Boomers Quotes

“Tech helped to create this economy, and tech is what keeps it stable by giving us the greatest bread and circuses of all time. Casino owners discovered in the late 1980s that people who gambled on screens became addicted three to four times faster than those who gambled at tables. The rest of America had learned that lesson by 1992, when a third of homes had Nintendo systems. Men without jobs have video games the way men without girlfriends have pornography, and growing numbers of men are finding the substitute good enough to be going on with, declining to pursue either permanent employment or marriage. The historian David Courtwright calls this “limbic capitalism,” the redirection of America’s productive energies into inducing and servicing addictions.”
― Helen Andrews, Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster

“Drugged up, divorced, ignorant, and indebted, but at least they did it out of idealism. That has been the baby boomers’ universal alibi: our intentions were good. Later, they will admit, perhaps that idealism curdled, motivation flagged, the weaker-willed sold out. Still, the original impulse was altruistic. It would be quite a blow to their self-image if it were to be discovered that the boomers’ various crusades were selfish from the very beginning.”
― Helen Andrews, Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster

“The baby boomers have been responsible for the most dramatic sundering of Western civilization since the Protestant Reformation. If that is hard to accept, it is only because the boomer revolution has been so comprehensive that it has become almost impossible to imagine what life was like before it. The rise of television, for example, has so altered the human mind as much as the printing press did, and one of the ways it has altered it has been to make sustained concentration virtually impossible for those raised in its atmosphere, the way a third dimension is unthinkable for the inhabitants of Flatland. The result has been generations of young people who lack a grounding in the basic facts of history, which can’t possibly be absorbed by video. To cover their tracks even further, the boomers have stuffed their heirs with sufficient pseudo-knowledge to make them feel as if they know enough about the past to judge themselves superior to it.”
― Helen Andrews, Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster

“Assuming TV really did rot their brains, how would they be in a position to know? Its intrinsic biases—toward flash over illumination, sound bites over substance, the methods of advertising over the methods of persuasion—have become their basic intuitions. When subjective evaluation fails, objective measures must be consulted, and the most glaring objective consequence of the boomers’ embrace of mass culture has been the death of both folk culture and high culture. … During the cold war, the Communist leaders of the Eastern bloc did their best to keep pop culture out of their countries, because they believed that Western entertainment would put their children in thrall to decadent bourgeois values—and they were right.”
― Helen Andrews, Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster

“Little hypocrisies are easy enough to find, and where sex is involved, one finds little else. During a debate in 1970 over whether to introduce coed dorms at the University of Kansas, one male student said that such living arrangements would leave students “free to engage one another as human beings.” “I believe that the segregation of the sexes is unnatural,” another said. “This tradition of segregation is discriminatory and promotes inequality of mankind.” The same high-flown statements were heard at every school where coeducation was introduced, and they all carried the same tacit addendum: any benefit to our sex lives will be purely coincidental. From the moment the Pill became widely available, the effect of the sexual revolution has mainly been to make women more sexually available to men. This hardly even qualifies as an unintended consequence, just an unannounced one.”
― Helen Andrews, Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster

“In 1963, the music critic for The Sunday Times called the Beatles “the greatest composers since Beethoven.” That could be chalked up to excessive enthusiasm in the first flush of novelty. The fact that large numbers of American adults hold the same opinion fifty years later is a serious failure of taste.”
― Helen Andrews, Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster

“For all their claims to be women’s greatest liberators, it would be hard to convince an impartial observer that boomer feminism has left women better off when one in five white women are on antidepressants. Feminism, for the boomers, mostly meant channeling women into paid employment on an unprecedented scale. Women have always worked, but never in American history did women outnumber men in the labor force until January 2020. Boomers promised that employment was the only way for women to be fulfilled and independent, when any socialist could have told them that there is no one more dependent than a wage worker.”
― Helen Andrews, Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster

“To cover their tracks even further, the boomers have stuffed their heirs with sufficient pseudo-knowledge to make them feel as if they know enough about the past to judge themselves superior to it.”
― Helen Andrews, Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster

“A poll of millennials taken in 2018 found that a majority believed boomers had “made things worse” for their generation. What could they be referring to? The boomers have started no world wars, conscripted no soldiers, launched no breadlines. There is nothing in their record to compare with the pile of corpses at Passchendaele. The only fields of poppies planted on their account have been in Kandahar, not memorially.”
― Helen Andrews, Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster

“The boomers were dealt an uncommonly good hand, which makes it truly incredible that they should have screwed up so badly. They inherited prosperity, social cohesion, and functioning institutions. They passed on debt, inequality, moribund churches, and a broken democracy.”
― Helen Andrews, Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster

“Huysmans: “Democracy is like iodide that draws out the boils of human stupidity.”)”
― Helen Andrews, Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster

“The boomers were dealt an uncommonly good hand, which makes it truly incredible that they should have screwed it up so badly. They inherited prosperity, social cohesion, and functioning institutions. They passed on debt, inequality, moribund churches, and a broken democracy.”
― Helen Andrews, Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster

“It’s always the people who most hate the idea of turning into their parents who end up doing so. The millennials blame the boomers for wrecking the country, yet rather than break free from their influence, we continue seeing the world in their terms. Our social justice activities devote their lives to the same causes, with only the most minute updates in terminology but an agenda otherwise unchanged. Our rebels wear the same Che Guevara T-shirts, do the same drugs, obsess over the same music. I remember being surprised back in high school that the stoners cutting class behind the gym all had Black Sabbath and Pink Floyd patches on their jackets, and not anything more contemporary.”
― Helen Andrews, Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster

“Kenneth Clark was wrong about the boomers. They did not take their place in the chain of civilization. And if the boomers think that they can unmoor millennials from our past, immiserate our futures, tell us we’re rich because we can afford iPhones but not families, teach us that narcissism is the highest form of patriotism, and still have a nation resilient enough to bounce back to normal after the younger generation starts to riot in the streets, then the boomers will be wrong about us.”
― Helen Andrews, Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster

“Paglia has written movingly about her days teaching Shakespeare and Sophocles to factory workers at the Sikorsky Aircraft plant outside New Have, so she could hardly endorse a solution that involves ejecting so many working-class students from college life. When you ask the average humanities professor whether too many unready students might not be getting hustled into the matriculation office, he (or, statistically, she) will often wax populist: everyone deserves a chance to contemplate the big questions of life. Such big questions are indeed the stuff of literature and philosophy. But they are also the stuff of church. Religion has historically been the place where classes below the upper middle can air their ideas about meaning and seek to integrate them with a greater tradition. The nice thing about church is, it doesn’t cost $50,000 a year.”
― Helen Andrews, Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster

“Yet [Hoggart] could not help noticing that those unschooled slum dwellers were mentally independent in a way that his postwar students were not. His grandmother’s range of cultural reference was narrow and unimpressive, consisting mainly of homespun aphorisms and the Bible, but at least her mind had not been colonized by pulp novels and Hollywood movies. The difference between the old culture and mass culture was like the difference between preparing a meal and microwaving one, and Hoggart’s students had been rendered helpless in teh same way as someone who has never been taught how to cook. The colonial aspect of mass culture was easier for Hoggart to spot because he was British. Mass culture, for England and Europe, was a foreign takeover. But “Americanization” homogenized the home country as much as it did the rest of the globe, sapping the life out of regional subcultures. Before the 1950s, music, theater, magazines, and even radio were all local, to one degree or another. Hollywood movies were not.”
― Helen Andrews, Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster

“The boomers’ most consequential political legacy may be the biggest irony of all: for all their claims to be the most progressive generation ever, the main result of the boomers’ involvement in politics has been the destruction of the Left. In 1950, the Democratic party polled fifteen points better among those without college degrees, compared with those with them. By 2016, that advantage had flipped to a fifteen-point deficit. The Labour Party in the U.K. has undergone the same transformation, from the party of the working class to the party of the college-educated elite. But if a left-wing party is no longer the party of the working class, what good is it? What left is it?”
― Helen Andrews, Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster

“The journalist Dan Lyons joined a tech start-up after being downsized from Newsweek in 2012, and the experience inspired him to write a book about how Bay Area norms have infected the American workplace, Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us. Nominally egalitarian but oppressive in practice, the start-up spirit insists that everyone be super psyched about their jobs all the time. No one is actually loyal to the organziation in the sense of intending to work there for longer than five years, but what employees lack in commitment, they must make up for in enthusiasm. This mandatory passion is made worse by the smartphone. No one is every off duty anymore. The BlackBerry’s original tagline was “Always On. Always Connected.” Bizarrely, this made people want to buy it.”
― Helen Andrews, Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster

“Jobs succeeded beyond his wildest hopes in building a lasting institution. Whether that is a reason to praise Jobs is uncertain; the very durability of his creation means that the rest of us now have to live in the world Silicon Valley made, a world that gives free rein to the boomers’ worst vices, even the ones Jobs himself did not share.”
― Helen Andrews, Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster

“I wanted to figure out where the boomers had really departed from historical norms and done irreparable harm to Western civilization, versus where they just happened to be lucky or millennials unlucky. In the case of the two-income trap, for instance, I do think the boomers are to blame. They were the ones who hustled mothers into the workplace with the false promise that wage work was the only way to be independent and self-actualized, and that shock to the labor market killed the family wage.”
― Helen Andrews, Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster