The Baby Boom E-Book

P. J. O'Rourke

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

A hilarious look at the aging baby boomer generation from the author the Spectator labelled 'what happens when America does Grumpy Old Men'. The Baby Boom - over-sized, overwrought, overbearing, and all over the place, from Donovan to Obama. The generation that said with a straight face, 'We are the world.' What's so funny about peace, love and understanding? Ask the generation responsible for the fall of the Berlin Wall and their knickers. Who put their faith in the Kyoto Accord and disco. Who dropped out of the capitalist system and popped back again in time to cause a global financial crisis. How did the Baby Boom become what it is and who let them get away with it?

Leseprobe

THE

BABY BOOM

ALSO BY P. J. O’ROURKE

Modern Manners

The Bachelor Home Companion

Republican Party Reptile

Holidays in Hell

Parliament of Whores

Give War a Chance

All the Trouble in the World

Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut

Eat the Rich

The CEO of the Sofa

Peace Kills

On The Wealth of Nations

Driving Like Crazy

Don’t Vote—It Just Encourages the Bastards

Holidays in Heck

P. J.

O’ROURKE

THE

BABY BOOM

How It Got That Way

And It Wasn’t My Fault

And I’ll Never Do It Again

Grove Press UK

First published in the United States in 2014 by Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Published in hardback in Great Britain in 2014 by Atlantic Books.

Copyright © P. J. O’Rourke, 2014

The moral right of P. J. O’Rourke to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 61185 611 8

Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 61185 573 9

E-book ISBN: 978 1 61185 979 9

Printed in Great Britain

Grove Press, UK

An Imprint of Grove/Atlantic Inc.

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.groveatlantic.com

The Baby Boom is dedicated to the memory of

Clifford Bronson O’Rourke and Delphine Loy O’Rourke, progenitors thereof.

Thou shalt not answer questionnaires

Or quizzes upon World-Affairs,

Nor with compliance

Take any test. Thou shalt not sit

With statisticians nor commit

A social science.

—W. H. Auden

from “Under Which Lyre”

CONTENTS

Preface

UK Introduction

Prologue: We Are the World

1 A Regular Old Baby Boomer Speaks

2 A Good and Happy Place

3 Life as We Imagined It

4 In the Doldrums of Fun

5 Mere Anarchy Is Loosed

6 Ends and Means

7 All That Glisters

8 Agents of Influence

9 The Prelude

10 The Man Is Father to the Child

11 The Great Disconnect

12 Era of Good Feelings

13 The Baby Boom’s Garden of Eden—Thanks for the Snake

14 There Shall No Sign Be Given Unto This Generation

15 Dawn’s Early Light

16 Real Life

17 Ripeness Is All

18 Big Damn Messy Bundle of Joy

Acknowledgments

In lapidary inscriptions a man is not upon oath.

—Dr. Samuel Johnson

PREFACE TO A BOOK ­ATTEMPTING TO CAPTURE THE SPIRIT OF A GENERATION OF GOD’S FAVORITE SPOILED BRATS

Herein is a ballad of the Baby Boom, not a dissertation on it. A rhapsody, not a report. A freehand sketch, not a faithful rendering. That is to say, I am—it is a writer’s vocation and the métier of his age cohort—full of crap.

Characters, the narrator included, have been drawn from nature and not from individuals. Essence has been added and accidens has been omitted. Merry hell has been played with time, place, personages, and recalled dialogue. Twice-told tales have been trotted out onto the court for three-peats. (And, come now, fellow Baby Boomers, confess your own guilt to the same.) Only the most outrageous and unbelievable things in this book are recounted exactly as they happened.

UK INTRODUCTION

It is with no little trepidation that I dish out this slumgullion of Americana to British readers. Post-war experience in America was very different from post-war experience in a place where war, in fact, occurred. That is, we had the “post-” and you had the war.

There were “Baby Booms” in both nations. (Don’t look at me if yours started a little early due to GIs being “overpaid, over-sexed and over here.” My dad was in the Pacific.)

America’s Baby Boom got the benefit of a period of social stability and strong economic growth. Britain’s Baby Boom got the benefit of Obamacare, before computer access to universal health service had been perfected the way it has been by the current American president.

Your food and clothing remained rationed until the early 1950s. We plumped up and dressed in silly coonskin caps.

You disposed of your old empire. (I’ve been to many former British overseas possessions and don’t know why you wanted them in the first place, but the world map did look nicer with all that pink.) We went looking for a new one—in all the wrong places such as up along the Yalu River and on the underside of Chiang Kai-shek and in South Vietnam.

And the American car culture was an important factor in the lives of our Baby Boom. Meanwhile the British car culture was . . .

Mind you I’m a fan of British cars, having owned a number of them including a 1960 MGA, the wooden floorboards of which gave way leaving the heels of my shoes grinding the pavement at 40 mph. Also the electrical components manufactured by Lucas (company motto: “Home By Dark”) would periodically catch fire.

Let’s just say the British car culture was different.

Of course, in many ways, Britain was far ahead of the United States. All we were able to produce was common, garden-variety juvenile delinquents. You were cultivating rare and exquisite breeds: Teddy Boys, Rockers, Mods. For all I know the Droogs in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange are pictures drawn from life.

Your Skiffle bands, horrid as they were, represented a vast improvement on the folk musicians who gave America’s Baby Boom its first taste of “alternative” music. From those Skiffle bands came a few musicians who would greatly influence the Baby Boom on both sides of the Atlantic and who were, to be honest, not bad. John Lennon for instance. Although he was, of course, no Otis Redding.

And the BBC’s 1950s children’s television programming was worse by miles than what we had in America. Bad television for young people is extremely important to their growth and development. It promotes going outside and getting exercise and fresh air. It establishes a healthy skepticism about the wisdom and intelligence of people in authority. And it teaches the important lesson that adults who pretend to be very, very fond of children are…

Somehow I feel that I’m not making the best sales pitch for my book. And Americans are supposed to be so good at selling things. Invasion of Iraq, for example.

There’s probably no good reason for anyone who isn’t American to read about the American Baby Boom. Except America’s Baby Boomers are all over the world poking our noses—and our drones—into everything. (Three U.S. presidents from this generation and, with Hillary Clinton, still counting . . .) So I suppose understanding us is useful in a don’t-smoke-while-dousing-the-effigy-with-petrol-on-Guy-Fawkes-Night way.

Let me start over with a personal plea. I read every word of Fever Pitchby Nick Hornby (fellow Baby Boomer, though one of your lot). I hadn’t the slightest what Hornby was on about. I gather the subject was a game he mistakenly called “football.” (Interesting that we pay our hooligans a salary and put them on the field while yours seem to operate on a volunteer basis.) And I enjoyed the book immensely.

But now I’ve put a foot wrong again, as if I’m comparing myself to Nick Hornby, which would be like comparing Posh Spice’s career as a midfielder to David Beckham’s. And even my apology is bollocks since Beckham never played for Arsenal. What I’m trying to say is that we are all members of a single vast and splendid worldwide English-speaking culture. (Well, the Americans can speak English, more or less, while the British can read and write it as well, but you know what I mean.) As fellow members of that vast and splendid culture we should support each other’s cultural endeavors, which, in this case, means you ought to buy my book although you’ll haven’t the slightest what I’m on about.

P. J. O’Rourke

March Hare Farm

New Hampshire

Candlemass (or, as we call it in the States, Super Bowl Sunday), 2014

There was a generation,

That had a lot of hair,

Right in the middle of their forehead.

When they were good,

They were very good indeed,

But when they were bad they were horrid.

—with apologies to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

PROLOGUE

We Are the World

We are the generation that changed everything. Of all the eras and epochs of Americans, ours is the one that made the biggest impression—on ourselves. But that’s an important accomplishment because we’re the generation that created the self, made the firmament of the self, divided the light of the self from the darkness of the self, and said let there be self. If you were born between 1946 and 1964, you may have noticed this yourself.

That’s not to say we’re a selfish generation. Selfish means “too concerned with the self,” and we’re not. Self isn’t something we’re just, you know, concerned with. We are self.

Before us, self was without form and void, like our parents in their dumpy clothes and vague ideas. Then we came along. Now the personal is the political. The personal is the socioeconomic. The personal is the religious and the secular, science and the arts. The personal is every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his (and, let us hasten to add, her) kind. If the Baby Boom has done one thing it’s to beget a personal universe.

And our apologies to anyone who personally happens to be a jerk. Self is like fish, proverbially speaking. Give a man a fish and you’ve fed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and, if he turns into a dry-fly catch-and-release angling fanatic up to his liver in icy water wearing ridiculous waders and an absurd hat, pestering trout with three-pound test line on a thousand-dollar graphite rod, and going on endlessly about Royal Coachman lures that he tied himself using muskrat fur and partridge feathers . . . well, at least his life partner is glad to have him out of the house.

We made the universe personal, and we made the universe new. New in the sense of juvenescent. We have an abiding admiration for our own larval state.

We saw that the grown-ups were like primitive insects. They never underwent metamorphosis. They didn’t emerge from their home and office cocoons with brilliant, fluttering wings. They just continued to molt, getting more gross, lumpy, and bald and, as it were, bugging us. Better that we should stay nymphs and naiads. Plus we were having more fun than the adults of the species.

“Don’t ever change!” we wrote in each other’s high school yearbooks. “Stay just the way you are!” What strange valedictions to give ourselves on the threshold of life. Imagine if we had obeyed them, and now everyone possessed the resolute solipsism of adolescence with its wild enthusiasms, dark lethargies, strong lusts, keen aversions, inner turmoils, and uncontained impulses. Life would be exactly like it is today. You’re welcome.

So here we are in the Baby Boom cosmos, formed in our image, personally tailored to our individual needs, and predetermined to be eternally fresh and novel. And we saw that it was good. Or pretty good.

We should have had a cooler name, the way the Lost Generation did. Except good luck to anybody who tries to tell us to get lost. Anyway it’s too late now, we’re stuck with being forever described as exploding infants. And maybe it’s time, now that we’ve splattered ourselves all over the place, for the Baby Boom to look back and think. “What made us who we are?” “And what caused us to act the way we do?” “And WTF?” Because the truth is, if we hadn’t decided to be young forever, we’d be old.

The youngest Baby Boomers, born in the last year when anybody thought it was hip to like Lyndon Johnson, are turning fifty. Those of us who were born when postwar birthrates were highest, even before Ike was liked, won’t (statistics tell us) have to wait as long for death as we had to wait to get laid.

We’d be sad about this if we weren’t too busy remarrying younger wives, reviving careers that hit glass ceilings when children arrived, and renewing prescriptions for drugs that keep us from being sad. And we’ll never retire. We can’t. The mortgage is underwater. We’re in debt up to the Rogaine for the kids’ college education. And it serves us right—we’re the generation who insisted that a passion for living should replace working for one.

Nonetheless 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. This is every generation’s fate. It’s a matter of power and privilege demography. Whenever anything happens anywhere, somebody over fifty signs the bill for it. And the Baby Boom, seated as we are at the head of life’s table, is hearing Generation X, Generation Y, and the Millennials all saying, “Check, please!”

How can he get wisdom . . . whose talk is of bullocks?

—Ecclesiasticus 38:25,

The Apocrypha

1

A REGULAR OLD

BABY BOOMER SPEAKS

To address America’s Baby Boom is to face big, broad problems. We number more than 75 million, and we’re not only diverse but take a thorny pride in our every deviation from the norm (even though we’re in therapy for it). We are all alike about us each being unusual.

Fortunately we are all alike about big, broad problems too. We won’t face them. There’s a website for that, a support group to join, a class to take, alternative medicine, regular exercise, a book that explains it all, a celebrity on TV who’s been through the same thing, or we can eliminate gluten from our diet. History is full of generations that had too many problems. We are the first generation to have too many answers.