Generation Narcissus: the Worthless GenerationThe ever-discriminating attention of Cranky Greg has alighted on this article about the fall of another Boomer pleasure palace. This one is a Las Vegas site called "The Great Indoors," which is rapidly turning into the desert it once was.
The author, H. Lee Barnes, writes this about Generation Narcissus:
I’m reminded of Guy de Maupassant’s story The Necklace, in which Mademoiselle Mathilde, given the choice of Madam Losell’s finest gems, chooses instead a necklace of paste. Her inability to distinguish between what is genuine and what is fake leads to her downfall. Fast food. Image. Glitter. Pick the downfall. Here’s what few “get” and why the demise of The Great Indoors speaks to so much about America’s current situation—inevitable given all the predictors no one seemed to see. This nation fell prey to Mathilde’s fate.
Much of what was on the shelves at The Great Indoors was paste in the first place, faux stuff with “Made in China” taped on it somewhere. If not China, Indonesia or India. A lot of glitter. For a while, the price reductions on items ranged from 10-30 percent, but eventually the scavenger hunt began in earnest, and the store was invaded by lollygagging credit-card parasites who pawed over the once-precious merchandise and wrung out last-gasp discounts from department managers.
Who’s responsible?
Some blame Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae; others, the banks or the global market. That’s because the analysts are looking at the hands on the clock of fate. I say, look at the face of the clock. If you look closely, you’ll see the face of the Baby Boomer. Yes, Dr. Spock’s generation, the generation that was rarely held accountable; the generation that embraced sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll; the generation that got naked at Woodstock; the one that protested the Vietnam War; the one that created the hippie movement that in a decade transformed into the yuppie movement (if you can call opening a wallet and thumbing through credit cards a movement); the generation reared on television, and consumption, and pleasure, and vanity and vanity and vanity; the generation of readers who drove Look, a magazine about people, off the shelves and made a success of People, a magazine not about people (unless you believe celebrities are human people); the generation that promoted the fast-food culture, the know-it-all culture, the a-pill-will-fix-everything culture; the generation enslaved to fad and pop culture; the one whose parents won a war against fascism and endured the hardships of the Great Depression.
How, you may ask, can a writer make such a sweeping indictment, especially without offering an array of studies and statistics? It’s easy. The writer is an observer and a participant and has been since that wonderfully self-centered generation emerged. Herein lies the basis for my thesis. What generation produced the current leaders in business, industry and politics, those who have held the reins of power for the past decade and a half? We need look no further than the last 16 years in the White House, the terms of Clinton, who represents his generation at its hedonistic best, and Bush, who represents the same generation at its my-way-or-the-highway best. Still, I’m a touch less cynical about them than the media who reported on their administrations. I see neither man as motivated by evil intentions. How can we blame Clinton for saying he “never had sex with that woman” or Bush for his weapons-of-mass-destruction argument for invading Iraq? After all, both were part of the generation reared on Dr. Benjamin Spock’s grand theories, children counseled and coddled, rarely punished for being wrong or irresponsible or held accountable for lying.
I can’t pin dates of birth on all the leaders of industry and finance, but the current CEOs of the big three in Detroit were born post-WWII, as were Jeff Skilling, Michael Milken and the guy who ran Home Depot into the ground and walked away tens of millions richer. Governor Rod Blagojevich, that Baby Boomer wunderkind from Illinois, took office in his late 40s and by his early 50s wore waders in his office to navigate the swamp of corruption he’d built. Boards of directors hand out bonuses to CEOs for demonstrating ineptitude, engaging in irresponsibility or practicing outright deceit. Did I mention the ends-justify-the-means generation?
But the leaders are only partially to blame. Baby Boomers, look in the mirror. What do you see? Someone figuring out how to turn a house after two years into a 50 percent profit? Or use its equity as an ATM? Someone who borrows against his home to pay cash for that BMW in the driveway, the one he really doesn’t need? Our system of politics and business encourages self-serving irresponsibility by rewarding it.
True, the Boomer generation gave us its share of accomplished, legitimate entrepreneurs, artists, musicians and inventors, but even achievements such as “Hotel California” and the wonders of the dot-com aren’t enough to overcome the vapid aspirations of those who idolize Madonna and her ilk. Now that they have plunged the country into a financial crisis that may end up as epic as the Great Depression, the Boomers can hand matters over to their offspring, who hopefully will be prove themselves the next great (well, good) generation.
Even as one of their own, Barack Obama, prepares to tackle this economic crisis, don’t be optimistic those in their early 40s will do better. They have been long misguided, ferried as they were from school to soccer games to karate lessons. The wisdom best passed on to Gen X is that there is no Great Indoors and never was. Not even the bones of a Swell Indoors will be left as a metaphor for Baby Boomer failure. Start change by ridding the language of the word “great,” discard it along with “awesome” and all words associated with the Dr. Spock syndrome. Revive the language of the generation that won WWII. Restore humble words such as “grit,” “integrity,” “diligence,” “honor,” “responsibility,” “sacrifice” and especially “accountability” to the social vocabulary. Let Boomer hyperbole vanish along with the merchandise the scavengers fled with when The Great Indoors finally closed.
Look on my works, yea mighty, and despair.
Generation Jones Update:This is interesting. I've never felt particularly akin to the Boomer generation, notwithstanding the fact that my birth year - 1959 - falls within the purported time period for the post-war baby boom.
The reason for this is that by the time I came of cultural awareness the revolution had been won. People my age were growing up with the effects of the divorce culture, the sex culture, the youth culture, etc. Vietnam and the draft were a distant memory by the time I was in high school, meaning more than 4 years had passed, but such is the memory of teenagers. I remember watching the student protests as a child and wondering how adults - i.e., 18 through 24 year olds - could act like spoiled children.
I've always accepted that there was a later cohort of the Boomer generation that did not share the formative experience of the true boomers. People my age grew up hearing how bad America was, and we reacted against the earlier boomers and voted for Ronald Reagan. As was noted at the time,
Reagan captured the votes of most new voters, which definitely included me since 1980 was my first presidential election.
In any event,
this Wiki article describes as "Generation Jones," the later cohort of the Boomer generation, i.e., those born between 1954 and 1965:
American social commentator Jonathan Pontell defined this generation and coined the term naming it.[4] Prior to the popularization of Pontell’s theory, its members were identified with either Baby Boomers or GenerationX'ers.
The name “Generation Jones” has several connotations, including: a large anonymous generation, and a “Keeping up with the Joneses” competitiveness borne from this generation’s populous birth years. The connotation, however, which is perhaps best known stems from the slang word "jones" or “jonesing”, which means a yearning or craving. Jonesers were the people who as teens in the 1970’s made this slang word popular, but beyond this historical claim, many believe the concept of jonesing is among this generation’s key collective personality traits. Jonesers were given huge expectations as children in the optimistic 1960’s, and then confronted with a different reality as they came of age in the pessimistic 1970’s, leaving them with a certain unrequited, jonesing quality.
In demographic terms, Generation Jones was part of the baby boom which ended in the early 1960s. However, the events stereotypically associated with generational discussion of Boomers, including protests over civil rights and the Vietnam war and the emergence of rock music took place while the members of Generation Jones were unborn, still children or early teenagers. This is the situation described by Sex Pistols bass player Sid Vicious, who said that he had missed the Summer of Love because he was too busy playing with his Action Man. Thus the early life experience of this group was more similar, in many respects, to that commonly imputed to Generation X. Generation Jones is thus associated with pop icons such as Pong, Rubik's Cube, and MTV.
This age group became politically active in the United States during the Presidential campaigns of Ronald Reagan, who was extremely popular among people of this age group.[5] "The turn toward the Republicans was based very much on how the young felt about Ronald Reagan's performance in office," said Helmut Norpoth, a political scientist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. In the 2008 election, surveys found that fans of classic rock music, popular during this period, tended to favor the Republicans.[6]
Interesting.
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