A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

by Bruce Cannon Gibney

Finally, on the international stage, the consumer-driven, neoliberal Boomer culture has unleashed vast environmental and social problems, and just because some of these manifest offshore does not mean they vanish from the moral equation. The sociopathic society of consumption depends heavily on goods turned out by dismal sweatshops (e.g., Boomer Kathie Lee’s/Wal-Mart’s Dickensian workshops, Boomers Steve Jobs’/Tim Cook’s subcontracted factories, so depressing that they feature suicide nets to prevent employees from leaping to their deaths).23 Asking other countries to improve their labor conditions would not only be ethical, it would improve America’s competitive position. The only thing Boomers really ask for now, however, is that their purchases be cheap and the moral quandaries offshored. As for pollution, geographic felicity will make America one of the last countries physically affected by global warming. Countries like Vietnam, for which liberal Boomers had affected so much sympathy in the Sixties, will be inundated by the consequences of Boomer energy policy. (Henry Kissinger was right: Consumer capitalism could defeat Hanoi.) By then, of course, the Boomers will be in their expensive, environmentally unsound caskets, manufactured by funeral oligopolist Hillenbrand. At least Hillenbrand is an American company featuring “predictabl[ly] strong cash flows”; it’s even, as Wall Street would put it, “acylical.”24 The next time someone tells you that America makes nothing,...