Curse of The Boomers, Part 1

Someone’s got it in for meThey’re planting stories in the pressWhoever it is they better cut it out quickWhen they will I can only guess.They say I shot a man named GrayAnd took his wife to ItalyShe inherited a million bucksAnd when she died, it came to me…I can't help it if I'm lucky                                                         --Idiot Wind, Bob Dylan


Mad Men creator Matt Weiner recently sat down with Stephen Colbert where he expressed this opinion about the Boomer generation:

They think they invented sex, drugs and, you know, they have a view of it that is a child’s view of it….What really happened was there was a generation that was asked very little. They got education, they got a lot of entertainment, they got a lot of spending money, they became the focus of the economy, of entertainment, of everything. There was a war going on, which they were supposed to fight. Some of them didn’t. But the generation before them, all of them fought.

There is so much shallowness packed into that statement that it probably would've gotten Weiner fired at Sterling-Cooper, his fictional ad agency. As a huge fan of Mad Men I can only conclude that this is one of those cases where the creation is smarter than its creator. Ironically, I’ve never seen Mad Men as the rebuke of the 60s generation that Weiner suggests it is, but rather as a bold and brilliant dramatization of the French existentialism that so influenced the politics of the Boomers. Don Draper could be a character right out of Sartre. In an early episode, one of Draper's many lovers asks him what matters to him, and he answers, "Only this matters." Only this meaning that sex at that moment. One of the greatest of Mad Men episodes, "The Suitcase," unfolds like Sartre’s existentialist play No Exit with Don and Peggy stuck in their office building for the night, seemingly with no way out and resigned to that as their fate. Living in the moment with few illusions about salvation is pretty much the philosophical underpinning of the most culturally obvious aspects of Boomerism.
But rather than acknowledge this influence on his own work, Weiner traffics in the most superficial pap in describing the Boomer generation. His blanket statement that “they think they invented sex, [and] drugs” is just the rankest of generalizations. Perhaps some of the Boomers that he encounters in the affluent Southern California world where he was born and works believe they invented sex and drugs, but being a Boomer myself and having grown up with Boomers and lived amongst them on two coasts for all my life, I’ve never run into one who ever seriously said anything close to, “Hey, look at us! We invented sex and drugs.”
As to all these indulgences that were dropped at our precious feet…education, entertainment, an economy that we can bend to our will…not even the true greed heads of our generation, like Donald Trump, came bursting out of the womb with a list of demands. Those National Defense Loans that floated our schooling? Those Disney and Beach Blanket Bingo movies? That famous Crocker Bank advertising campaign, "We’ve only Just Begun"?  They were all aimed specifically at us by the previous generation. Like sex and drugs, we didn’t invent those things either.  And when Time magazine named the Boomer generation its “Man of the Year" before we had been on the planet 25 years, most of us could barely afford a subscription to Time, let alone dictate its editorial choices.
Once we came of age and started to produce our own view of things, only an obtuse cultural observer would argue that “a child’s view” predominates in Boomer culture. The quintessential Baby Boomer film… The Big Chill …is seeped far more in self-reproach than self-regard. As it opens at the funeral of a friend the characters consider the best of them, we learn that he committed suicide and the Rolling Stones' "You Can’t Always Get What You Want" is on the soundtrack, not because it has a good beat and you can dance to it, but because it underscores the hard lesson this generation, like others before it, has learned.
As for not paying our generational dues by fighting in Vietnam, 40% of eligible Boomer males were drafted and Boomers comprised most of the 50,000 casualties…not to mention the untold numbers of the physically and emotionally wounded. Though Matt Weiner may not approve of the price the Boomer generation paid for the so-called Greatest Generation’s colossal foreign policy blunder in Southeast Asia, he should thank his lucky stars that by being born in 1965, one year after the Boomers, he got to grow up in an unusually halcyon period in recent American history between Vietnam and Iraq, when kids weren’t confronted with adult choices about war and peace…duty and conscience. 

Because Weiner is not a Boomer, his slander of my generation is nowhere near as reprehensible as is that of those who are part of it. There was Bill Keller, for instance, former editor-in-chief of The New York Times, who The Nob went after in a previous post for portraying Boomers as an “entitled” generation. But Keller’s betrayal of his generation (not to mention betrayal of his own intellectual integrity) is a misdemeanor compared to the felonious career of one P.J. O’Rourke. Next week, The Nobby Works examines how O’Rourke has managed to make his insufferably self-satisfied puss the face of a generation he accuses of being insufferably self-satisfied.