Vox and the Boomers: Prejudice and Villification Explained

A couple of self-professed Millennials strike back at criticism of  their generation in the only way that Millennials apparently can: by trashing the Baby Boom generation.  It's been done before, in fact it's pretty much a media cliche.  But perhaps not with the consistent vitriol of Sean Illing's interview of author Bruce Gibney on the site called Vox.

Gibney, a venture capitalist and libertarian, is still being interviewed for his 2015 book A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America. The tenor of this generational hit piece in Vox can be found in the "questions", which never actually question Gibney's premises or choice of evidence, even for the purpose of clarification.  It's a lovefest of prejudice and vilification, that borders on hate speech.

Before considering the dubious merits of the argument, let's step back and look at what they are doing.  They indict at great length and in detail, an entire generation as principally responsible for wrecking the country, and they attribute certain characteristics to this generation.  If they were attributing the plunder and corruption of America to black people, it would be called racism.  If they blamed it on women or homosexuals, it would be sexism.  If they named Muslims or Jews, they would be called bigots.  But an older generation is fair game.  That's not prejudice, or bigotry, or guilt by association, or dangerous.

I say it is. Sure, it's natural for a younger generation to rebel against the older.  We certainly did--even though our parents' generation is now venerated as the Greatest Generation.  Well, some were, some weren't.  But this isn't just generational idealism expressed as rebellion.  This is vilification expressed in the same terms, and with the same ignorance, as racism and bigotry.  A Generation of Sociopaths? The proof is in the title.

As opposed to a functional category (like capitalists) or even a voluntary association that professes an ideology (like Republicans), you're part of a generation just because you were born into it.  Indicting a generation in these terms is like indicting a group defined by race, gender or ethnicity.  The onus inevitably falls on all individuals within it.

The Baby Boom is in one sense valid as a group--more so than, say, Millennials. Whereas "the Millennials" is just a made up marketing thing with no clear meaning (for it does not seem to designate the first group born in the 21st century, for instance), the Baby Boom, as the name suggests, was an actual phenomenon.  1946 marked the beginning of a steeply increasing number of births in America.  It was a demographic fact. The beginning and end dates are somewhat arbitrary, if nicely symmetrical: 1946 to 1964.

What distinguishes it as a generation is a combination of the effect of its numbers with its relationship to what happened during those years.  Some phenomena with social implications are clearly related to their numbers: more and bigger schools and hence a larger educational establishment, the growth and changing nature of television, the growth of suburbia, for instance.

That this is a big generation also accounts in part for the impact of activities involving some of its members.   Because that "some" was a lot in sheer numbers, in comparison with previous generations.  Any early boomer (born in the first third, between 1946 and 1952, say) can tell you that all the splashy stuff that has become the 1960s brand (hippies, anti-war and other political activists) were performed by a small minority of our age-group.  It's just that a small minority of a very big generation made for a large crowd--and eye-catching pictures.

So, for example, the idea suggested by the photo that accompanied the Vox hit job--- of swaying stoned longhairs in the park--that the turned-on generation became Reaganites, is trash thinking.

But regardless of whether you believe vilifying an entire generation vilifies all its members, let's look at their intellectually lazy and self-serving assertions about the Baby Boom.

 Gibney defines the cohort he is particularly writing about as the first two-thirds of the Baby Boom, or those born between 1946 and 1958.  He states his premise: "They were raised after the war and so have no real experience of trauma or the Great Depression or even any deprivation at all. More importantly, they never experienced the social solidarity that unfolded during war time and that helped produce the New Deal."

Okay, so let's assume that he knows that the New Deal preceded World War II. Apparently learning history from war movies and Depression nostalgia, and swallowing whole the PR paeans to the Greatest Generation, he assumes a solidarity that didn't exist, once the historical record is examined, or even a few biographies.  It was much more complicated.

But let's get to the years I experienced.  Born in June 1946, I am one of the first of the postwar Boomers.  It is astonishing to me that in the spring of 2018, as we recount the incredibly traumatic events of fifty years ago in 1968, that he can stay with a straight face that my generation had "no real experience of trauma."  That's ignorant and offensive. (Readers of my previous post, please forgive the repetitions that follow.)

There was first of all a little trauma called the Vietnam War, begun and carried forward by members of the Greatest Generation. Thousands of boomers died or were maimed, thousands returned traumatized for the rest of their lives.

 There were the assassinations of JFK, MLK, RFK and too many others.  There was the trauma of duck and cover drills in grade school, the Cuban Missile Crisis in high school, and the possibility of nuclear holocaust at any moment, every year of my life, for most of my life.

 There was racial violence in the South, cities everywhere burning in racial strife several times in the 1960s.  More than 300 people were killed in one 24 hour period during the riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King.

There was the draft, in which hundreds of thousands of  young men were sent against their will to die and to kill in a futile war, and there were the young people of my generation beaten, gassed and killed in protest demonstrations for various causes.

Yet members of my generation propelled the women's movement, gay liberation, the American Indian and Latino movements, as well as following our slightly older brothers and sisters in the Civil Rights movement.  Members of my generation postponed careers to serve in the Peace Corps, the International Volunteers Service and other organizations, in the sincere effort to help others.

And while the hippies may seem self-indulgent, many were rebelling against machine-like conformity in the service of predatory capitalism, searching for meaning and purpose.  Some were sincerely searching for spiritual alternatives. Some risked and sacrificed a lot in doing so.

As for boomers exploring alternatives that went against conventional medicine, a great deal of today's medicine is due to those explorations.  If some went overboard on exploring their own psychologies and settled for oversimplifications, the direction was needed. This society could use a a lot more self-knowledge.

As for the boomer generation not suffering "any deprivation at all," this is ignorant class prejudice.  You don't think any Baby Boomers grew up poor?  Or in struggling lower middle class families?   Or did these pompous dogmatists learn about the 1950s from Leave It To Beaver and Happy Days reruns?  Sorry but those weren't historical documents.

I remember surplus food, I remember the pall of fear in our classroom during a steel strike.  Have you guys ever even seen a picket line?  We also had actual parents and grandparents who experienced the Great Depression, the mine strikes, the quotas and the perils of immigration in the 20s.  These were flesh and blood connections your generation lacks.

In this interview, the Baby Boom generation as a whole is made responsible for Reagan, and all the economic catastrophes that resulted in the trashed economy and trashed planet that make life hard and sad for Millennials.  Why?  Because that big group born between 1946 and 1958 constituted the majority of voters, homeowners and solid citizens in the 1980s.  So we all voted for Reagan, right? None of us foresaw the consequences, or fought against them, or were in absolute despair?

By the way, if you were born in 1946, you got the vote in 1967.  My first vote was for Bobby Kennedy.  Oh wait, it wasn't.  The American people managed to elect Nixon twice without the Boomers in control.  The roots of what's happened to this society go back before boomers were in control of anything.

On the other hand, how about white people--weren't they the majority?  Why name the Boomers instead of white people?  Christians maybe? Or why not those nefarious right-handed folks? Way more of those.

The cause isn't there, and neither is the effect.  Members of my generation were selfish and politically deluded.  Like no Millennials are, of course.  By sheer numbers, the selfish, clueless and deluded boomers increased the power of the traditionally nefarious.  That hardly makes for an entire generation of sociopaths.

Unless you define a sociopathic generation as a particularly large one. Millennials therefore constitute a more virtuous generation because their generation is smaller. And of course, not sociopaths.

But these guys get even more ridiculous than that.  Get this exchange:

Sean Illing:
Something that doesn’t get discussed enough is how hostile so many of these boomers are to science. It’s not hard to connect this aversion to facts to some of these disastrous social policies.

Bruce Gibney:
This is a generation that is dominated by feelings, not by facts. The irony is that boomers criticize millennials for being snowflakes, for being too driven by feelings. But the boomers are the first big feelings generation. They’re highly motivated by feelings and not persuaded by facts. And you can see this in their policies.

You know, I heard that's true of black folks, too.  All feelings, no facts.  Must be their jungle blood.

And yes, you can definitely see this "in their policies."  Why at the last Baby Boomers national reunion, we decided that America should vote on our laws by pressing the Like button, or indicating our positions by means of emojs.

So I get that self-described Millennials are upset at being stereotyped, and have had their feelings hurt by being bashed as such.  Welcome to the club. I don't give Gibney a pass for anything.   But a site like Vox wants to appeal to their marketing demographic (which is the only thing that "Millennials" means.)  Vox appeals to its readers by explaining everything to them.  Really, nearly every article is in this form, viz: The past 72 hours in North Korea news, explained.  They have writers called "explainers."  Not too juvenile or anything.

So let me explain something.  You vilify me, I don't give you my clicks.  Vox is off my daily news bookmarks list.  You may not want me, you may think you don't need me, but if you want an explanation, you've just read it.