Baby Boom

by P. J. O'Rourke

  Of course each child must be accompanied by a full-scale parental security detail on every visit to a sporting event, school activity, shopping mall, public restroom, Scout jamboree, and Catholic Mass, especially if the tyke is within inappropriate touching distance of a priest or Scoutmaster.

  We bother and control our older children and interfere in every aspect of their lives because we don’t want them horning in on the fun of being juvenile, which rightfully belongs in perpetuity to the Baby Boom. Although I also blame the kids. In “The Helicopter Parent/Air-Support Child” relationship, it takes two to “Tango Hotel Papa to Alpha Sierra Charlie: debit card deposit in-bound at zero-nine hundred hours.”

  And despite the fact that we are now at the age when our generation has full control of the levers and pulleys of the American political mechanism, we haven’t done much to legalize drugs except print up some “Medical Marijuana Makes Me Sick” bumper stickers.

  “Safety” is so inconsistent with the spirit of the Baby Boom that it’s like hearing the Clash performing Gilbert and Sullivan at the Nixon Library. Perhaps post-traumatic stress disorder explains the Baby Boom’s safety hysteria. Doing the things our generation did and coming through them safely—that’s hysterical.

  Anyway, we grew up. We got married. We found true love. This wrecked the marriage. But we’re a caring generation. We sometimes take care of the kids on weekends.

  We got jobs. We made money. We spent it on cocaine. Then we made money with junk bonds for leveraged buyouts. Until the LBO market collapsed and the Savings and Loan crisis happened and some of us such as Michael Milken had to go to jail. Then we made money in the dot.com bubble. Hope you’re not still waiting for the Webvan grocery delivery or the chew toy you ordered from Pets.com. Then we made money with subprime mortgage lending securitization and collateralized debt obligations. Sorry about the foreclosure. One thing about moving the family back to mom’s house, she may be getting a little dotty but she still makes a great meat loaf. Now we’ll make money with category-killer smartphone apps.

  But whatever it is that the Baby Boom has and hasn’t done, it’s worked.

  First, look at the butcher’s bill. When the Greatest Generation took charge of America in 1961, their esteemed John F. Kennedy and his pals began a war that, according to the Department of Defense, left some 58,200 Americans dead from battle and its attendant accidents, incidents, and disease. And this for a purpose that has yet to be explained.

  That’s not as completely horrible as what the Idiot Generation preceding the Greatest Generation did. They killed 405,399 Americans in World War II and another 36,576 in the Korean War. True, the idiots didn’t start the wars, but they did fuck-all to prevent or preempt them, and may they rot in hell.

  The Baby Boom took charge of America (and hence, for all intents and purposes, the world) in 1988. That’s when we decided to skip a generation of political leadership. We bypassed the ever risible Silent Generation represented by bobblehead Michael Dukakis trying to take a ride in a tank. (Younger readers should consult YouTube—a laugh is guaranteed.) We elected, as a sort of stand-in father figure, George H. W. Bush. And soon we’d have a Bill Clinton White House full of the Baby Boom and a Newt Gingrich Congress equally full of it.

  Three hundred and eighty-two Americans died in the Persian Gulf War, 4,488 in the Iraq War, and 2,170 in Afghanistan as of this writing. That’s an improvement. We do have blood on our hands. But there will be less “Out, damned spot! out, I say!” when our conscience performs its Act V of Macbeth. Although let us not let ourselves off too easily. What with allowing villainous slaughter to run amok in the Balkans for most of a decade, staying seated in the bleachers during the Rwanda butchery, being perfectly oblivious to the oncoming catastrophic attack on New York and Washington by militant Islamic fundamentalists, giving no thought to what the Pandora’s box of the Iraq War contained for Iraqi civilians, and so on, we’ll probably rot in hell, too, but in an upscale neighborhood of it.

  Now look at the balance sheet. The size of the world economy has more than tripled since Baby Boom students quit paying attention in Economics class. World trade has grown enormously. I don’t want to take all the credit myself, but I did buy a cheap Indian batik bedspread after I got my first job. The per capita gross domestic product of India, in 2013 dollars, was $691 in 1972 and is $1,734 now. Then I bought some cheap Japanese stereo equipment. Japan’s per capita GDP went from $5,104 to $47,783 in the same period. Chinese electronics were even cheaper. China’s per capita GDP has gone from $724 to $6,741. And we haven’t done so badly ourselves with U.S. per capita GDP growing by $18,725 to reach a current figure of $51,248 on the Baby Boom’s watch.

  More to the point, morally speaking, there’s the World Bank’s index of global extreme poverty. By which they do mean extreme—people living on less than $1.25 a day. You can’t even buy anything at the Dollar Store for $1.25 these days. In 1981, 52 percent of people in the developing world were that poor. By 1990 it was 43 percent. By 2008 (the last year for which the World Bank has complete data) it was 22 percent. This still leaves 1.29 billion people in starving and ragged misery. You might want to move the decimal point one place to the right on your check to Save the Children. But World Bank preliminary estimates indicate that, despite a worldwide economic slowdown, extreme poverty continues to abate.

  The Baby Boom is more famous for repeatedly declaring that we’re moral than for repeatedly acting that way, but the earth’s increase in widespread well-being and decrease in widespread war couldn’t have happened without a generation of self-indulgent Americans avid for all the good things in life and disinclined to put themselves—and hence, for all intents and purposes, the world—to too much trouble.

  There have been some glitches in the Baby Boom’s beneficent self-indulgence, especially when we were young and impetuous. The murder rate per 100,000 Americans went from 5.1 in 1960 when Joe Brody was first considering whacking his stepfather to 10.2 in 1980 when the Baby Boom was between sixteen and thirty-four and still buying blow and quaaludes from shady characters in the disco parking lot. We’ve gotten a grip on ourselves since then (and put a trigger lock on the pistol in the desk drawer). The murder rate is back to where it was in the halcyon 1950s.

  We’ve had a generational tendency to “liberate” things going all the way back to Mrs. Furstein’s decorative garden rocks. Incidence of property crime—burglaries, larcenies, and petty thefts—was at a rate of 1,534.3 per 100,000 in 1960. The rate was 3,309.0 by 1971. I assume the .0 represents Steverino Leary’s failure to file a police report about the liberation of the Puddles office by the Balto-Cong. The rate peaked in 1980 at 4,851.1 and is now down to 2,703.1 although I don’t know if Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, and Fannie Mae are counted in that figure.

  And we always stole a lot of cars. At the time Joe Brody claimed he’d perpetrated theft-by-taking with the family automobile, the rate per 100,000 was already 183.0 and by 1989 it had reached 630.4. But that was during the “Bush Recession” just after we’d all splurged on BMWs, and how many of us parked them in a bad part of town with the windows down, took the bus home, and called Allstate?

  A more persistent problem with the Baby Boom’s beneficence is that we aren’t as good as we claim we mean to be at spreading the benefits around. Although America’s per capita wealth is 37 percent greater than it was when the Baby Boom began its rise to national domination, 15.1 percent of American families are now living below the official federal poverty level. In 1972 the percentage was 11.9.

  This is not the World Bank’s “extreme poverty.” The U.S. government 2013 poverty threshold for a family of four is $23,550, food stamps, Medicaid, and housing subsidies not included. In 1950 dollars $23,550 would have been $2,436.43 or a weekly wage of $46.85. According to Historical Statistics of the United States, the average weekly salary of people employed in “finance, insurance, and real estate
” was $50.52 in 1950, and the average salary of people in “retail trade” was $39.71.

  If you’re poor in America today you’re making a little less than Billy and Bobby Stumf’s dad was making selling whole life and term before his reserve unit got called up and he went off to fight in Korea for peanuts. And you’re making a little more than Jerry Harris’s dad was making managing the produce department at a grocery store.

  But wherever we draw the poverty line, having 15.1 percent of the country below it is nothing to be complimented upon. And before we Baby Boomers indulge ourselves in some canned indignation about the gross inequities of corporate capitalism and how Warren Buffett’s income tax rate is lower that his secretary’s, let us pause to consider what our generation has left in its tracks. The fragile naifs who stayed at the sixties ball too long. The muddled goofs still beguiled by Large Thoughts. The drug-sodden burnouts. The poor souls who flunked their sexual license exams and were left with the illegitimate children and debilitating diseases. The way we failed to keep our eye on our sense of shame, which jumped bail and has been on the lam ever since. The swarm of divorces and slews of late and paltry child support payments. And the struggling immigrants who help us around the house and in the yard and whom we pay under the table and not damn much. It’s a wonder 151 percent of the country isn’t below the poverty line.

  And yet we are the best generation in history. Which goes to show history stinks. But at least we are fabulous by historical standards.

  The Baby Boom was a carefully conducted scientific experiment. The empirical results are us. Take the biggest generation in the most important country, put them in excessively happy families, give them too much affection, extravagant freedom, scant responsibility, plenty of money, a modicum of peace (if they dodged the draft), a profusion of opportunity, and a collapse of traditional social standards.

  You get better people. Well, not better. Taken one by one, we’re as maddeningly smug as Abel and as vile as Cain, the way people always have been. But we’re better behaved. Although better behaved isn’t the right way to put it either.

  We’re willful, careless, rash, vain, indulged, and entitled. We’re “mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” as Lady Caroline Lamb said of the poet, but she was an ex-girlfriend and ex-girlfriends say those things especially if you marry their cousin Annabella who had a few choice words about the poet herself, but she was an ex-wife and ex-wives say those things. The point here is that “a bunch of rhyme-less Lord Byrons” is a good description of the Baby Boom and the romantic, disorderly, harum-scarum lives we’ve led.

  Except, of course, modern medicine cured the clubfoot, and we never slept with our sister—come on, there were plenty of other people to sleep with and it wasn’t like we didn’t have cars and couldn’t get out of the house. And we haven’t embarked on a campaign to liberate Greece. The EU has a central bank for that. Not that we didn’t give the Greeks a few bucks to see the Parthenon and knock back some ouzos when we embarked on our Carnival cruise through the Aegean to Athens. And we didn’t die of diarrhea at Missolonghi. The cruise ship gift shop had Imodium. Also our poetry is awful. The name Baby Boom poetry will be given in future literary anthologies is probably worse libre.

  Other than that we’re a lot like Lord Byron—larger than life personalities, providing the world with amusement, hearts in the right place even when our private parts aren’t, thinking noble thoughts somewhat thoughtlessly, and being high-minded in a mindless sort of way.

  We leave a mess behind, like Lord Byron did, but compare it to the mess that a generation previous left behind, like the generation previous to Lord Byron, which was Napoleon Bonaparte. You won’t catch us—or George Gordon, 6th Baron, either—taking credit for plunging all of Europe into bloodshed by putting our own name on a bunch of wars or posing for pictures while groping ourselves with our hand someplace where there’s nothing to grope or not leaving Moscow until it’s on fire and it’s winter and nobody has plowed the roads or letting the Battle of Waterloo be won on the playing fields of Eaton, which is nowhere near Belgium, or being the person everybody in the lunatic asylum is being. I mean, if I’m in the lunatic asylum, I’m just being me.

  It’s not a bad idea to have spoiled brats rule the world. The rulers of the ancient world may have been brats, but they weren’t spoiled, if the Spartan mother admonishment to sons on their way to an all-guy outing—“Come back with your shield or on it”—is any indication.

  Ancient potentates seemed to have had a firm sense of purpose rare among us pampered Baby Boomers eager for instant gratification. Mrs. Pharaoh must have popped her ankh when she caught Mr. Pharaoh blowing the IRA on a 455-foot Pyramid of Cheops for “his next stage in life.” But he kept at it for twenty years. We’d never pull something like that, especially if our Queen of the Nile happened to be the principal breadwinner in the family and was already on the phone to the partner in her law firm who handles community property settlements.

  And the mighty of yore must not have been doted upon sufficiently to make them emotionally needy and desirous of being liked by absolutely everybody. If Pontius Pilate had been a Baby Boomer, when he ordered the crucifixion he would have given Christ a “safe word.”

  Barbarian hordes used to run the ancient world too or, at any rate, run frequently into large parts of the ancient world to rape and pillage. The Baby Boom would make a lousy barbarian horde, no matter what Athenians had to say after we’d knocked back some ouzos. We’d be galloping across the Mongolian steppes sneezing because we’re allergic to horse dander, going, “What, no sushi?” and living off the fat of the land when we’re trying to cut down on the fat in our diet. Then it’s time to rape and pillage. Rape is very wrong. Also it’s damaging to the self-esteem. When somebody cries “Rape!” it’s a rejection, not just of your actions and attitudes at the moment but of you as a whole person. Baby Boom barbarian horde members would be smiling shyly at the cowering womenfolk, asking, “Get pillaged often?” Then we’d start fiddling with the firebrand instead of burning the houses down and explain that we were trying to stop smoking. Plus pillaging means lugging all that stuff back with you before there were wheelie bags. And wheelie bags are probably hard to roll along the Mongolian steppes while you’re galloping on a horse.

  I don’t think we would have been much use in the Middle Ages either, going on the Crusades by hitchhiking with flowers in our hair. Then we’d gather in a circle holding hands and try to levitate Jerusalem. If we’d had a be-in while Saladin was around I doubt he would have just let it be. We probably would have fared worse with the sultan in the Levant than we did with the National Guard at Kent State.

  In fact, the Baby Boom wouldn’t have been much good at committing any of history’s atrocities, history being mostly a record of atrocities, and this may be why we got a D in it. Our generation would have discovered the New World, got a whiff of tobacco, said, “We can start smoking again!,” moved in with the Indians, and convinced them to take their wigwams condo.

  A Baby Boom Cortés, eyeing Montezuma, would have been thinking, ”Gold? Nah. Got that hedged with long calls in precious metal commodities. How about an emerging market fund invested in outsourcing high-priced domestic Spanish Inquisition torture to low-cost overseas Aztec human sacrifice?”

  The notorious triangle trade—sugar/rum/slaves—­likewise would have been in Chapter 11 if operated by the Baby Boom. We use NutraSweet and Splenda. Rum means a Jimmy Buffett concert. And then we’re so hungover we sleep right through the slave auction. Not that we ever would have brought Africans to America as human chattel. We would have brought Africans to America to make sure we never had to listen to “Turkey in the Straw” again.

  History would have been very different—a C+ at least—if the Baby Boom had ruled the world.

  And I will give children to be their princes, and babes shall rule over them.

  —Isaiah 3:4
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  BIG DAMN MESSY BUNDLE OF JOY

  And we will. Because the American Baby Boom is the future. We’ll all turn into us eventually, as soon as families get excessively happy and start feeling too much affection for their kids. Unless, of course, extravagant freedom, scant responsibility, plenty of money, and a modicum of peace lead to such a high rate of carbon emissions that we all fry or drown. But you can’t have everything. And you can have a profusion of opportunity and a collapse of traditional social standards.

  Western Europe and the wealthiest parts of Asia and Latin America have had them already. And they’re almost as useless as we are, meaning useless in the best abundant disposable income with ample leisure time to devote to pointless activities that don’t harm anybody much except ourselves way.

  Baby Boom–like places all seem to be engaged in bellicose national political deadlock the way we are in America. There’s much tut-tutting about bellicose national political deadlock. But it’s an improvement on bellicose national political purpose. World conquest, for example. “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the [insert name of deity or national leader whom you dislike most]/He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored/He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword . . .” That doesn’t sound like any fun at all, except maybe the vintage trampling part.

  We and our kindred generation of European Baby Boomers brought down the Berlin Wall. Reagan and Thatcher and Gorbachev get the kudos. But it was the Baby Boom that did the job.

  After I’d given up on the messenger profession and become a foreign correspondent (you get the same frosty treatment from receptionists), I spent some time behind the Iron Curtain in the USSR, Poland, and East Germany. Everything, including the toilets, was made of crumbling concrete. Buildings were constructed without benefit of plumb bob or spirit level. There were wire mesh nets around the tops of the taller structures because pieces of the crumbling concrete kept falling off. Furniture looked as if it had been made by the seventh- grade shop class. Food was a lard sandwich except they were out of bread. Roads were paved with random bucketloads of asphalt dumped in the right-of-way. Cars, trucks, and buses had been reverse engineered from Tootsie Toys and went bumping down moon-cratered streets sputtering, misfiring, and burping clouds of smoke. You could have made a fortune standing on a Moscow street corner with a screwdriver and a timing light, had fortunes been allowed to be made.