Curse of The Boomers, Part 2

P.J. O’Rourke has been robbing the rubes for years, posing as the spokesman of the Boomer generation. The pose alone should be an immediate tipoff to what a fraud he is because any self-respecting Boomer would know enough not to attempt to speak for what is obviously a diverse, unwieldy mass population of 75 million, which defies any rational attempt at pigeonholing. Yet O’Rouke has persisted in this charade for his entire adult life because there’s very good money in it for him. His most recent book, in fact, is entitled, The Baby Boom: How It Got That Way . . . And It Wasn’t My Fault . . . And I’ll Never Do It Again.When he first started off, there was a receptive audience of older folks willing and eager to pay him good money to confirm…and enhance…their worst impressions of a generation they resented. Now in his 60s, his audience is primarily those members of the Boomer generation who, like O’Rourke, react with glee that their generation didn’t live up to its ideals because it justifies all the time they spent watching from the sidelines as their bolder brethren tried to change a society sorely in need of change. They are the self-loathing Boomers.
Like that other jughead of our generation, Rush Limbaugh, O’Rourke positions himself as an entertainer. That’s always provided a nice dodge for Limbaugh because every time he steps over the line of common decency he can claim that he was only making a joke, and say, “What’s the matter with you, can’t you take a joke?” O’Rourke can hide behind the greasepaint of funny man with more credibility because the bulk of his work is an attempt at humor, no matter how bilious, whereas Limbaugh trades straight-up in unfiltered bile.
If O’Rourke continues to get away with his act, the Boomer generation ends up being indelibly defined by this smart-ass in the stead of any serious thinker. And it wouldn’t take all that serious a mind to poke major holes in the myths about Boomers that O’Rourke keeps peddling. His favorite seems to be that we are a generation that lacks a sense of responsibility. Leaving aside the Boomer war dead and wounded from Vietnam…and leaving aside the mighty struggle mounted against that misbegotten war by those who opposed it in stark contrast to the recent generation that blithely marched off to the wrong target in Iraq to avenge 9/11 and ferret out phantom WMD…leaving all that aside, just what in the hell is O’Rourke talking about when he writes about generational responsibility thusly:

Baby boomers aren't power hungry. Power comes with that kicker, responsibility. We're greedy for love, happiness, experience, sensation, thrills, praise, fame, adulation, inner peace, and, as it turns out, money. Health and fitness too. But we're not greedy for power.

Granted, O’Rouke is no scholar, so no one should expect him to try to separate what would seem to be pretty typical human desires for love, happiness, inner peace etc. from an alleged Boomer greed for such things. Such facile observations are the clown’s stock and trade. Whether the Founding Fathers’ inclusion of a “pursuit of happiness” in one of the nation’s most sacred documents had as much to do with our lust for the good life as the accident of our birth year should probably be left for more serious thinkers. But O’Rourke wants it both ways. He wants to influence a serious appraisal of his generation but he doesn't want to put much thinking into it. Thus he makes the absurd claim that Boomers avoid power because they have an aversion to responsibility. How can anyone paying even casual attention to the politics of the Boomer era get away with such utter nonsense? Do those ur-Boomers Bill and Hilary Clinton shrink from power? Did George W. Bush, that most feckless of Boomers, show insufficient ambition in his crusade to spread democracy throughout the Arab world? And all that damn money we spend on elections in increasingly escalating, hideous amounts? If you're blind to the Boomer appetite for power and deaf to our nation’s intense intra-generational quarreling between opposing views of government, yet insist on marching forth  as an authority on Boomers, you're a fool.    
O’Rourke, however, clueless to his severe limitations, sets a serious task for himself when he writes of Boomers:

Still, it's an appropriate moment for us to weigh what we've wrought and tally what we've added to and subtracted from existence. We've reached the age of accountability. The world is our fault. We are the generation that has an excuse for everything—one of our greatest contributions to modern life—but the world is still our fault.

First off, let’s note that O’Rourke’s speaking fees, book sales and TV appearances go up when he (ho-ho) steps up to accept blame for his generation. This is the one trick he’s been playing since Nixon. But I’ll play along.  Allow me to do a bit of accounting for my generation. First off, it’s dismaying that the willingness to question materialism during the Sixties did not save the country from having capitalism subsume democracy as it has in the 21st century. Second, it’s painful to see that despite the Sixties mantra of “Give peace a chance,” we now live in a nation of guns gone wild. And thirdly, it is but a cruel irony that where once upon a time in the Sixties we had a Free Speech Movement, we now have politically correct speech codes, NSA wiretapping and a so-called Patriot Act, which forfeits First Amendment rights to such a degree that if the Second Amendment was assaulted as grossly, all that firepower our nation's paranoids have been stockpiling would have been unleashed on the Pentagon by now.It dismays me that all this happened while my generation was in ascendancy, and though O’Rourke tries to pre-empt any excuses by accusing Boomers of inventing excuses, the truth is this world as it exists is not our fault. The world turns, as it were. Historical forces, random events and certain realities overwhelm the best of intentions…the most idealistic visions. Birth control, which liberated sexual behavior, came down to us. Liberalized divorce laws, which led to more broken families, were bequeathed to us. Those Social Security and Medicare programs we're supposedly breaking were gifts from a generation which experienced first hand what life could be like without such safety nets. The GI Bill, which made it easier for our parents to create the greatest middle class the world has ever known, did not come with a proviso that its benefits were off limits to the children of vets.
And speaking of tours of battle, one might argue that Baby Boomers were the first and youngest recruits in the Cold War, serving in the sorely undecorated Duck and Cover Battalion, where as grade schoolers we served on the front lines of the most insidious battle ground in human history.
Profit only partially explains O’Rourke’s promiscuous Boomer bashing. The other part is revealed in this excerpt from an interview he did promoting his new book:

…I think we’ve learned a basic lesson about a government promising too much and interfering too much in the lives and responsibilities of its individual citizens, and we’ll come out the other end of this with painful trimmings to these social programs and, I’m hoping, with a better sense of what the Catholic Church calls “subsidiarity.” That good should be done by the first proximate people. If someone needs help, the first people should be family, and then immediate community─ neighbors, and then local government, then state government, thenfederal government ─ only as a very last resort. 

If the Sixties were revolutionary, as some inside and outside the Boomer generation have claimed, it was a revolution for more equality and less militarism in American life. It was also a revolution for more individual freedom. How successful a revolution it was remains to be seen, just as it’s taken more than 200 years to gauge the true success of the first American Revolution. In any case, O’Rourke is to his contemporaries’ revolution what he would’ve been to the Founding Fathers’ revolution—a Tory. His Boomer bashing is a veiled attempt to reestablish the old order, relocate the dispossessed to their place, and advance the fiction that "every man for himself" is really just a call for individual responsibility.
His continued attacks on Boomer irresponsibility, coated in so much fluff about sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll, is really a rear-guard action against the progress the US has made toward creating a fairer, more just society from passage of Social Security through the GI Bill to Civil Rights, Medicare, and beyond to the Affordable Care Act and regulation of greenhouse gases. This Tory view holds that if you’re unemployed, without health insurance, need a home or college loan, or are disenfranchised by your local polling commission, those are matters you should bring up with your family, your church, or your town councilor, but if you go to the Federal government for relief it will come at the cost of your individual freedom. On the other hand, if you’re sufficiently afraid of Russians, Vietnamese, and Muslims, give the Feds all the blood and treasure they ask for and keep your mouth shut. 
None of this would be so awfully bad if P.J. O’Rourke were a genuinely funny fellow, but the next time I find something he’s written or said that brings even a smile to my face it will be the first time. P.J. O'Rourke may not be the curse of the Boomers, but he is a curse.