[NYT] AUG 06, 2001 A Caustic Look in the Mirror From Boomers By ALEX KUCZYNSKI
Joe Queenan is 50 years old and sorely ashamed of it.
"I loathe my generation," he said last week. "We became culturally frozen in time at a very early age and continue to think of ourselves as trailblazers. It's completely pathetic."
A writer who contributes frequently to GQ and Forbes, Mr. Queenan's latest book, "Balsamic Dreams: A Short but Self-Important History of the Baby Boomer Generation" (Henry Holt), chronicles the cultural irrelevance of his generation, which is - at least to Mr. Queenan - a whiny, narcissistic bunch of paunchy, corporatized losers.
And he is not alone in his distaste.
A body of literature - call it boomer bashing - has emerged from the trenches of American popular writing. As the 80 million Americans born from 1945 to 1963 have begun to slip en masse over the dreaded benchmark known as the big five- oh, a squadron of journalists, editors and authors have begun to question the abilities and point out the failures of the Woodstock Generation. Because most of those churning out the criticism are boomers themselves, the bashing also has the distinct whiff of boomer self-loathing.
Along with Mr. Queenan's book, this year also saw the publication of "What if Boomers Can't Retire? How to Build Real Security, Not Phantom Wealth," by Thornton Parker (Berrett-Koehler Publishers), which criticized their reliance on the stock market as a kind of phantom wealth that could eventually derail the entire American economy. Pow!
David Brooks's excoriation of yuppie boomers, "Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There" (Simon & Schuster, 2000), stayed on best- seller lists last year for four months, urging boomers to recognize themselves as hypocritical sellouts. Blam!
There was Marty Asher's darkly comic novel, "The Boomer" (Knopf, 2000), which opens with the birth of a baby boomer on a Friday and after a lifetime of excruciating banality ends in "a small, tidy cemetery with a view of the ocean." Ooof!
In June of last year, Time magazine published an article called "Twilight of the Boomers" in which Daniel Okrent described the boomers as preening, self-congratulatory, cavilling solipsists. Sock-o!
And that was the nice part. He then slammed his readers. "If you're like the overwhelming majority of boomers, your career has hit a brick wall, you haven't saved enough, your pension is underfunded, your health is deteriorating, even the medical advances that will probably extend your life will, in an especially cruel paradox, probably mean that later life will be meaner and more spartan."
Mr. Okrent, 53, said that boomers were pretty much fatuous, self-important and lazy, and that's why they arouse so much resentment from Americans in their 20's and 30's.
"There is so, so much to loathe about the boomers," Mr. Okrent said, as he spoke by telephone from his vacation home in sunny Cape Cod, doing his own boomer duty to arouse resentment. "And there is this sudden spate of attention to boomers because they have finally reached real age. They used to think they would be young forever, and now they know they will not."
"My loathing is not for the fact of being a boomer," he said. "It is for the boomers' self-involvement, and for my generation's belief that we were special. It was just another generation."
Really? Even with the Vietnam War, Woodstock, Kent State?
"We were powerful in numbers, and we had something to react against," he said. "That was the virtue of the Vietnam War. It gave us direction."
While the boomer-bashers are happy to skewer "their desperate and pathetic cult of the self," to use Mr. Queenan's words, there are also boomer apologists to prop up their ever-jowlier self-esteem and explain away their sins.
Priscilla Painton, an assistant managing editor at Time magazine who oversaw last week's Time cover story, "Do Kids Have Too Much Power?", said that Time's boomer readers were always hungry for more information about whether they are raising their kids to be spoiled brats. Last week, the answer - according to Time - was no.
"The story really looked at the criticism leveled at baby boomers, that they have given their children too much power," Ms. Painton said. "And we came to the conclusion that these kids are turning out to be one of the healthiest generations, so maybe there is no blame to lay on the boomers."
Susan Faludi's last book, "Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man" (William Morrow, 1999), advanced the theory that the male boomers, especially those born immediately after World War II, were emotionally disfigured by their fathers, cold and patriarchal men who taught their sons that power - not the nurturing of family or community - was the only goal worthy of male aspiration. So for that set of male boomers, their stunted self-absorption was not their fault, but that of their Archie Bunker- esque fathers.
Betsy Carter, the editor in chief of My Generation, the boomer magazine published by AARP, said that boomer-bashing literature was the outgrowth of unprecedented navel- gazing.
"You have never had a group that is so primed to be analytical and examine themselves," she said. "And we're also the first generation to be so vocal and so public about our failures and our misgivings."
Ms. Carter, 56, said that boomers' eagerness to talk about themselves may also be why other generations - or other boomers - tire of the ceaseless boomer meditations.
"We tell everybody everything," she said. "We can yack and yack and yack. If you're not one of us, it probably gets really boring."
Mr. Queenan said that it was precisely that endless yacking and the parading of bad taste as good taste that inspired him to write "Balsamic Dreams."
"When soft rock hit in the early 1970's, I think people just thought the generation was taking a nap," he said. "In reality, we were going to sleep. We never woke up again."
That soporific cultural stupor is why Sylvester Stallone is a highly paid movie star, Mr. Queenan said, and why Andrea Bocelli has become a cultural staple masquerading as high art when he should really be accorded the status of, say, Zamfir, master of the pan flute.
"I am still amazed that it is my generation that actually supported Sylvester Stallone's career and watched those movies," Mr. Queenan said. "That wasn't the way it was supposed to play out. We weren't all supposed to buy the same foods, watch the same movies, listen to the same music. I mean, does everyone have to listen to Andrea Bocelli? Does every boomer have to go to the same four towns in Northern Italy? Has any boomer ever gone to Southern Italy? Say, Sicily? There's a tremendous pack mentality."
David Brooks, the author of "Bobos in Paradise," said there was only more to come.
"Boomers have to exhaust all varieties of narcissistic experience, and having run through self-adoration and self-love and all the other self- somethings, now they have to do self- loathing," he said. "They have just begun to tap into it."