“Cosmos” brand filter cigarettes had to be held upright or the tobacco dribbled out the end of the paper tube. Matches didn’t work. After you struck a match you put it back in the matchbox because it was just as likely to light as any other match in there. The dial telephones buzzed with static. Assuming they were all tapped there must be reams of telephone conversation transcriptions somewhere in the KGB files reading: “zzzzzzz Nyet zzzzzzz Da zzzzzzz.”
There was nothing to do but drink bad vodka and a lot of it. The Poles had a joke about a man from Warsaw who visits his brother in America. The brother says, “Would you like a drink?”
“Of course.”
So the American brother goes to the liquor cabinet, gets out a bottle of vodka, and pours them both a drink.
“And then,” says the man from Warsaw, “do you know what my brother did? He put the cap back on the bottle!”
The Soviets may have been a nuclear power but all they ever blew up was Chernobyl. I was in Poland when it happened. I said to a Pole, “I understand that because of the fallout we’re supposed to avoid fresh vegetables.”
He said, “Fresh vegetables?”
As ugly as Chernobyl was, it was nothing compared to commie couture. Older men wore Harry Truman suits but looking as if they’d been fitted to Harry and worn by Hervé Villechaize on Fantasy Island. Older women wore housedresses so ugly and so flowered that our grandmothers, even in their most muttering-to-themselves-in-the-kitchen mode, would have recoiled in horror. Young people tried to be hep. But it didn’t work. One youthful Soviet minder, who’d been assigned to me as my translator, wore a pair of blue jeans in the most wrong possible blue and as un-jean-like in cut and as denim-less as a burka. On the back of these was a patch of fake leather, imitating the Levi’s patch except three times too large, upon which was emblazoned “Dakota Jean” with Dakota misspelled in several places.
The Baby Boom was laughing at the communists. Finally, on November 9, 1989, the East German communists, being sensitive to ridicule the way Germans are, gave up on Marxist/ Leninism, and the Berlin Wall came down.
For totalitarianism to work everybody has to keep a straight face. Dictators don’t stand a chance with the Baby Boom—the Hitler snot comb mustache, the Mussolini beanie, Mao lacking only a gold chain to be dressed like a fat swinger in a Nehru jacket, plus all those silly dictator arm gestures. Baby Boomers would be Photoshopping their cats. Notice how the leaders of today’s China are careful to appear in public looking like they’re headed to a funeral—probably their own. I’ll bet “Chairman Meow” memes are all over Chinese microblogs. And not to bring Jimmy Buffett into this again, but did you ever notice how Stalin kind of looks like Jimmy when Buffett had hair and a mustache? If the Russians had posted videos of Stalin lip-syncing “Margaritaville,” Uncle Joe would have had to go gulag his own bad self.
The Baby Boom is the generation of the mocking tongue. The pen may be mightier than the sword but not once you get people howling with laughter. A couple of spit takes and the ink runs, the sword rusts, and the Baby Boom triumphs.
It will take a while to turn the whole world into Baby Boomers. For one thing, due to declining birthrates, they won’t be a boom like we were with the same weight of numbers on their side. On the other hand, aging populations in places such as Russia and China will let these babies speak in booming voices. And a lot of the world is still stuck in the Idiot Generation and hasn’t progressed to Greatest let alone attained the glory of B.B. But Muammar Gaddafi’s clothes, grooming, and arm gestures were so dictator-ridiculous that even the fool Lybians shot him.
Also, there’s a little bit of the Baby Boom in everyone. I was in Lebanon in 1984 during the civil war, and I was stopped at a checkpoint manned—or I should say boyed—by fifteen- and sixteen-year-old members of the militant Islamic fundamentalist Hezbollah. They were waving their AK-47s around, digging the barrels into the dirt and scratching their ears with the muzzle sights. (Gun safety courses must go begging in Lebanon.) One of the young militants pointed his AK-47 at my face. (It’s surprising how small the hole is in the end of an AK-47, considering what a big difference it could make in your social life.) He demanded my passport. When he saw that I was an American he subjected me to a twenty-minute tirade, at gunpoint, about America Satan Devil and how the United States had caused the Lebanese civil war, colonialism, imperialism, Zionism, and every other problem he could think of. Then he handed my passport back and said, “As soon as I get my green card I am going to dentist school in Dearborn, Michigan.”
Militant Islamic fundamentalism probably had a tough time surviving the karaoke nights and Craigslist personals of the Detroit metropolitan area. I bet the teenager who pointed the gun at me is now a wealthy orthodontist living in Bloomfield Hills.
Noxious politics will disappear as all the world’s political science classes happily degenerate into hour-long shouting matches the way Jim Fisk’s Constitutional Law class did. It’s hard to remain truly noxious when you like being obnoxious better.
Stupid notions of central planning, nationalization, and protectionist trade barriers will fall by the wayside when everyone is paying as little attention in Economics as I was.
And sooner or later the 1.29 billion people making $1.25 a day, the way we were, selling Puddles on the street in Baltimore, are going to figure out there’s a better way. I just received an e-mail from Nigeria about a rather large amount of money needing to be transferred to an American bank and requiring only modest assistance on my part.
There will be no religious fanaticism. We’re not a generation who listens to anybody, God included. In our defense, I doubt God minds us not bothering about Him. Very few of the people we’ve bothered—parents, college deans, the police, LBJ, the psychiatrist at my draft physical, supervisors, bosses, attractive types in bars—have minded when we quit bothering them. Religious fanatics must be pesky from a heavenly point of view. “Now what?” thundered the Lord.
We’re more sports fanatics. Yahweh hikes the ball to Jesus. Does Jesus hand off to Muhammad for short yardage? Buddha and Krishna are covered midfield. Secular Humanism is wide open for a long pass but he seems to be chatting with a cheerleader.
There will be no suicide bombings. Baby Boomers aren’t going to strap explosive vests around our middles; it would make us look fat.
There will be no genocide or ethnic cleansing. One thing about the coddling and cosseting and doting upon that goes into creating a generation of spoiled brats is that it leaves us with a sentimental streak. Killing a whole race or ethnicity would involve doing away with quaint old people who possess time-honored wisdom (even if they are crabby with the kids in the neighborhood) and those kids in the neighborhood, too, not to mention major babes and ripped dudes. Plus a wholesale, warehouse store–type of hatred like that is too downmarket for the Baby Boom. When it comes to hating people, we like brand names. Furthermore, consider the progress science has made. Nowadays genocide would require everyone to be subjected to DNA testing. All those cotton swabs, what a bother.
There may be some outbreaks of sixties behavior in unexpected places. Perhaps that’s what the Arab Spring is. Doesn’t look too groovy to me, but whatever turns you on. A Saudi Arabian sit-in would be interesting because I’ve never seen the Saudis do anything but sit around anyway.
World peace is probably too much to ask. But it will be hard to assemble those huge conscripted armies that used to fight wars. We’ll all have a letter from our doctor about our deep-seated psychiatric problems and drug use.
The hippie doctor who wrote mine happened to be a good doctor despite a practice constrained by crab lice. I was having some kidney problem and he sent me to a hospital for tests. A decade later the problem recurred. I had more tests and an appointment with an elderly kidney specialist. Looking into my medical file he began to back his chair away from mine. “Your kidneys are al
l right,” he said. “But . . . do you need help?”
I had no idea what he was talking about, for a moment. Then I said, “Did the doctor’s letter I took to my draft physical wind up in my medical files?”
“Aha!” said the elderly kidney specialist. “I wrote a lot of draft physical letters. But I never wrote one this good!”
Besides, war is about power. Baby Boomers are not power hungry. Power comes with that kicker, responsibility. We’re greedy for love, happiness, experience, sensation, thrills, praise, fame, adulation, inner peace, and, as it turns out, money. Health and fitness too. But we’re not greedy for power. Observe the Baby Boomers who have climbed to its ascendency in Washington. The best and the brightest? They’re over at Goldman Sachs.
When we really are the world the place will be chaos. A universal Baby Boom will be running around everywhere doing anything they want at all hours of the day and night with nobody left to clean up. It may be a bad world.
But it will be a worse world for the Leaders of Men, looking around for their followers and wondering why everyone is following Keith Richards. It will be a terrible world for Authority. The Baby Boom will not countenance it. We turn our face from Authority. Indeed we turn our ass toward it. We moon Dominion.
Woe to you who have oppressed mankind with your theologies and your ideologies, your bigotries, doctrines, dogmas, and no sex until after we’re married. Desolation awaits you who have foisted war upon us, subjugated us, yoked us, fettered us, and told us we can’t get down and boogie.
You shall be as the ants beneath our magnifying glasses, the sand wasps affronted with our tennis rackets, the frogs ingesting our fireworks, the cats between our garages, the birdbaths, garden gnomes, and glass gazing balls at the mercy of our Wham-O slingshots. Flaming bags of dog poop shall be set upon your front porches.
Think how we made a misery of the lives of our parents. If we can do that to our dearest beloved, think what we can do to you. For that matter think what we did to ourselves. You shall spend eternity at a “Model UN.” You shall listen forever to lectures of Margaret Mead. You shall sit upon a staircase inside a giant evil eel for all time. And if you go upstairs you’ll be chewed by giant eel teeth. And if you go downstairs you’ll be eel shit.
We are an obdurate generation. Our whim is iron. What we will to do is done. You, eel shit members of the Chinese politburo, have had a taste of this in Tiananmen Square. You remember the fellow blocking the tank. But do you remember the crucial detail? He was carrying shopping bags. Not only were you violating his human liberties, you were interfering with his shopping, a Baby Boom birthright. One man is a majority with shopping on his side.
You loathsome communists got away with it in Tiananmen Square. But for how long? The vengeance of the Baby Boom can be delayed but not denied. There will come a day, Xi Jinping, when the power and the dignity of your office shall be rendered so low that you shall appear as guest host on Saturday Night Live.
And what about you, detestable Taliban and Al-Qaeda and Osama wannabes cowering in your Waziristan, Kandahar, Yemen, and Mali hidey-holes? You who are pursued by those things perfectly christened with the name Baby Boomers have so often been called, drones. And when it comes to Baby Boom lethal technology, drones are nothing. How will things be with you when your bevy of wives discover vibrators?
And you, contemptible Putin? How long will your shirtless self escape the LGBT float in the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade?
And all the rest of you tyrannical, despotic, overbearing squares and wet smacks with your two-bit autocracies in the butt ends of the world? You shall gather in finished basements while your revered elders stand at the top of the basement stairs yelling, “I think something’s on fire down there!” Your offices shall be liberated by Balto-Cong. You shall spend your treasure on cocaine and rehab. Your junk bonds shall default. You shall form overage garage bands and try to play “Margaritaville.” Your third spouse shall acquire an American Express Black Card with a credit limit higher than the U.S. national debt. Your daughters shall wear nose rings. Your sons shall have pagan symbols indelibly marked upon their necks. (Unless you belong to one of those cultures where daughters wear nose rings and sons have pagan symbols indelibly marked upon their necks, in which case they shall not.) You shall be perplexed by the Internet. You shall grow old and addled enough to vote for Ron Paul in a presidential primary.
There is no escape from happiness, attention, affection, freedom, irresponsibility, money, peace, opportunity, and finding out that everything you were ever told is bullshit. Behold the Baby Boom, ye mighty, and despair.
Much did I rage when young,
Being by the world oppressed,
But now with flattering tongue
It speeds the parting guest.
—William Butler Yeats,
“Youth and Age”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We may glean wisdom from the worst fools, or what are writers for? A greater fool than even the present writer was communist dupe Maxim Gorky. In a speech to the Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, Gorky said, “The basic hero of our books should be labor; that is, man organized by the process of labor.”
If Gorki’s advice were followed, literature would be the plucking and gutting production line in a Perdue chicken processing plant, and readers would be up to their bifocals in feathers and gizzards. But when it comes to writing “Acknowledgments,” Gorky may have been on to something. The basic hero of this book is man organized by the process of labor in the form of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Morgan Entrekin is my friend, my editor, my publisher, and my Hercules. He goes forth daily to perform his labors. He snatches the Pulitzer Prize–winning golden apple authors of the Hesperides, catches the Erymanthian Boar of bad writing before it gets into print, braves the poisonous fumes of the nine-headed Hydra of book reviewing, captures the Cerberus hell-hound of the modern book buyer’s attention span, and otherwise cleanses the Augean stables of the publishing industry. Count him among the immortals.
Associate publisher Judy Hottensen, publicity director Deb Seager, and publicist Scott Manning are saintly Melchior, Caspar, and Balthazar in the marketing of books. Never mind if this particular star they’re following is an ignis fatuus. In all other cases their gold, frankincense, and myrrh are delivered to the correct address.
Art director Charles Rue Woods works always in the heroic scale, as the cover of this tome attests. I salute his intrepid industry as he perched upon the rickety scaffold of my scribbling to give a Sistine Chapel ceiling to the privy I have constructed.
Associate editor Peter Blackstock is the Chevalier de Bayard, the knight sans peur et sans reproche of editing. Without Peter, there would have been no chivalry in the grubby battle to produce a book.
Copyeditor Don Kennison played brave Galileo during the tortures of the Inquisition to which I subjected spelling, punctuation, and the English language in general. Often I forced him to renounce his accurate contention that Earth’s prose style revolves around the sun of grammar and sense. But his courage never failed. He exited saying, “And yet it moves.”
Managing editor Amy Vreeland and production director Sue Cole have—what is more valiant?— managed and produced. No Penelope beset by suitors coped better than they with waiting for the long overdue Odysseus, in the form of corrected proofs, to come slay that horde of unwelcome swains known as deadlines.
And let us give medals and erect monuments to sales assistant Becca Putman, digital manager Michael Dudding, and social media manager Jessica Monahan. I confess, due to my e-senility, that I don’t know exactly what digital and social media managing are, so Michael and Jessica become my Unknown Soldiers, but here, as at Arlington, all the more honored for being so.
Lastly there are, among the paragons, eight muses rolled into one: my wife, Tina. She is Calliope, muse of epic poe
try, for inspiration in attempting to make an epic of the Baby Boom’s comedy, and Thalia, muse of comedy, for inspiration in attempting the reverse. She is Clio, muse of history, listening to my old stories over and over without letting her head explode. She is song’s Euterpe, crooning when things went well, tragedy’s Melpomene, comforting when things didn’t, and love’s Erato always. She is Polyhymnia for her hymns of praise and prayers of criticism. And she is Terpsichore in her dance of attendance upon the children and the household cares while I was locked in a room for sixteen hours a day writing or, as it is properly called, staring out the window doing nothing.
This leaves one muse, Urania, whose domain is astronomy. That would be my old hunting dog, Millie, who has spent the past year in an armchair in my office, staunch ally in staring out the window doing nothing.
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