policies and school uniforms for their children that they would never have tolerated when they were their children’s ages. They’re still into the appearance of wealth and status, and despise the prospect of people less well-off than they are bettering themselves.
I am more disappointed in my peers than I am in most Boomers and ex-hippies.
Sentient Puddle
When I was between 15 and 25, 9/11 and the Bush presidency happened. And yeah, I think that shit is going to be stuck with me for a long time.
So I think there’s something to this.
Doctor Gonzo
You may not be surprised, given my name, how much of a HST fan I am. I was born in 1977, and the Wave Speech in F&L in Las Vegas made such an impression on me, that when one of my closest friends suddenly and unexpectedly died a couple weeks after we graduated from college, I read that speech at the wake. I think it would have liked it; he was the one who introduced me to HST when he loaned me Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.
Toast
Um… what others said about Watergate.
Watergate : Torture :: Shoplifting : Murder
Substitute lying about WMD’s for torture if that’s your preference.
Toast
As to your larger point, I am the complete and total opposite of you. Born in 1968, a year before you, I am a Gen-X’er to the core. The Kennedy assassination, MLK, peace marches — all of that seems roughly as real and immediate to me as Pearl Harbor and D-Day.
As for music, movies, and culture generally, I was, for a long time, completely indifferent to what came out of the sixties. That indifference morphed into explicit rejection as I saw the music of my own generation repeatedly squelched on the radio for yet another “classic rock” station.
I’ve tried to temper my disdain for Boomers and all the detritus they tow in their wake. Individually, it’s not their fault, after all. Well, for the most part. Sort of. But still, I think I’ll always harbor at least a little resentment from having grown up in their loooooooooonnnng shadow.
Yutsano
Incidentally DougJ, there’s a Toby Keith song that’s a great counterpoint to your title. I’d link a YouTube but all the vids I found sucked eggs.
Keith G
@General Winfield Stuck: And an economic sense of common purpose, actually. You and your neighbors, your doctor, and the family that owned the factory lived a very similar lifestyle.
Woodrowfan
Born in 1959 I don’t remember JFK at all, or Bobby, or MLK. I remember the Moon missions (Neil Armstrong and Tony Perez were my boyhood heroes) but the political events that shaped me were the 1968 election, Kent State and Watergate. I learned early on not to trust Republicans, a lesson that has served me well over the past decades.
And I’ll take the music from the late 70s-early 80s over anything outside the Beatles from the 60s. My (college) students still wear rock shorts with my age group’s favorite bands on them. I tease them to get their own damn cultural touchstones!
NickM
I was born right around the same time as DougJ. When I first went to college in the mid-80’s, people still had up Beatles and Stones posters, and you’d hear Zep blasting out of frats all the time. Bowie and The Who still had rabid fans. Even though I was a (poseur) punk, all my friends knew the canon, and it was all recorded in the 60’s. Now I realize that a lot of the “old” rock stars were just hitting their 40’s in those days. It seems it took about 25 years for the 60’s to stop being the cultural referant, at least in terms of music.
Woodrowfan
Actually I think the boomers are two generations, those old enough to worry about being drafted to Vietnam and those of us too young…
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
There was definitely a sense of greater possibility in those days than there is now. You’ve always had experimental art, literature, music, and so on, but there was a sense that it didn’t need to stay at the margins, that it could be seriously considered by the larger society. My best example of what I’m talking about from that period is the movie 2001. It was big budget and very successful, yet in some senses you could say it was as much an “art” film as your average Bergman or Fellini offering. Over the years I’ve tried to think of another mainstream Hollywood offering that was as audacious, but with no success. There will never be another 1968.
General Winfield Stuck
@Keith G: This is true.
Tax Analyst
@ #79 Woodrowfan:
Excellent point.
rootless_e
@DougJ
well, television wasn’t very good. But “Richard Hell” was a good name for a rock star.
Proper Gander
I was born in 1975, and in my mind it’s still 1994, when I first heard this song:
The abuses and crimes of the Bush administration were definitely born in the struggles of the ’60s, and I think that some people could feel this tension and intuit what was coming long before Chris Cornell screamed about falling towers, much less before the towers actually fell and all the rest…
Oh, and new Soundgarden apparently:
http://www.soundgardenworld.com/
rootless_e
A friendly edit:
Over the years I’ve tried to think of another mainstream Hollywood offering that was as
audacious,pretentious,—
Napoleon
@Woodrowfan:
I would agree with that. Born in 61 and except for the space program don’t recall much of what was going on outside the family, other then the nightly Vietnam causality report on TV (and some of those numbers were big, at least to me).
First thing politically I really paid attention to was Nixon and so the rest of my childhood was the Dems slowly fumbling away the majority and culminating in my first vote in the Carter/Reagan election.
And it pretty much has been downhill from there.
Sanka
Hey, remember when liberals bitched about George Bush politicizing the White House with campaign advisers, pollsters and various insiders?
Yeah. About that.
Keith G
@Toast:
I don’t agree, entirely. The torture was beyond bad – god awful. Cannot ever be defended.
Watergate was a different kind of bad. It was the systematic attempt to destroy the election process in the country. All we really have here in this land is a notion that our speech is generally without undue retrains and that elections matter. The Nixon team were devilishly focused on aborting both of those notions. They were only different from a South American coup because nobody got shot. A fact that really pissed off G. Gorden Liddy.
Amanda in the South Bay
I guess I’m not really getting DougJ’s pov, since he was what-5 when Watergate happened? Unless he literally is a genius, how can you really comprehend those types of events when you are that young?
I mean, I was born in 1979, and despite having three older siblings who actually grew up in the 80s, and hence having absorbed some 80s pop culture, I really didn’t grow up in the decade, and was too young to really get what was going on. When Michael Jackson died, I couldn’t get how people younger than me mourned like it was their childhood hero that died. If you are 25, for example, then, you were just barely born when he was in his (pre weirdo) prime.
DougJ
There was definitely a sense of greater possibility in those days than there is now. You’ve always had experimental art, literature, music, and so on, but there was a sense that it didn’t need to stay at the margins, that it could be seriously considered by the larger society
Yeah, I agree.
Amanda in the South Bay
I guess what I meant to say is that I think its, well, if not pretentious, then theres something wrong about generations stealing other generation’s cultural symbols. Its like these early 20 something hipsters walking around looking like my older brother’s closet from 1986 vomited on them. Just embarrassing.
Napoleon
PS to my post, I grew up in a town where you were born a Democrat and baptized a Catholic. I recall my grade school having a vote for the 72 election and McGovern winning.
Nellcote
@Amanda in the South Bay:
It was sad and sickening to see all the diamond encrusted peace symbols for sale last xmas.
MikeJ
Since DougJ declared it an open thread, here’s where I hung out today:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psHCb2gI5NM
Gun turret video is still processing.
Svensker
As a boomer, the only thing I think was really better then was the music. There was a lot of creativity happening happening then between Stax, Motown, British Invasion, psychedelia, etc. Very “authentic”, unlike the overproduced stuff now (I know it’s not all like that, but a lot is).
The world has sure changed. Some things are a lot better, some things aren’t. The only thing I really miss is my waistline.
scav
well, Amanda, you’ve clearly written off Bach, Mozart, Shakespeare and dog knows what all else with that limited wet blanket! ho la! Not that I ever understood the appeal of MJ ever, but I never thought to check the birth certificates of anyone that chose to.
barely made 63 myself but I too can remember the body counts (actually, about one of my earliest memories go figure) and the moon stuff. Big countdown calendar on the pantry door for the end of Nixon and a lot of my mom ironing to the whole Watergate thing on TV. So I didn’t understand them as a 40-distinctly-odd year old. I understood them as a child and I understood them as important.
Mnemosyne
@Toast:
As long as you completely ignore that the people who decided torture was a great policy are the exact same people who supported Nixon’s lawbreaking, then I guess you can claim that the lawbreaking on Nixon’s part that people like Rumsfeld and Cheney cheered on wasn’t as bad as the lawbreaking that Rumsfeld and Cheney got up to when it was their turn.
ETA: Oh, and Cheney? Baby Boomer. Just sayin’.
rootless_e
never mind the stars and stripes
let’s hear the watergate tapes
chrome agnomen
@Napoleon:
boston?
Pennypacker
@ Church Lady (comment 36)
You pretty summarized exactly what I thought when I read the post. I’m a 1964 boomer, and though I’m older than DougJ I just don’t identify as much with those earlier events. Or I should say, the Clash resonates with me more than the Beatles, the Berlin Wall was a huge event for me (since I had traveled on both sides of it years before it came down), and I was largely politically apathetic until the Iraq War radicalized my thinking.
chrome agnomen
@Mnemosyne:
cheney: not a boomer. just sayin’.
rootless_e
But George W. Bush is a boomer.
LondonLee
I think Doug is just a victim of the Boomer hegemony that has dominated pop culture history for over 30 years, the ceaseless propaganda of books, movies, tv documentaries, and box sets that set out to convince everyone that the 60s were the greatest time ever to be young and the music was the greatest ever too.
As someone born in 1962 I find it objectionable bullshit. I’ll take the 70s and 80s over the 60s (Bowie over Dylan, The Jam over The Beatles) and think the much-maligned 1950s (maligned by parent-hating Boomers anyway) were far more creative and interesting.
SiubhanDuinne
I was born in 1942, which I guess makes me a pre-boomer by a few years. One of my earliest memories is my uncle coming home shortly after V-J Day after having served in the Pacific Theatre throughout the war. At 3, I had no concept of war and peace but I certainly absorbed the almost palpable feelings of relief and joy in the family. Television became part of my life in January 1953 when the few kids in my fifth-grade class whose families owned TV sets were asked to invite the rest of us to go home with them at lunch time to watch the inauguration of the unimaginably ancient President Eisenhower. (Personally, I was far more excited a few months later when my own family rented a TV set for the sole purpose of watching the coronation of the unimaginably young and beautiful Queen Elizabeth II.)
I was 21 when JFK was assassinated and I don’t think I’ve felt young or completely carefree since then. I’m just enough older than the first wave of Boomers that I never felt fully part of the counter-culture, and while I applauded their stances and principles, I pretty much hated their tactics, hair, clothes, and lifestyle. I identify much more with swing and big band music of the ’30s and ’40s than rock ‘n’ roll or anything that came after, although decades later I have developed a real appreciation for the Beatles.
I’ve become a lot less conventional as I’ve aged. My politics have certainly moved steadily leftward (I was too young to vote for JFK, although I would have done, if only to piss off my Republican family. I married an extremely conservative man and might as well confess right here that under his influence I listed well to starboard for a while and was even a Goldwater Girl in 1964.)
I do agree that the global turmoil of the late 1960s, and Watergate in the early 1970s, were culturally seismic in a way that almost nothing has been since.
AhabTRuler
@John Cole: There have been a few bright spots.
AhabTRuler
Shit, they don’t really take the “breaking news” tag down on CNN anymore.
maye
My memories of the 60s are all the grown ups yelling at each other about Vietnam.
When MLK was assasinated all the black kids got up and walked out of my jr. high school (right in the middle of Miss Cofar’s 8th grade math class!) A few months later my mother woke me up for school and said Bobby Kennedy has been killed. I remember thinking “of course he has.” It seemed completely unremarkable.
The summer I turned 19, I sat in front of the TV every single day of the watergate hearings. Occasionally my mother would walk through the room and say “aren’t you going to get a job?” (I usually worked in the summer). I couldn’t tear myself away from Sam Ervin, Fred Thompson and John Dean.
Nellcote
blame it on the Stones
DPirate
Can offer two explanations.
1. On the whole, everyone shares this phenomenon. In youth, all new experiences seem terribly important and become fixed in our minds as such, in combination with #2:
2. People interacted with each other more then than now on interpersonal levels, both in employment, at the home, and about town. Families, for instance, were less apt to be scattered across state lines. This meant that events you discussed became twined into these relationships in your memory.
Do I believe any of that? I don’t know, but I think it makes a lot more sense than any force of history cresting in the 60s/70s. Especially if one considers only the hippie phenomena, which was easily overwhelmed, as always, by militancy, of all stripes and by all classes.
PS I was born in 68 and my first memory of politics is watergate. I remember thinking that a dam broke. Seems to me there was a tv graphic like that but it may have been just my imagination. Nevertheless, I do not think watergate is any terrible scandal, since in my household the government was generally despised.
DougJ
never mind the stars and stripes
let’s hear the watergate tapes
Yankee soldier, wants to shoot some slag…
Hard to beat that for an opening
DougJ
Pennypacker
I hope your name doesn’t mean what I think it means.
Leelee for Obama
I remember when I rented “JFK” when my son and his friends were maybe 16. We watched it together, because after all, it WAS my TV! They always knew I was political, and very much to the left, and they used to tease me that my son was really Abbie Hoffmann’s love child, cause he had very curly hair. I cried all the way through it, letting them know a lot of it wasn’t historical, but the sense of the times was there. When it was over, they asked me how it had affected my life, and I said something very like what you did. I knew when he was killed that the country I believed in did not exist.
Funny thing, I was watching Tom Hayden last month on BookTV and someone asked him about 9/11 conspiracy theories. He said the Kennedy Assassination was his conspiracy, but he said it in a way that I heard differently. I thought he said that the assassination was his 9/11. I think I heard it that way, because that’s what it was for me.
Ana Gama
It’s not that the shadow is so long, Toast. It’s that it’s wide, because there are just so many more of us than subsequent generations. (At least for the time being, that is.)
Brick Oven Bill
The dirty little secret about the dirty fucking hippies is that they were really closet Teabaggers and Glenn Beck viewers. Take, for instance, John Lennon:
“You say you’ll change the Constitution;
Well, you know;
We all want to change your head.
“You tell me it’s the institution;
Well, you know;
You better free you mind instead.
“But if you go carrying pictures of chairman Mao;
You ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow;
Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right.
All right.
Frankie T.
Interesting thread. I’m 51 years old and have vivid memories of the Nixon administration. I think Dubya was worse for the country, but Nixon was by far more venal. Some observations:
1) The Nixon administration established the Plumbers, a secret, extra-governmental unit filled with ex-CIA types, to smear and antagonize political opponents, break into their psychiatrist’s offices looking for dirt, and ultimately bug the offices of the Democratic party. The Attorney General of the US, and later the President’s Counsel, managed this illegal enterprise for the White House. Money to fund the dirty tricks (and later pay for blackmail by the Watergate burglars) came from a slush fund diverted from campaign contributions. The President himself participated in discussions about paying hush money. The Bush administration was pretty thuggish (e.g., Valerie Plame), but never got quite to this level of Sopranos-lite criminality.
2) Nixon had a very antagonistic relationship with the press, especially the NYT (because of it’s agressive reporting on Vietnam) and the WaPo (in part because of Ben Bradlee and his ties to the Kennedy family). The antagonism was returned in spades once the Watergate/Plumbers story got traction and the MSM smelled blood. In contrast, the Bush administration took the country to war in Iraq under false pretenses with the collusion of reporters at the NYT (e.g., weapons of mass destruction). Unlike the Watergate era, there was little aggressive reporting from the elite MSM to challenge the administration’s assertions (the war would pay for itself, we would be greeted with flowers and candy, post-war conflict was driven by a few “dead-enders”, etc). The WaPo, former scourge of the Nixon administration, now has a permanent seat on the Republican establishment tire swing.
3) When the Supreme Court ruled against the Administration and the Watergate tapes came out, Nixon’s support in his party evaporated. He resigned after Barry Goldwater and a few other Republican leaders told him they would vote to convict in a Senate trial. In contrast, there was no collapse of support for Bush in his party when the weapons of mass destruction didn’t turn up, and the illegal data mining, rendition and torture were exposed. Many influential Republicans instead embraced this as the face of conservatism! Big contrast with the Nixon era. I don’t recall any Republicans of national note in the mid-70’s arguing for more politically motivated burglary.
Andy K
Born in 1965, remember the Apollo 11 moon-landing pretty clearly, but then there’s a gap in my memory until about ’72…
But what I do remember is that there seemed to be a lot less cultural diffusion. Three televison networks (four if you count PBS) in most markets. More local newspapers, but fewer national magazines. Three types of radio stations dominant in most markets- Top 40, AOR or Country (depending on what section of the nation you were in), and a MOTR station that ran syndicated network news at the top and bottom of the hour, but local news and chat with a smattering of Sinatra or Roger Whittaker tunes the rest of the time. Cinemas had one screen. We shopped at department stores that had what seemed like everything.
Then came the malls, the multiplexes, cable tv . Everything marketed to niches. We all went our separate ways.
scoudouc
I was eight in 1969. I felt it even as kid that something was extraordinary was up. But at the same time I had a sense of foreboding. We used to have a show in Canada called “The Fabulous Sixties”. It was a documentary type of show that showed all the cool and groovy inventions that were coming on line at that time. But then I would walk by newsstands that would have Life or Look magazine for instance. The topic du jour was of course Viet Nam or Biafra. The thing that that used to terrify me and stick with me was the bright red colour of the blood in the war porn pictures that would inevitability be on the cover or inside the pages. But then again we only had a B&W TV which could have something to do with it.
stickler
DougJ, I was born in 1968 and I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about. And I teach US history (1877-present), so I talk about the God-damned sixties.
I mean, I understand how pivotal that decade was, but I also came of age as the God-damned baby boomers dominated EVERYTHING in our culture. EVERYTHING. I know on some level that the Rolling Stones are great musicians, I guess, but man — I could go to my grave a happy man if I never heard another note from those bastards. And now? Every man-oriented TV advert is for blue pills or painkillers. (Where’s the love for Cruex? I remember those commercials from the 80s, back when baby boomers still played sports and needed something for jock itch!).
And the dynamics of our current political scene reflect the same (I’ve offended God enough, insert your own epithet here) baby-boomer dynamic as the last fncking thirty years.
And I’m only halfway through my second martini.
rootless_e
Hard to beat that for an opening
God save the queen
the fascist regime
that made you a moron
potential H-bomb
Pretty punchy too. None of that 60s anthem meandering around stuff.
DPirate
@ThymeZone:
Yes. Also, the average middle class guy was behind Bush most of the way.
dr. bloor
@Frankie T.:
Yeah, Nixon’s doppelganger is Cheney, not W.
Who learned at the feet of the master, of course.
Ruckus
@Woodrowfan:
I second this. If you were the right age in the mid to late 60’s this possibility of being drafted ran through everything you did, politics, music, college, drugs, jail, work. Everyone I knew thought about this all the time, just like I did. I think most people knew someone who had to deal one way or another with the draft or the war. We are in two wars now and other than on the intertubes I don’t know of anyone in the military or directly involved in the wars. A huge cultural difference. So far the current wars have lasted about the same length time as Vietnam yet we had losses of over 50K in Vietnam and even if you count the contractors the losses are much less. Still too, too many (more than zero is too many) and that does not count for the injured but it meant that many more citizens were directly affected by Vietnam.
rootless_e
well we said we’d start a revolution
well you know
we decided to get high instead
we said we’d change the constitution
well you know
we found out we preferred to be lead
but if you want to show adverts for boner pills
us boomers are ready watch them
until we’re killed
don’t you know
it’s all marketing
etc.
Bob In Pacifica
I was in eighth grade in 1963 when Kennedy died. Everybody then knew something was hinky no matter how much the news said that it was a lone nut. Any healthy investigation of the assassination demonstrates that it was orchestrated by the CIA. From that point on American politics became more unreal, one step at a time. Even when it seemed like the “good guys” won there was an air of unreality (read Russ Baker’s “Family of Secrets” about Watergate).
While the media was always controlled by the rich (who paid the town cryer?) and used for the benefit of the wealthy, the coalition between the press and our intelligence industry (you could start with Carl Bernstein’s piece here: http://tmh.floonet.net/articles/cia_press.html but better to read Christopher Simpson’s “Science Of Coercion”), and a quick study of some of the post-Watergate Congressional investigations you will be able to see the actual alliances and business relationships that have infected what we see and hear.
Every Democratic President has turned out to be less democratic and more likely to allow the criminality of the previous Republican administration to stand. With each cycle the country moves another step closer to fascism. But it’s just a little at a time.
Because fascism is a system which by its nature rewards the rich and powerful, it has to have an explanation for why things continue to get bad for everyone else. That’s why it’s necessary to invent scapegoats or amplify old hatreds. Death panels and Kenyan birth records work well for old, fearful white bigots. America hasn’t moved that far from its history of slavery.
But don’t feel too superior because there is so much money and so much energy at disposal that there is narrowcasting to any identifiable group, including liberals and progressives. Hillary Clinton had three CIA cheerleaders last year (Larry Johnson, Valerie Plame and Gloria Steinem) during the campaign. But they were too easy to spot. Usually propagandists are harder to find.
I guess what I’m saying is that life seemed more alive the farther back you go is because it was. Life was more realistic. Now what you get is professional wrestling. Scandals are staged, or set up, or at worst amplified as part of a given propaganda campaign. Or as Henry Miller described it in his essay “Into The Nightlife”, everything is pasteboard, “a Coney Island of the mind”.
Doug, you may now resume your drinking.
General Winfield Stuck
@stickler: Pretty soon all this will be yours grasshopper.
ono
I was 12 in 1963 and 24 in 1975. I’m probably the oldest person posting here now (but possibly the youngest in spirit, or maturity). Yes children, it was a great time. And yes, Nixon was bad news, but he was a novice and a very nice man compared to George and Dick. The music was better then too, but old people always say that sort of thing. Another thing, I like Frank Sinatra music now, but didn’t when I was young. I blame that on the generation gap, which was a big thing then.
General Winfield Stuck
@ono:
Sounds more like a serious condition.
MTiffany
I’m with Toast. I was born in 1971 and to me, all of that is the past. Are all of those events important? Certainly. But — and here’s the thing I think pisses off a goodly number of people of my generation endlessly — history didn’t stop with those events, contrary to the way the Boomers carry on, endlessly.
And don’t even get me started on Woodstock. A bunch of people getting high, listening to music, and rolling around — some of them naked — in the mud is supposed to be the pinnacle of what, exactly? Two wetsuits and a dildo if I know. When my fellow Gen-X’ers and I get wasted and engage in some consensual free love, we have at least have the courtesy to do it in private. And oh yeah, we don’t bring the kids along, either.
rootless_e
the peak of western culture.
rootless_e
I like Frank Sinatra music now,
me too.
Pennypacker
@ DougJ
I hope your name doesn’t mean what I think it means.
Seinfeld reference. Pennypacker, a wealthy industrialist.
BTW, good choice of Clash lyrics. For years I really WAS bored with the USA!
Andy K
This is sorta what i was talking about up-thread. I’m not so sure that the music was better or that there were far fewer choices, so that things became to be regarded as good by consensus. There’s plenty of good music being made now (here’s an example), but it’s stuck in its own niche. Had the radio been more diverse then as now, Sinatra might not be nearly as popular as he still is.
ono
@MTiffany
I sense anger in your words.
Yes, I agree with, it looks pretty stupid to see a bunch of Woodstock hippie dippys acting like idiots, but if you had grown up in those terribly uptight 50’s and early 60’s, you too would have shed your cloths and rolled in the mud when the opportunity arose.
Peace and love to you, from my generation to yours.
General Winfield Stuck
@MTiffany:
Only in summer. You should feel lucky none of your friends got letters of Greetings from your president, to take a long trip and come back in a body bag. More than a few of my friends did. I got the letter, and was on my way when the fun and death ended. What chu got to worry about?
rootless_e
The recent Coen brothers movie had a too accurate take of suburban life in the 1960s in America.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wR6w6_x9CXA
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
@dr. bloor:
This post brought to you by the Henry Kissinger Foundation.
Andy K
@MTiffany:
See, here’s where I think the Boomers- and the pre-Boomers- have it all over those us, though probably not by their own making. They traveled down many of the same roads together because there were a lot fewer roads. They talk about Woodstock because they all knew about Woodstock. We, on the other hand, got Woodstock II, but we had plenty of other alternatives to Woodstock II, so that Woodstock II isn’t as common an experience. The more common the experience, the more clarified the history.
DougJ
Hard to beat that for an opening
I still say that “I am an anti-Christ” is the best opening ever. What more can you say than that? What could be more rock n’ roll in the best possible sense?
Runner-up: “Destroy your safe and happy lives before it is too late” from the Mekons criminally underrated “Memphis, Egypt”.
sharon
I am 72, meaning that when you were born I was already over 30. But the late 60s and early 70s still seem significant to me, too. Watergate was fascinating and I would come home from grad school and turn on the TV right away. I still like to read stories about it. I remember reading the first little story about the break-in at Democratic headquarters and thinking “it’s the Republicans and nothing will be done about it.” I was wrong, as it turned out. I remember being scared when the Saturday Night Massacre occurred, wondering if our government was moving toward a dictatorship. I think I was more scared during the Bush era and it went on longer. A big difference is that most of the Republicans (and Democrats) I read about now seem to be unprincipled, whereas during the Watergate hearings, much of what was being pursued was by Republicans. I am still hopeful. Back to your sense that so much that was substantial occurred in the 50s and 60s–I agree to some extent, but wonder if it was that in those days, people going against the mean stood out. Now everyone is texting about how radical they are, and no one is very interesting. I read a comment recently about popular music being just repeats, and not good ones, of what came decades earlier. Anyhow I liked reading your remarks.
DougJ
But you know, in the end, as much as I love the Pistols, and the Clash, and the Mekons, and as much I regard the latter two as intelligent, compassionate observers of contemporary society, in the end, the Stones are/were better, for all their idiocy and self-indulgence and going on for thirty years too long. More great records and if you check it out on YouTube they were a million times better live.
SiubhanDuinne
@ono #125
Before you get too carried away with the view from the perch of your vast age and being the oldest one posting here, may I politely observe that both CanadaGoose at #39 and I at #104 noted that we were born in 1942, fully nine years before you were. My 50th high school reunion is this year; yours will be well after President Obama triumphantly completes his second full term.
Anybody else here born in or prior to 1942? If not, I want to arm-wrestle CanadaGoose for bragging rights on being The Very Oldest Juicer.
Paris
“Why is this? ”
Its hard to find good acid any more. I think that explains it.
Andy K
@SiubhanDuinne:
So what was Jesus really like?
General Winfield Stuck
@Andy K:
No one chooses when they are born. Growing up in the sixties and seventies was unique because of the social change that convulsed and roiled us all during that time. Changes that are now passe and routine but weren’t then.
While in a way, I feel lucky to have grown up then, though I wasn’t political other than to sniff after hippy chicks that were, there are also some negative things about growing up in that kind of turmoil. I can’t name them, but I know they exist.
General Winfield Stuck
@DougJ: The Stones? No wonder you are confused.
slag
@DougJ: I created this image in honor of your contemplative nostalgia, DougJ. You’re welcome.
DougJ
I created this image in honor of your contemplative nostalgia, DougJ. You’re welcome.
Thanks.
DougJ
The Stones? No wonder you are confused.
There have been periods in my life when I listened to most of Exile On Main Street every day. I can’t explain the other periods very well.
Andy K
@General Winfield Stuck:
I’ll put it this way: The Boomers aren’t responsible for the map they were handed, but they had a hand in redrawing that map and passing it down. I didn’t have a hand in the creation of cable tv or the diversification of the entertainment or news industries. Boomers had a hand in creating the diffuse culture in which those of us who followed have grown up. Maybe it wasn’t a conscious effort, but they have effectively divided and conquered us.
General Winfield Stuck
@Andy K:
Sorry, we didn’t mean to. :-)
SiubhanDuinne
@Andy K #141
I knew Jesus when he was a baby. For some reason he was always crying.
General Winfield Stuck
@DougJ: I have that with Led Zep.
jenniebee
’72, and for me it’s not the events, it was the moment in my 20’s that it really sank into my consciousness that this country was all about the Baby Boomer’s experience of their life, and that nobody was going to pay much attention to the wants and needs of my generation without reference to the boomers probably until there were no boomers left to pay attention to. They are the norm, and we are the odd creatures who also live here.
Andy K
@General Winfield Stuck:
And I don’t think any of you did. I think some of you might have been a bit shortsighted, too eager to jump the gun.
But as I said in the earlier thread, I do think there’s no small amount of blame to be laid at the feet of your parents. Grandma and grandpa just couldn’t control themselves, so we got a glut of you.
Paris
This is how I picture the 60’s:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLRX7bZH41g
Jefferson Airplane playing live on top of a building in NYC.
Semi-controlled anarchy
trollhattan
@114 MotherfuckinbOb
We already know what happens when people bend John Lennon’s work to match their beliefs from Charlie Manson and the asshole who assassinated him. Since you seem inclined to include yourself in that cohort, knock yourself out.
rootless_e
Ok, the real peak of western civilization
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkP5roFukKY&NR=1
slag
@General Winfield Stuck: Pink Floyd. I even owned them on vinyl. And didn’t have a record player.
wiley
I was born in ’61. My parents were young. So I guess I am a boomer child of boomers? In the working-class neighborhood, the hippies were just not that significant. The most memorable events of the sixties for me were Mai Lai and Manson. After Mai Lai was made public, the jingoism in my world stopped completely and I saw collective shame like I have not seen since. After Manson (and a slew of other highly publicized serial killers), people started locking their doors and windows. Prior to that people would leave their keys in their cars and the windows down while they were at the store, and their houses were left unlocked with the windows open.
drkrick
I was born in ’58. Barely remember Kennedy, but remember the earliest manned space shots well. 1968 was a damn weird year to be 10 – I was just starting to really pay attention to the outside world in general, and sort of imprinted that madness as normal for quite a while.
It took the culture several decades to work through the Civil War. The ’60’s weren’t that cataclysmic, but the changes and the conflicts were deep. Someone upthread was right to say the whole Cheney regency was about getting revenge on the libs for the effrontery of holding Nixon responsible. But for a lot of his voters, the last 40 years have been about getting revenge on the libs for the effrontery of making them treat blacks and latinos like people. And if we every get away with making them treat gays like people, that’ll fuel another 40 years.
My theory on the ’60’s is that the legitimacy of cultural authority broke down. Between the people who figured out that the toleration if not promotion of racism was morally bankrupt and the people who thought forcing them to end Jim Crow was morally bankrupt, you wound up with damn few people who took the traditional sources of authority seriously anymore. Alliances were possible, but were constantly subject to negotiation, and the rules kept changing. A generally accepted set of values and leaders was out of the question Once that door opened, the whole sex’n’drugs’nrock’n’roll (‘n’general cultural chaos) came rolling right in. And we’ve been at war with each other ever since.
DougJ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…..&NR=1
Yeah, Sly is more up my alley than Pink Floyd and Jefferson Airplane as such.
Andy K
@wiley:
Your parents were 14 or 15 years old when you were born? Because if they were born before ’46, they ain’t Boomers.
DougJ
But for a lot of his voters, the last 40 years have been about getting revenge on the libs for the effrontery of making them treat blacks and latinos like people. And if we every get away with making them treat gays like people, that’ll fuel another 40 years.
I think you’re right on the first but not on the second. Race runs deep — it’s tribalism and that strikes a chord. Sexual orientation issues don’t go much deeper than I want my kids to reproduce, it’s gross when two guys kiss, and I hope I’m not gay too. It’s pretty superficial stuff, by comparison, and in 15 years no one here will give a fuck.
Andy K
The Temptations
Ball Of Confusion
wiley
Oh. Well my mother was born in 44. My father in 43. What generation is that? Surely it’s not the Greatest Generation.
DougJ
This is the best Temptations song. Got to listen to the long version. It loses a lot when they shorten it.
Uriel
I always find it odd that people always go from Bush:WMD/Torture to Nixon:Watergate.
Where’s the love for Ronnie R? He had not only has the corruption and torture/war for no good reason (just not with our troops) thing going for him, but with the added feature of such reckless saber rattling that a routine military exercise nearly ended with the end of the whole world. Plus, about 90% of the crap we’re dealing with today started on his watch.
It does a true disservice to his enduring legacy, and is a shame.
slag
@DougJ: You’re posting the best YouTubes ever tonight. Now we know without a doubt you’re at least +5.
Pennypacker
He had not only has the corruption and torture/war for no good reason (just not with our troops) thing going for him, but with the added feature of such reckless saber rattling that a routine military exercise nearly ended with the end of the whole world.
Not to mention Iran-Contra, that great assault on the constitution. I hated Ronnie R. with a passion. Amazing that it only took a few years of Bush/Cheney to make me forget that completely.
Andy K
@wiley:
I don’t know that that generation has ever been named.
My dad was born in ’45 and insists on calling himself a Boomer. He won’t get a computer so I’m always having to print up articles to show him how the Boom is defined by birth rates that didn’t rise to the level of pre-war birth rates until early 1946.
Ironically, though I was born in ’65 (months after the end of the boom), I’ve got as many, though different, Boomer cultural touchstones that make me who I am as does he. He couldn’t give two cents about The Beatles or The Beverly Hillbillies, but they were staples of my childhood. I couldn’t care less about The Mickey Mouse Club, which was a staple of his.
Andy K
@DougJ:
Oh yeah, that’s a good one.
And now for something completely different (and it would help if you multiply whatever your “+ “number is by 420):
Junior Murvin
Cool Out Son
wiley
I enlisted in ’78 and the military environment was more liberal than the W. civilian environment. When back in the states in ’83 I was appalled at being stopped leaving the library for my backpack to be searched. I don’t know what the hell happened, but it was a frog in the boiling water thing, for sure. I, too, credit Reagan with the decline.
The Raven
The post-war boom was still going on. It was a golden age; a time of liberation in many ways:
– Sexual (the pill was approved by the FDA in 1960)
– Musical
– Artistic
– Political: the end of segregation
– Scientific (space travel)
Such times do not come often in history.
Cat Lady
@DougJ:
Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine. Best. Opening. Ever.
Comrade Kevin
My parents were both born before World War 2 in Northern Ireland, I was born in 1966, and the Clash are the best band ever, followed by the Beatles.
If you don’t agree with me, you’re full of shit.
Mnemosyne
@chrome agnomen:
Ah, yes, you’re right he was born in 1941. I was confused by his three deferments so he could avoid having to go to Vietnam.
fraught
@SiubhanDuinne: 1940. I remember the day Roosevelt died and the day the war ended. Bush was the worst but Watergate seemed bigger because it actually caused a president to resign. That was satisfying and I was hoping to feel that again when they threw Bush and Cheney out in twin impeachments with guilty verdicts. No such luck. No politician in office now has the nerve to actually stand up and ruin another politician’s career. Leiberman should be officially shunned with a public statement by the Dem caucus.
Shit, am I the oldest?
Mark S.
@Cat Lady:
Ha! At first I thought your handle said Church Lady. I was like, “That’s not a lyric I would expect her to like.”
Cat Lady
@Mark S.:
Ya think? She could make diamonds in her butt. :-D
+++++
DonkeyKong
“Come’on people now love yer brother’s, try to come together and love one another right now!”
Even if you have
Even if you need
I don’t mean to stare
We don’t have to breed
We could plant a house
We could build a tree
I don’t even care
We could have all three
-Breed, Nirvana
Man, when I first heard the opening to that I said to myself, Fuck those motherfucken boomer fucks.
Boomers dominated the radio and culture like the damn British Empire of the 19th century. The sun never sets on “Light My Fire”
I still lose it when that song comes on the radio. Full Lewis Black style meltdown.
For the record, born in 1970
bago
Uhm… I’d like to talk about haircuts from the seventies.
Comrade Kevin
@DonkeyKong:
that’s really unfortunate. The Doors are one of the most overrated bands in history.
Bill Arnold
1960, first memory is of JFK dying (specifically, mom crying while watching a B&W TV). 60s a blur; the moon landing was very cool. Stunned that Reagan pulled off his con on the American people, twice.
Happy to be living in a time where this multiway textual conversation among generations is possible.
Comrade Kevin
I don’t know if you’re still reading this, DougJ, but if you want more material for these generational troll-fests, perhaps you can make a post asking people which presidential candidate they first voted for?
I’m sure that would be a real hoot.
trollhattan
This is the sort of music I prefer to remember.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezHlu9rUAW0&feature=related
Comrade Kevin
@trollhattan: That video is AWESOME.
Mnemosyne
Here’s the difference between Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers:
The formative tragedy for Baby Boomers was the assassination of Kennedy. People remember being schoolchildren and being informed of the assassination.
The formative tragedy for Gen-Xers was the space shuttle Challenger disaster, where seven people died live on national television in almost every classroom in America. We didn’t have to be informed — we watched it happen right in front of us.
SiubhanDuinne
@fraught #178
Yeah, I think you win :-)
Wow, you get to have a birthday ending in a zero this year. Cool.
Cat Lady
@Mnemosyne:
The tragedies are totally different. The Boomers who had the hopey changey thing going on then had their future murdered in quick succession – JFK, MLK, then RFK – boom boom boom.
The Challenger was an accident.
The Boomers were traumatized then – I was. I was 13 in 1968, and came to understand that the good ones were probably always going to be killed by some sinister powerful force. That sets up a completely different dynamic, which was poured into music and movies.
The Challenger was just a failure of technology.
stickler
Mnemosyne:
Damn! You’re right! I was a senior in high school that year, and our whole (tiny) school was watching the liftoff. Man, that was something: hope, nervousness, boredom, then … WTF? The most beautiful, awful, pointed clouds where the Shuttle used to be, with burning smoking embers headed back to earth. It takes a lot to get the attention of 18 year olds, and that event did. For a while.
Luthe
Compared to y’all I *am* a whippersnapper. My first politics related memory is the fall of the Berlin Wall. I wasn’t even old enough to vote in 2000, which made the outcome that much more frustrating for me. I spent 9/11 in my high school library, watching the news and comforting my best friend (her dad was a pilot). Obama was the first politician I cared enough to vote for.
What I want from you old folk is for you to bugger off and retire so that those of us who will be paying your Social Security can get jobs that will allow us to support you in the style to which you have become accustomed. Because right now I’m up to my eyeballs in debt and making minimum wage in two part-time jobs. This does not contribute very much to the Social Security fund. A real job would correct this problem. My future earning power is your future food budget.
Us young folk would also like health care reform. All those stories you hear about 20-somethings who don’t want insurance coverage is BS. Most of us like being able to go to the doctor and pay for the various prescription drugs we are on. The rest at least realize the problem related to being hit by the hypothetical bus.
General Winfield Stuck
@Mnemosyne:
This is so true, and spookily so. I was 10 at the time, and the intense pall of grief that adults gave off is something that is weirdly crystal clear, even today for me.
The other event that is also profoundly glued to my psyche was the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the quiet terror I could see and feel in the adults at the time. I have sometimes thought those two events had more impact on growing up in those days than anything else that happened in my childhood.
ondioline
Hey boomers:
No one cares when you were born.
fraught
@SiubhanDuinne: Thanks, in November. I’m ashamed of many of my generation for not participating in these discussions because they won’t get computers. Balloon Juice is so much fun. I love snark. People are really good here especially when they are drunk or stoned and these threads take the edge off whenever I feel like throwing half the Democratic members of congress off the Williamsburg Bridge which is near where I live in Brooklyn.
Gaelic, much?
Gravenstone
Born in ’63 a couple of months before JFK. While I remember the moon landings, the first landmark events I recall were Munich and Watergate. The former because of the dark and terse coverage (bless Jim McKay) and the latter because of the nationally televised hearings (nearly a decade before the advent of the the 24 hours new channel, mind you). About all I directly remember of Vietnam was watching the morning news while waiting to go to school and seeing the daily body counts.
Reagan and the Pope were both shot during my senior year in HS (I actually asked my teacher if Reagan had died, then expressed disappointment to him when told he hadn’t). Flash forward 3 years, and my ignorant punk ass is voting for the bastard in ’84. Of course, by ’86 I’m getting a face full of Iran Contra as my thank you (I was more than a bit skeeved out by various and sundry signs in my area of the midwest publicly lauding good old Ollie North). That was when I finally began to wake up and recognize the evils to which the Republicans tended to gravitate. As I said, I recalled the Watergate hearings, but was too young to actually understand the import – only that all these serious men were on my teevee daily talking in serious and hushed tones about serious things.
Probably the biggest impact for me culturally was the Challenger explosion. We went from landing men on the moon, to not being able to successfully get a space truck off the ground within my brief lifetime? The other aspect of that was how jaded we’d all seemed to become about the shuttle program. Hell, my friends and I got in trouble for breaking into the HS AV closet to watch the first test launch. By ’86 they didn’t even “bother” to broadcast the launch live like they had so many of the earlier ones. Instead, they had to break into the morning’s game shows and such to tell us the sad tale.
trollhattan
@ Comrade Kevin,
Can you believe they let that much talent on one stage at one time? Seems illegal. I’ve seen Albert and Butter, never saw Stevie and somehow haven’t managed to see B.B. I’d better hurry.
I was looking for Mike Bloomfield video when I found that one. I later found this, which has a brief but dazzling solo that shows what the man could do. Not bad for a Jewish kid from Chicago.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smRXnyUWktg&feature=related
Cheers
Common Sense
@John Cole:
Nah. The vast majority of music artists in the 1960’s and 70’s was just as crappy. Ever look at a list of bestselling albums by year? It’s a sea of Monkees, Carpenters, and Bee Gees with a smattering of albums that were mediocre in their day but have sold consistently for years since. I have no doubt that there will be artists from our era that are still being sold twenty years from now. People have just had 3 decades to block out the crap.
Common Sense
Probably the most formative memory from my childhood was the Challenger explosion or fall of the Berlin Wall.
General Winfield Stuck
@ondioline:
We do only seek to annoy folks like you. Thanks for playing.
ondioline
@General Winfield Stuck: No, I mean literally no one cares when you were born. No. One. Cares.
Except for you.
General Winfield Stuck
@ondioline:
This is more than enough.
Cat Lady
@Luthe:
Us old folk want that too. Us old folks have mortgages and multi thousands of dollars in kids’ college tuitions, and without health insurance we can’t leave the jobs we have that you want until Medicare eligibility many years from now, because we’re too old to be without insurance. It’s a ridiculous, unfair and untenable situation, and this is the only window of opportunity we’ll have in the foreseeable future to do something about it. Call your congresspeople and explain it to them.
fraught
@ondioline: When were you born?
General Winfield Stuck
@fraught:
My guess is yesterday.
ondioline
@fraught: No one cares.
Boomers make everything personal. “I was born in fifty-seven, blah me me me blah, Kennedy, blah blah me me me hippie blah blah drug reference blah Nixon me me me blah.
And boy, do things suck now. I wonder why that is?”
Thanks a bunch, you self-absorbed assholes.
Ecks
@fraught: No, Clinton was impeached. I mean, forget torture, he got a BLOW JOB!!1
Let the corrected record state that nobody will ever try to end a political career anymore unless they are a democrat.
General Winfield Stuck
@ondioline:
Someone needs a big hippy hug.
fraught
@General Winfield Stuck: Wow, a reply from the venerable General Stuck.
Feeling honored here. Mustn’t let it go to my head. A pleasure sir.
General Winfield Stuck
@ondioline:
Mr. Pot meet Mr. Kettle
General Winfield Stuck
@fraught: I am just your run of the mill Obot. No more, no less.
fraught
@ondioline: But you’re wrong. Come over here and sit by me and we’ll do dirt to all the rest of them. You sound,uh, what’s the word… plastered?
JasonF
@rootless_e:
I am speechless. Marquee Moon is a fabulous album, and the title track is one of the all time greats.
(Born in 1974; listen to everything from Sinatra to the Thermals)
ondioline
I can’t wait until 2020, when we’ll probably have our first near-octogenarian perform in a Super Bowl halftime show.
If necessary, they’ll trundle out Mick Jagger prone, in his deathbed, and stick a microphone very close to his respirator so he can faintly wheeze out a lyric or two to “Brown Sugar” and paw feebly at his crotch.
Meanwhile, millions of aged boomers will pause in their frenetic taking of pharmaceuticals and multiple plastic surgeries, look up at their Mick, and know that they’re still in charge.
It’s gonna be great.
Go America!
Mike G
@ondioline
FTW
(Translation for Boomers: ‘For The Win’,
i.e. “Groovy”, “Far out, man”)
Ecks
[now caught up with thread].
Yeah, Challenger is probably one of my main early memories too… But it didn’t really MEAN anything the way all the boomers here seem to have deep feelings about Kennedy et. al. It was just a memorable thing to see on TV.
My earliest big political engagement was the nasty right wing party that got voted into power in Ontario when I was in high school & undergrad. There were some big protests with even the odd brick even getting thrown, and a few teachers getting clubbed in the head by overzealous cops… I will bet large sums of money that almost nobody here has even heard of anyone involved in those though.
I also heard about Reagan getting shot and the Contra hearings, but I was too young, and they were too complicated and foreign (literally) to make much impression.
So for all the people bitching about boomer cultural hegemony here, let me register a token bitch about all y’all’s AMERICAN cultural hegemony :)
ondioline
@JasonF: Yeah, I’m with Jason on this.
fraught
@General Winfield Stuck: Even so, you make much sense and I like it.
Kyle
A lot of the swooning about the awesome music of the 60s is through the rose tint of nostalgia that filters out all the crap, leaving only the memory of the good stuff.
For example, in 1969, one of the supposedly super-fantastic years for music, the two top-selling singles were shameful dreck — “In the Year 2525” and The Archies’ “Sugar Sugar”.
I find a lot of 80s music pretty awesome today compared to the latest stuff, but then I look back at what topped the charts week by week in that decade and most of the songs were musical ipecac.
Comrade Kevin
@ondioline: How old are you, twelve?
fraught
The second part of my Ambien just kicked in, the amnesia part, so I’d better get off now before I say something I won’t remember having said. Oldest one at BJ. Hmmmm. Must think about that.
Common Sense
I think that the internet has broken barriers that were entrenched in the 1960’s. There has never been a better time to be a musician. Anyone can be heard if they want to. Just put it on YouTube. None of this payola DJ shit. No Casey Kaysum telling you what to buy. MTV has less influence today than it did in 1985, and even then the industry was starting to crack. Independent labels were really starting to shine in the 80’s.
Comrade Kevin
Would someone out there help me with this? Am I a traitor to my generation if I still listen to Blue Öyster Cult?
Mnemosyne
@Cat Lady:
The Challenger was criminal neglect by the corporation who built it and the government bureaucrats who were supposed to make sure the damn thing was safe to take off.
Sorry, but you don’t get to dictate that your traumatic event was, like, totally more traumatic than mine. For those of us who were toddlers when Watergate happened, realizing that the government could actually cause people to die through neglect was pretty horrific. And having technology with the ability to fail and kill you accidentally at any time is in some ways worse than knowing that bad people want to assassinate politicians. At least the assassins have a reason, crazy as it might be. What was the reason for Morton Thiokol to not tell NASA that the o-rings could shatter if frozen?
Mnemosyne
@Ecks:
Did you guys watch it live on TV, or was it something that you saw on your news after it happened? Because here in the States, many schools actually had a live feed of the launch and were showing it in the classroom as part of the school day. And then it blew up literally in front of our eyes.
SiubhanDuinne
@fraught: I rejoice every day that I found Balloon Juice back during the 2008 campaign. Can’t even remember now what circuitous path brought me to B-J; I do know that in a fairly short period of time I went from closely following several sites each day to pretty much ignoring the others but checking in here at every opportunity. People joke about “I came for the politics and stayed for the pets,” but it’s true. There’s an amazing sense of community here, way beyond anything I’ve seen on other sites. And I have to think, especially after reading the last couple of threads, that part of what makes it such an interesting place is the spread of half a century or more between the oldest members and the youngest, and the huge variety of experiences we all bring to the table. (Lots of other factors too, of course.) Yes, I love it when people get a little or a lot looped and start posting.
Back in the 1960s when I lived in NYC, my husband and I and another couple came *this close* to buying a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights. We would have, too, if my husband hadn’t been transferred to Florida. (Since both marriages ended in divorce a few years later, it’s probably just as well. . . . )
Faux Gaelic, if you’re referring to my handle. But I do have a bunch of Scottish and Irish ancestry on both sides, so it works for me.
Must. Go. Sleep.
Royston Vasey
@Kyle: Heh. Funny, i’ve been compiling a 1970s Collection/Playlist. Up to 120 songs – of all types and styles. I started by going through all the #1 hits – boy, some interesting records!
I have also just started a similar Collection of 1980s tracks. So far I ‘v been distracted playing Duran Duran, Ultravox and Echo and The Bunnymen.
RV+10 on the Sprite Zero now
Ecks
@Mnemosyne: Don’t remember. I think I saw it on the news at home, but it was still extremely striking and shocking.
I hear your theory about how it meant technology could kill you at any time… and if that’s what you got out of it, then who am I to say otherwise, but to me, the main message was “strapping yourself to devices that work from high explosive is risky.” Or at least, that was it until the experts came out with all their case studies making the interesting case that it wasn’t really a technology failure but a culture failure, and we all nodded our heads and said “hm, very interesting, yes.”
Not invalidating your reading, but certainly didn’t share it, and neither did anybody I know. Maybe it was an American thing, but I’m not even so sure about that. I’ll quiz my wife for her take when she wakes up in the morning :)
Mnemosyne
@Ecks:
As I said, because of the way we saw it happen in real time while sitting safely in our classrooms during the school day, it’s probably an American thing. It had been hyped for months that Christa McAuliffe was going to be the first teacher in space and it was a really big deal with a huge amount of publicity in the schools. I’m guessing your wife has a somewhat different memory of it than you do if she was in grade school or high school in the US in 1986.
Anne Laurie
@Mnemosyne:
Duh… MONEY. There’s an argument to be made that the secret hidden disconnect between the Boomers and the Post-Boomers and now the Post-Post-Boomers is that those of us who were at an impressionable age during the Assassination Years (JFK, MLK, RFK) believe at some level that evil intends to kill good because evil wants power. The people whose pivotal years fell during the Reagan/Challenger/Iran-Contra/Reagan-Redux-aka-Bush-the-Slightly-Lesser years were taught that evil would do anything for money, including if necessary kill people wholesale, but apart from vacuuming up all the money in the universe mere political power didn’t seem that important. (Ronnie just wanted Gordon Gekko to provide an audience for his addled fantasies of olde hollywood, and the guy who tried to assassinate him was a pasty upper-class suburban twit trying to impress a movie star.) Then the C-Plus Augustus got shoved into the Oval Office for the greater glory of the corporations, but 9/11 gave Nixon’s leftover CREEPlings another shot at the whole global-power-and-hegemony thing, which of course they fvcked up, because they couldn’t get organized enough to focus on either money or power so they pissed both away like a drunk too busy arguing with his fellow drunks to stagger away from the party. So us older Conspiracists are looking for the New World Order behind every SCOTUS decision, and the mid-period Conspiracists are looking for the Bildersburg robber barons, and the youngsters assume that every single politician / media figure / bidnisclone wants to steal all the money & corner all the influence and whoever wins, we’re all skrewed…
Mnemosyne
@Anne Laurie:
Pretty much, yeah. I think a lot of my generation operates on the assumption that money conquers all and people only seek power in order to get more money. Money is power, and having power without money to back it up is useless.
Remember that Bhopal had happened only a couple of years earlier. An American corporation killed several thousand Indians because maintaining their factory properly would have cost them too much. Challenger was very much of a piece with that — corporate profits uber alles, and the government wasn’t going to do a damn thing to protect us.
ETA: Don’t forget that Dick Cheney may have beggared the US government, but he made quite a nice profit for himself for his policies during the Bush years, thankyouverymuch.
Chuck Butcher
1953,
I’d say that understanding the “what” of the things going on would depend a lot on parents and what you cared about. There are about as many experiences to be taken out of the 62-72 decade as people there. There was a lot of top 40 crap, I barely heard it – listened to FM album stations and vinyl. Parents as Depression children, WWII adulthood. One set of grandparents Union organizers when it was dangerous, one set upper middle business. I cared about politics, girls, fast cars – and drugs.
I know that people as little as 4yrs either side of my age took pretty different things away and I know for damn sure that my exact contemporaries did. I hate these better/worse generation things, what do you do with it is the question. I don’t like much of the pop music of today, big surprise – I didn’t like much of it then. So?
Things were different then, yeah and they were different at about every slice of time you take. I wouldn’t wish ‘Nam, Watts, Kent State, etc on anyone; but then Korea, Normandy, Iraq… One thing I am damn sure of is that if you don’t think life is going to get real strange on you – you ain’t paying attention.
Uriel
Know what, mother fuckers? I put this on the goddamn other thread, and I’m going to fucking put it here as well- with a couple of corrections, but you know. Because that’s exactly how goddamn mad I am about this, and how important it is to:
Lay. The. Mother. Fucking. Blame. On. The. Generation. Responsible. For. Goddamn. EVERYTHING!
(Even if it’s through no fault of any one person or another included in that cohort on their own, given that their participation in any of the media defined “excesses” of their peers is pretty much limited to a vague assumption based on an accident of birth, and the desire of sociological hacks to reduce things into nonsensical narratives.)
(Also, I’m posting it here because it’s stuck in the moderation que over there as a result of me trying to be “clever,” and who knows when that will get cleared up, given the time of day I’m posting.)
wiley
I used to think I loved the elderly. Eventually I figured out that I loved people who remembered the Great Depression. The people who are in their late sixties aren’t (on the whole) as sociable, and tend to be evangelical—generally speaking. Don’t know where the hell it came from. Television?
Chuck Butcher
@Uriel:
Having lived through several generation’s politics and culture and reading history – ahahahahahaha – is about the best I can do with this rant. Life always gets strange, get over it.
Uriel
@Chuck Butcher: It was meant to be ironical. I was pointing out how silly the discussion was. I thought I was sufficiently over the top and unreasonable to get that across. Sorry if it was unclear.
Chuck Butcher
@Uriel:
Evidently I’m tired…or your over the top humor needs work.
Besides, irony is dead, remember?
Uriel
@Uriel: But really, after re-reading it, I’m hard pressed to see how it’s hard to misread my intentions-
Do you really think I blame 12 year-olds for any thing at all, politically?
You’ve been snapping at my heels for a couple of days now, and I’m not all that sure why. Granted, I’m not the only one, but I can’t help but feel that you somehow feel I’ve slighted you, personally along the line. And I frankly can’t remember when or where that is. Could you maybe clue me in on the grave sin I’ve committed? I’d just like to know if it was actually intentional, or merely a mis-communication.
Granted, it may not be personal, and is only a coincidence caused by and overlap in the time of day we choose to post here. But I would like to know….
Uriel
@Chuck Butcher: Sorry- I was type type typing while you posted that.
It may well be a bit of both. If it’s not personal that’s fine.
And yes, I did forget about irony’s in memoriam, although now that you bring it up, I do recall hearing something about that.
Chuck Butcher
Other than my general irritation with the general stupid left bashing I have nothing against anyone here, especially you.
Like I said, tired. Bed time.
Coincidence is probably the culprit. If I’m irritated by a direction and you happen to get there near where I do sort of thing. apologies for putting you in that place. G’nite
Uriel
Also, I’m not sure why I referred my post before last to @myself. Probably means I should get to bed as well.
(Edited to add- man my spelling is atrocious in some of these posts. Definitely time for bed.)
Night, good sir.
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
Good night John Boy. ;)
JSD
@ Doug,
WTF? In one post you lament how the 60s casts a pall over everything, then talk about how the 60s were more real than everything you have lived through? Can you be consistent please?
DPirate
I was just thinking, maybe the good old days seem so much better just because we didn’t all know how fucked we are back then.
Chris Johnson
I’m an early GenXer totally dedicated to boomer music, especially the self-absorbed stuff (like prog- Yes, Crimso, Genesis, or on other fronts Creedence, old ZZ Top). Seventies FTW.
Partly because the production literally sounded better and different for technical reasons I’ve worked out (peaking mid-seventies- before then it was too crude and after it was too glossy) and partly because flaming narcissists make the best artists :)
Seriously. That kind of steamroller conviction is awesome in art and music. In politics and governance and science and business and culture, uh… :D
DougJ
WTF? In one post you lament how the 60s casts a pall over everything, then talk about how the 60s were more real than everything you have lived through? Can you be consistent please?
That is consistent.
Mnemosyne
@DPirate:
I’ve heard people my age refer to the 1970s as “a more innocent time.” No, seriously.
People confuse the difference between the times they grew up in being more innocent and themselves being that way. Heck, John Boorman was able to present the London Blitz as a more innocent time in Hope and Glory (though he did seem to realize how ironic it was for him to do so).
There is one thing that happened when I was growing up that I do think genuinely made us less innocent: the Tylenol murders, which are still unsolved to this day. Until then, it just never occurred to anyone that someone would tamper with products on store shelves so they could kill strangers. Now we take it for granted that completely random people could want to kill us for no reason and protect ourselves from it.
Ecks
Yeah, didn’t you know that every single age is the one that we lost our innocence in?
20’s, roaring? America discovers drinking and partying to excess, bootlegging & gangsters, loses innocence
30’s, depression? America discovers the costs of personal hardship, and how far people will go before banding together. Loses innocence.
40’s, war? Brutal mass slaughter. Americans grow up in hurry, lose innocence.
50’s, aftermath? Disillusioned soldiers return from war, try to integrate,”Death of a Salesman” written (ok in 49) about the frantic hollowness. Americans just about preserve existing reserves of innocence…
60’s, swinging? America lands on moon, regains innocence, except for all the other bits which lose it again.
Really, it’s a lot like a chronically single fundy Christian with their personal virginity narrative. Always losing it.
Have to agree with Anne Laurie @229 on the power / money thing. It does seem axiomatic to me that it’s all about the money, and boomers do seem to talk differently about politics from their day. It always sounds odd to me hearing them talk about it, like “power” or “the man” are meaningful entities that can be meaningfully fought, as opposed to just varied moneyed interests having their own particular means of making $ that need defending.
Also, Mnemosyne I buy your story about how the challenger thing was built up for months for you guys, but to my wife it was just a really sad event with no bigger implication. She says she remembers crying over the teacher who died, and her teachers being sad and struggling to explain it. Perhaps you’re older than us, we’re ’75 and ’77 models.
Latchkey Man
Anytime one critiques the boomers they can expect to be swarmed by pit vipers.
A note about the music you credited in your previous post: most of the great 60’s musicians were a bit older than boomers and are considered to be Silent Generation members (Beatles, Stones, Hendrix). So it’s safe to say that the babyboomers greatest contribution to music remains Disco.
ondioline
@Latchkey Man: The problem with the boomers is very simple: there’s just too many of them.
Thankfully, that’s a self-correcting problem.
mclaren
Sorry, have to disagree. I was born even earlier than you but there are a bunch of journalists today with the same impact and heft as Hunter Thompson. Carl Hiaasen, for example.
Likewise, the pop music of the 80s probably was better on the whole and had a bigger impact on the culture than the pop music of the 60s.
The 80s and early 90s had “event” movies like The Empire Strikes Back and Pulp Fiction that the 60s never had.
No, the deification of the 60s just won’t wash.