The Icepick Cometh

Meh.

It was not a great and rousing speech — yes, his personal story is rich and worthy, and at another time, perhaps in place of either Bush, Sen. John McCain could have been (past tense) a fine president (or at least better than either Bush). But like his Silent Generation cohorts, he still seems more of a behind-the-scenes worker. Just like those of a prior generation (but of the same generational type, as Strauss & Howe defined it) — Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John C. Calhoun — he is a Great Compromiser (not, of course, a compromiser of his own ideals but rather a person who can get two sides to talk ). And though his backstory inspires, he himself lacks that inspirational touch of a leader.

That's as much the reality of his generation as it is of John S. McCain.

You can see it in his speaking.

What could have been the most powerful part of his speech, where he at last made the very frequent drawing on his own POW history relevant (it's been powerful, yes, but relevant?), where he said he hoped no family should go through what his has in War, he topped the ball rather than drive it solidly.

I still don't know if it was a problem of delivery — he was getting there, his voice rising in power. But he didn't finish the note with a flourish, with inspiration in his voice. I originally thought this was a failing of the speechwriting, rather than the delivery.

I'm running for President to keep the country I love safe, and prevent other families from risking their loved ones in war as my family has. I will draw on all my experience with the world and its leaders, and all the tools at our disposal — diplomatic, economic, military and the power of our ideals — to build the foundations for a stable and enduring peace.

See? Re-reading it, it reads so much better than when he spoke it. This is where a great speaker can inspire the masses, something as true and as old as the ancient Greek democrats themselves, something the GOP has been deriding lately, but overlooking (oddly, they the Party of the Great Communicator).

What did turn out to be the most powerful part of his speech, the "a cause greater than yourself" line, resonated with me. It echoed in some ways the JFK and Obama calls to service.

If you find faults with our country, make it a better one. If you're disappointed with the mistakes of government, join its ranks and work to correct them. Enlist in our Armed Forces. Become a teacher. Enter the ministry. Run for public office. Feed a hungry child. Teach an illiterate adult to read. Comfort the afflicted. Defend the rights of the oppressed. Our country will be the better, and you will be the happier. Because nothing brings greater happiness in life than to serve a cause greater than yourself.

Some of these, ironically, harken to Obama's derided days as a Community Organizer ("Defend the rights of the oppressed") and one of them recalls a famous calling of the newspaper business: "Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." (Of course, I once drank the Kool-Aid and felt that way about journalism (and still do in many ways). My skills were in writing, in curiosity, in seeking truth and telling people about it. I felt like I could use my skills to make the country a better place in many ways, I really did (sniff). But his Party hates the media, so what I have to offer the country is useless, according to them. Cheers. And I digress.) That's McCain, though: unpredictable as ever.

Still, there were not enough specifics for my taste in tonight's speech (with the notable exception of the "doubling the child tax exemption from $3,500 to $7,000" and a few others), and too much of the GOP's old party lines.

Otherwise, I cannot dislike McCain. He is honorable. He has served and suffered. Yes, he is a hero. If it had to be a Republican the last eight years, why couldn't it have been him? In many ways I like him better than the bitter Pelosi and Reid in Congress. Not so much the very ambitious-sounding Palin (the third song played playing after McCain concluded his speech was Heart's "Barracuda," and McCain better what his back from someone who, gifted speaker as she is, clearly seems to like the spotlight — fine for the person at the top of the ticket, maybe not so much for the Veep, eh?).

(Minor point: I can't make that much of this, since I thought it was bullshit when it was called on Obama, but where was McCain's flag pin on his lapel? Granted, you can in no way question McCain's patriotism, but this only serves to point out the ridiculousness of questioning Obama's.)

(On the other hand, McCain needs to watch out for the ambitious Veep selection he's selected — talk about a pragmatic Gen X'er, grabbing the brass ring and not letting go!)

All that said, and like I said with Hillary, Obama is simply a better choice this time around. That's no dis on McCain (or Hillary, for that matter). Don't blame him. It's just his generation.
 

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Sorry about my progressive brethren bashing her speech tonight, and I agree with absolutely nothing she said (in fact, was enraged throughout with what she was saying, especially in mocking community organizers — has Sarah Palin ever been in a big city, ever shook the hands and cared for someone in an inner city setting?), but Obama-Biden have a real fight on their hands.

The Republicans do nothing better than fire up their base and encourage them to come out in overwhelming, angry numbers from those small towns I know so well. They do this much better than the Dems do in pulling in their own base (in a battle between bringing in college students vs. small-town residents on Election Day, never bet on the college students). Palin may get an "F" for content — frankly, she misrepresented Obama's position on taxes and there's a lot of talk about her late-coming opposition to the Alaskan bridge-to-nowhere — but I think Gov. Sarah Palin hit it out of the park as far as delivery. Sorry, but it's true.

You can hate everything she said, you can make fun of her accent or her sneers all you want, but she was probably the best speaker with the best delivery among the Republicans since the primaries began. I'd be worried about meeting her again on the national campaign trail in four or eight years.

I'm wondering how many voters from my own Generation X will swing toward McCain with a running mate from the 28- to 47-year-old set that was Raised on Reagan. Oh sure, all the people I know would never consider voting for him, no matter who he was running with. But that's a small, mostly urban-leaning segment of the population. My own generation, I still believe, is largely conservative.

And don't underestimate the Hockey Mom appeal — as Campbell Brown was saying a little while ago on CNN, that femininity, that "mom-ness" (for lack of a better word, and I'm paraphrasing here) carriers a lot of weight for many voters. (Brown later questioned Harry Reid's use of the word "shrill" to describe Palin's speech, noting that word is almost always used to describe a woman, not a man. That kind of response from Reid is not what Obama needs.)

And to take Brown's analysis a step further, there will be women, moms especially but feminists too, who will vote for McCain-with-Palin, even as Palin stands against everything they themselves stand for and have fought for, simply because they can connect with her. And, no, I am not talking about Hillary's former and still supporters. I'm talking about the fence-sitters.

Even Hillary connected with women as a Woman, but not necessarily as a Mom, not in the way that Palin I think just did, simply by dint of having more children to trot out onto a stage.

Finally, frankly, McCain is savvier than credit has been given him. By announcing the Veep pick as soon as the Democratic Convention was over, but not a minute sooner, he didn't let the Dems attack her during Prime Time Convention TV. But by also airing the family's pregnancy laundry publicly, he surely must have anticipated the media firestorm that would have resulted (there's unfortunately more focus on that than there has been over legitimate criticisms, such as her lack of experience, her back-and-forth on pork-barrel spending, and her husband's past connection to a secessionist movement; as always, sex sells in the public imagination; and there's also this.).

And, of course, a big enough media firestorm that they can (accurately or not) link to the Democrats against a defendable Republican (i.e., not Larry Craig) almost always produces a bitter, well-organized, how-dare-you, victimized backlash that brings out the loyal troops, picking up steam and on-the-fencers along the way. Well played, McCain.

This is a real fight, and if you don't believe me and underestimate this, then get ready for four years of McCain-Palin.

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McCain's VP choice and her very public position on the Abortion debate aside, I have been uncomfortable with some aspects of the discussion over her teen daughter's pregnancy. While very relevant in light of Palin's anti-Choice politics, and relevant to the so-called Family Values debates and the moral high ground claimed by the Republicans, that's exactly where the line should be drawn and end. Does it mean the VP is a bad mom more focused on her career than her children? There's a lot to criticize Sarah Palin over, and I'm not sure I'm ready to level that as a criticism.

Now, does it relate to her anti-Choice politics and the general Republican theme that strong morals and a Family Values-style upbringing is the sole cure to curbing teenage pregnancy (and evidently all the other ills perpetrated by those godless liberals)? You bet it relates. But I almost want to wear kid gloves with her over this whole issue.

Perhaps it's that I know enough wonderful non-traditional families in which the children were born to a young mom, or to unmarried couples, or to adoptive parents (married or united). So as much as the debate relates to Palin and McCain — and even the quick statements from their campaigns that the young couple will wed makes me wonder if, in trying to show that the couple is "doing the right thing," they're also leveling a subtle insult to non-traditional families — I must admit to some discomfort over some of the criticism.

Now, on the other hand, her prior (though very recent) courtship of the Alaskan secessionists and her husband's enrollment in that party is more than fair game — the gloves come off for that one, and come off with a quickness. Talking Points Memo closes their recent post on this issue with this:

It's worth pondering how big a deal it would be if Obama had ever courted the support of a group whose head had said this kind of thing about America and her flag. Oh, wait...

And while we're on it, questions about the State Trooper scandal and her lobbyist's connections are also open to close public examination.
 

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There's a throwaway shot in the opening episode of Generation Kill, which premiered on Sunday night on HBO, that establishes that These Are Not Your Father's Marines. With the sun setting on their encampment, two silhouetted Marines wearing boxing gloves throw some wild, leaping kicks at each other without ever throwing a punch.

The wide shot lasts for a mere few seconds as we transition from one scene to the next, but it's a telling few seconds — previous generation's warriors might climb into the base ring and go at it for a few rounds as a physical way of blowing off steam. Today's soldiers and Marines (and by extension, today's civilian 20-somethings) are bred on MMA and video games (and as we see in this episode too, irony and satire) and are more likely to engage in driveway boxing or backyard wrestling as they are a game of baseball on the base. As Mark Kriegel once wrote of this generation (he was talking about civilians), "These are the guys who made 300 a huge hit."

I don't know if it is too early to call it a profane version of Band of Brothers or merely the Marines version of The Wire, but after watching that premier episode for the third time, I am ready to be hooked again on another David Simon show, if only for the seven-episode arc of this miniseries adaption of Evan Wright's book.

But that transitional shot aside, I am hoping that the new HBO miniseries will go beyond the War is Hell and the They're Different Millennial/Gen X Soldier themes we've already seen in Iraq War (I and II)-related movies, like Three Kings (one of my favorites) and Jarhead. Those movies, to varying degrees, covered the nihilism apparently necessary in modern warriors, along with the misogyny, racism and homophobia which is presented at times as a coping mechanism in a World Gone Mad and also as something obviously deadly and seriously wrong (sometimes all in the same scene or in the same line of dialogue, though certainly not always or with all characters).

You never really saw any of this to the same degree in previous war movies about previous wars, with one notable exception that I can think of — Full Metal Jacket.

More to the point, and where I think and hope this new show is going, and as the Newark Star-Ledger's Alan Sepinwall has observed, Generation Kill's first episode is already setting up the David Simon theme of the individual vs. the institution which he explored for five seasons of The Wire — the futility of One vs. The Machine, the lack of Voice for the knowing rank-and-file vs. the obliviousness of management (even if this obliviousness is sometimes necessary).

This is all not to say that older warriors never used gallows humor or said things among themselves that they'd never say in public — shhhh, go into any locker room in the country, or for that matter, spend time in an all-male office.

And, as Sepinwall also noted, it's interesting getting thrown into a new show and being thoroughly confused and not understanding a thing about it for the first 30 minutes, and then still needing repeat viewings of the same episode to gain greater understanding. I used to enjoy mocking those who complained that the Baltimore world of The Wire was too dense and difficult to understand for novices, but I forgot how hard and yet how rewarding it can be discovering a new world on an intelligent TV show.

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I admit I was hoping for more liberal politics (I'm a liberal, after all, though I prefer "progressive," much the same way conservatives prefer that label rather than "reactionary"), but this post from The Root on Obama's pragmatism reflects my own thoughts from a week ago.

Here's a sample from "The Audacity of Pragmatism" by John H. McWhorter:

Politics is about pragmatism and compromise—even for leftists, even for black ones.

and

Some Obama fans, one suspects, would almost savor that as an opportunity to go martyr, decrying how the evil system thwarted the audacity of hope.

Check out this New York Times article — "In Illinois, Obama Proved Pragmatic and Shrewd" by Janny Scott — from last year for more examples of Obama's necessary practicality, a trait that reflects our generation even more than anyone's left or right political leaning.
 

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Perhaps it is the right time for a reckoning of sorts. We've spent a lot of space here slagging on the Boomers, and justly so. But this is not to forget what my own generation has wrought.

I was reminded of this by a comment from an obviously angry Boomer to a Talking Points Memo Café Reader Post last week, and also because I was returning some videos, er, up late last night watching American Psycho on HBOZ (which I think is an underrated, though often poorly directed, satire on the ’80s. I'm digressing again, I know.)

My generation largely revered Reagan as youngsters, looked up to late-Boomer (and early Gen X'er) Yuppies and DINKs and the ’80s stockbroker culture, to say nothing of unleashing Charlie Sheen (both in real life and Bud Fox from Wall Street). My generation also whelped Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity (both born in 1961, the same year as Obama). My own politics aside, we were fast on our way to becoming a more conservative generation than our parents — think Alex P. Keaton and you're not far off the mark — at least until George W. Bush came along.

According to Michael Connery on TPM Café, late-era Baby Boomers and Gen Xers are still the most conservative segment of voters in the country, raised in part during the boom of College Republicans in the 1980s and into the 1990s, during a time period, Connery notes, when Democrats ceded the seeding of the next generation of would-be liberals in the aftermath of Mondale and Dukakis. Democrats didn't begin to rise again until after Bill Clinton came to power, who nevertheless appealed more to the centrist base represented by the Democratic Leadership Council than traditional liberals.

In Strauss & Howe's book Generations, the authors note that in 15 of 16 polls from 1981 to 1988, my generation gave Ronald Reagan a higher approval rating than other other generation, except for the still-living members of Gen X's related generation, the Lost Generation (born between 1883-1900).

All is not lost, though, from my Progressive perspective. In fact, Republicans have to be kicking themselves for potentially blowing it with the Young because of the turn-off of George W. Bush — I wonder if, in the back of their minds, this is where some of the Republican backlash at Bush is coming from. Not that former Bush-supporters are suddenly going to become liberals, but the lustre is long gone.

Still, aside from Obama's popularity with my generation, and especially with the Millennials, it's possible the majority of my generation (born 1961-approx. 1980) may end up considered more conservative.

But putting the Left and Right aside, Gen X is nearly certain to end up in the Pragmatic camp, regardless of how that is defined on the political spectrum.

You see this already in Obama's post-primary shift in recent weeks, if not true to his hoped-for liberal roots, to some centrist-sounding stances. It's rather easy seeing the more centrist Hillary taking the position Obama recently staked on the FISA amendment, for instance, until you consider the gains he may realize from this position in the general election, as well as his necessary reversal to rejecting public campaign funding.

If you follow Strauss & Howe's logic and timeline, our "reactive" or "nomad" generational type, bound together as we are by our birth years, typically is less interested in ideology and more concerned about getting things done. Our "doing-what-you-gotta-do" generation is the only true way to combat the excess of the Boomers, which will haunt us for years to come with longer lifestyles embodied by "spending our children's inheritance" attitudes in prolonged retirement (hey, at least we're not Europe).

I consider myself a Pragmatic Progressive (as I would consider Obama, considering his life story and borne out by his recent political moves). Pragmatism is a hallmark of our generation. Pragmatism was the way we survived (if not thrived) growing up and beginning our careers, and it certainly will be the way we mature as leaders and advise as elders in old age. Think Harry S Truman or Eisenhower (especially upon Ike's exit, warning of the growing power of the institutions he helped promote), both members of the Lost Generation that Strauss & Howe links through history to Gen X.

Even the Wall Street types we helped popularize understand this pragmatism in coming out and supporting Obama. (link to Daily News via Talking Points Memo)

Time will tell if our conservative base or our pragmatism (or both) define Gen X in the history books, as we have the very real possibility of electing our generation's first president in the liberal yet pragmatic Barack Obama.

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Nice theory by pollster John Zogby about the end of Boomerism as we know it. Unfortunately, the Baby Boomers are like a Freddy or a Jason flick — just when you think they're dead, they're not dead.

I largely doubt this is the end of the Clintons, or the Bushes for that matter. Not only will their influence last for decades — the Boomers threaten to be the longest-lived generation ever, thanks to medical science — but their age-cohorts fill Congress and will likely overtake the Supreme Court — even an Xer like Obama can't stop that.

And while the Silents silently bemoan never electing one of their own as president (unless McCain pulls an upset of Da'Tara proportions), the Boomers can self-absorbedly whine about not having a stake in this election.

Not to worry. The Boomers, by the count I agree with, span the ages of 65 to 48, meaning they'll be 69 to 52 in 2012 and 73 to 56 in 2016. Even the oldest of the Boomers won't be too old to run in those years. This is, after all, also the Botox Generation, so while McCain makes 72 look like, well, 72, a 77-year-old Boomer will look like half that age in time for the coming Crisis of 2020. And with our luck (and thanks again to Science), that 77-year-old on the campaign trail of 2020 will not only be collecting retirement benefits (which my half-sized generation will be paying for with blood), but will also likely extend her life-expectancy to 126, or until around 2069, just in time to ruin the New Sixties!

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As I've previously said, I agree with the Strauss and Howe cut-off of 1961 to divide Boomers and Gen Xer's. Obviously, it's an arbitrary and symbolic date, but one that works for these reasons:

• The Pill was first marketed as a birth-control device in mid-1960 (impacting 1961 birth rates).
• Except for a slight upward tick at the start of the '60s, U.S. birth rates began their long decline into the 1970s, when Roe vs. Wade helped make Generation X the most aborted generation in history.
• The difference in attitudes and life goals between those born in the '50s vs. those born in the '60s. It's not as much as a stretch as you might think, argue Strauss and Howe.

Special thanks to our tipster and unanimous decider, Lord Jim, for directing us to Zogby's HuffPost article.
 

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Looking at the largely over-50 women and men disrupting the Democratic Rules Committee this afternoon with their sad Woodstocky cry of Denver! Denver! I realized something I had not previously considered. When people like them claim that this is the last chance ever for a woman to become president (which, if you believe that, then what the hell was the feminist movement about — promoting women's rights or promoting Hillary Clinton?), what they really mean is that this is the last chance for there ever to be be a Baby Boomer woman president, which might be true.

Because just like their hero, these Boomers are "all about me." It's not that there will never be a another woman who can be president (and one who hopefully won't need to ride her husband's coattails to rise to the Senate and beyond — you call that an inspirational story for women everywhere?). It's just possibly the last chance for a woman born before 1960 to become president. Quite frankly, it might possibly the last chance for any Baby Boomer to reach the White House.

Want to see the level of contempt Hillary has for the next generations? Right now on her official Hillblazers Web page — the page for "Young Leaders for Hillary in 2008" — the dominant item on the page is something called "Project T-shirt," which states: "We need your help to make a critical decision -- our next official campaign t-shirt."

So, on the day of the Rules Committee meeting, when her candidacy hangs in the balance, the major message on her Web page specifically geared toward the Next Generation is to design a fucking T-shirt. Not go out and protest with the Boomers. Go make a pretty picture to print onto a freebie.

In other words, you're too young to be of any good of us other than making a logo. This is perfect, because it's indicative of what both the Clintons and her Baby Boomer supporters are all about. I can just see her marketing department dreaming this up, like it's some bullshit corporate gain-share team-building exercise — "I know, let's draw in some younger voters by having them design a decal for a T-shirt. That's what the young kids like to do now, with their Photoshop and whatnot. It will help us 'connect' while letting the younger voters think that we think they're important."

To be fair, Hillblazers has links down the side with "5 Things You Can Do!," like becoming a Hillary supporter on the Facebook and other newfangled social networks.

I have to say I am truly sad for any Gen X'er or Millennial who supports this candidate, especially since she and her advisers see you as nothing other than expendable pawns in her campaign.

Incidentally, Obama has a Web page for his younger supports, too, called Generation Obama (ahem, and who coined a headline using a similar phrase? Um, yours truly) talking about grassroots activism and starting a support chapter in your community, with not a hint of anything so condescending as designing a fucking T-shirt.

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OK, now that we got that out of the way, check out this headline from Talking Point's Memo: Who's Disenfranchised? by Josh Marshall. This expresses what I've been cooking in the back of my brain but never made the full jump to put into words: If those in Florida and Michigan who voted for Hillary are so "disenfranchised," what about the people in those states who did not go out and vote at all on those days because they were told that their Primary was not going to count?

Now those people's voices will only be heard as part of this compromise Hillary supporters have unsatisfactorily pressured the Democratic leaders to concoct today, by counting those two against-the-rules elections at a 50% discount.

This does not erase the fact that people didn't vote in those primaries because they were told it was more-or-less a mock election, like those elections we used to do in middle school when the candidates were Reagan, Mondale and Bill the Cat. Hillary had no compunction to disenfranchise those would-be voters by making those elections "real," essentially discarding their worth as ballot-casters in order to change the rules to suit her. Typical of Hillary. Typical of a Boomer.

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Bit of a running commentary a couple of weeks ago on Gawker worth revisiting to determine if Obama is a Baby Boomer or a Gen Xer (among other running commentaries). His birthdate of 1961 makes it problematic, putting him right at that cutoff birthyear range defined by Strauss & Howe, who argue that Gen X (they called it the 13th generation) began in 1961. Others say this generation began in 1965.

I've already argued that Obama belongs to the later generation, but true to anyone born around the border year between two generations, he exhibits traits of both generations.

He would have been too young after just turning age 8 (if not too impressionable or, more likely traumatized) to experience the excess of Woodstock in 1969 the same way the Boomers did. Yet, I don't think he would have been too old at age 32 to be listening to Nirvana when Kurt Cobain committed suicide in 1994.

He has both the idealism of the Boomers and the pragmatism of the X'ers.

To put perhaps too fine a point on it, birthrates peaked around 1957, saw a slight decline during the recession of 1958 (which didn't hit the U.S. as hard as it did elsewhere in the world), and then peaked again in 1961 (I haven't had the time to see if the recent inclusion of new states Alaska and Hawaii impacted 1961's numbers vs. 1957's, but I can't image it was terribly significant). Then birthrates took its steep decline into my decade of the 1970s, likely spurred on by the unrest in the national mood, a slowing economy and increasing use of birth control and Roe v. Wade (January 1973).

But if you need a cutoff date (and I think I do) I'm calling it 1961 based on this alone: The FDA first approved the Pill for contraceptive use on June 23, 1960, which would start impacting fertility rates in 1961. True, Wikipedia conservatively estimates a half-million women were using Enovid for three years before that (the FDA initially approved it for menstrual disorders before OK'ing its use for birth control). But if you need a cutoff, I'd say place it at nine months after June 23, 1960 — I'll let you round it back to the start of 1961 for convenience's sake. (You could keep making arguments for cutoff dates revolving around Pill history — when it was first marketed after the FDA approved its use for birth control, when every state allowed all married and unmarried women to use it, etc., but I'm using the first date — that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.)

Anyway, this was spawned by the above-linked Gawker posting, which was inspired by backlash to a recent Radar article.

EDS NOTE: Originally published on our WordPres.com site at theicepickcometh.wordpress.com on Saturday, May 17, at 12:57 a.m., during that week when this Blogger blog was locked. Just wanted to get it posted on this site, too, to continue our Generational conversation.

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The Clinton ego machine rolls on, continuing to try its best to produce the first-ever president from the Silent Generation, represented in the form of the 70-ish John McCain.

The New York Times had a good article on McCain's generation a few Mondays ago. The article correctly echoes the research Strauss and Howe wrote about in their Generations book more than a decade ago when they, too, mentioned that the Silents have never had one of their own elected as president (the Times notes it as the generation born in the 1930s).

Born in and around the Great Depression, too young to fight in World War II, then raised and coming of age in the prosperous and mostly conforming 1950s, "smothered" and over-protected by their parents and society at large.

Re-reading that, I think of my son. Born in a recession in an era of protecting children (perhaps over-protecting, as witnessed by the vitriol over New York Sun columnist (and NYC-living) Lenore Skenazy's decision to let her 9-year-old son ride the subway alone), with perhaps a longer-term war underway and hopefully brighter economic days on the far side of all this (sometime around 2019, perhaps).

McCain's is a generation that produced Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis, an in-between generation, too young to fight the Great War (and gain the glory and amass the power while perfecting the institutions laid out by FDR), but also too old to be part of the future sell-out hippies of the Baby Boomers. As film directors, think 1930s-born Woody Allen or Clint Eastwood and Francis Ford Coppola — either neurotic or lyrical, but thoughtful either way.

I find this interesting not just because of the implications for my son and our future, but also because of this inter-generational presidential race — at the moment, it's between members of three different generations. Hard as it may be to separate the issues of race and gender on their own, but think how each of the candidates formed their world views not only because of what they saw and experienced, but at what ages they were when went through these personality-forming experiences.

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I'm no economist. But if you make a bad deal as a homeowner, it's too bad on you. If you make a bad deal and you're Bear Stearns, then the Gov't gets to bail you out, even if it did a shitty job itself?

OK, that said, Win Ben Stein's Money column in Sunday's Times about executive pay is interesting. To quote:

In other words, it’s not a pretty picture. It shrieks greed and contempt for shareholders and workers. …

Now we come to a sad fact about modern American life. It was brought up by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who often said that America, through its technology, has made of itself a neighborhood, but not a brotherhood. It is a lot worse now. The nation has become, to some at the top, far more of a looting opportunity than a family.

I am not sure where this has come from — maybe from media that glamorize wealth and high-end consumption, maybe from poor moral training.

Or maybe it's now that the Baby Boomers, into their 60's and 50's and fully running the country, can set their own level of greed and continue on their course to justify their own ambitions and world view, while socking it to the next generation. Thanks, Greedy Ones!

Ah, the Boomers. Here's a completely unscientific (but revealing, to my mind) example: after a quick search and some math on three Executives cited early in the Sunday Times' story on Big Pay for Big Shots — Lawrence J. Ellison of Oracle, Alan G. Lafley of Procter & Gamble and Lloyd C. Blankfein of Goldman Sachs — reveal ages of roughly 63, 61 and 53, respectively. Those are the prime birth years of the Baby Boomers: 1945 to 1955.

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Perhaps the greatest knock against Hillary and Bill's campaign is their overwhelming sense of her entitlement to the office that will be decided this November. It says here that while that seemingly mimics the Clintonian ethos, it has as much to do with two numbers:

• 1947


• 1961

The first number is Hillary's birth year, with her coming into the world smack dab in the original Baby Boom.

The second is Obama's birth year, teetering between the aforementioned Baby Boom and the next generation, one much reviled by their older fellow Americans — commonly, often derisively, but here, proudly known as Generation X.

Hillary has endured many slights in her career, some perhaps imagined, and some very real, despite the propensity for the Republican opposition to taunt that she is claiming false injuries, all the while holding the bloody hammer behind their proverbial backs.

But in competing neck-and-neck with a younger upstart, one who may or may not be considered part of her own generation, Hillary is enduring the sleightest of slights — possibly losing the nomination to a younger, seemingly undeserving Party compatriot.

It's a typical reaction of Baby Boomers, and it shows, without a doubt, what generation Hillary considers Barack to be a part of — and it ain't her own.

Obama may enthuse some of the seemingly naïve we-can-change-the-world attitude that is both the best and one of the worst aspects of the Baby Boomers. But I don't believe his agenda it is born of a naïveté, this yearning for hope. Rather, it is really the best part of my generation — a practicality born of a world weariness acquired before one's time.

Hillary, for sure, deserves some props for her own well-paid-for world weariness, which has helped produce an almost impenetrable suit of armor, which she needs to hold her own against every kind of backlash she faces, some very much of the male chauvanist kind (this armor, unfortunately, renders the wearer incapable of producing empathy for said-wearer, a few well-timed New Hampshire tears aside).

But, remember, Hillary is very much a product of her generation. To quote her Web site, in discussing her parents and upbringing: "The life that Hugh and Dorothy created for Hillary and her two brothers was a classic 1950s middle-class suburban childhood."

Gen Xers, on the other hand, were first portrayed as slackers as young adults. See Obama's high school and college years in Hawaii and then L.A. and New York (he buckled down somewhat when he transferred to Columbia) if you want some examples of honest slacking masking an untapped reservoir of talent and potential. This generation has have been children of divorce, more so than most other generations, certainly the Boomers. Barack has got it on this account, too.

But we have also been a generation to grab what we could when we could, since the Boomers were and still are keeping the best pieces of pie for themselves, and borrowing against our future to make sure their pie is well-filled long into what should be our peak earning years. They're still telling the waitress to put it on our tab, that's all.

Obama, perhaps running before his time, perhaps stepping on some toes as the know-it-all upstart. Maybe his birthdate is a a little too early to be considered a "true" Gen Xer (though the social scientists Strauss and Howe would put him at the start of what they call the 13th Generation, their post-Boomer grouping). But teetering on the brink of both generations, he's looking more and more like he'd fall in the latter one.

And as a truly practical Gen Xer, where many see a usurper, he sees an opportunity, one aided by timing and not a little bit of good fortune (some would call it luck), leading him to this particular momentum swing. That's not only a Gen X trait, that's an American success story.

Meanwhile, this could-be Gen Xer has sped past one Baby Boomer woman, shaking her head, if not her generation's entitled fist.

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In an op-ed piece Sunday in the Dallas Morning News — linked via NPR and appearing in longer-form in City Journal, the conservative Manhattan Institute's self-described "premier urban-policy magazine" — Brooklyn author Kay Hymowitz is upset: "Not so long ago, the average mid-twentysomething had achieved most of adulthood's milestones — high school degree, financial independence, marriage and children. These days he lingers — happily — in a new hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance."

Oh, shit, where do I start on this one?

The author goes on: "It's time to state what is now obvious to the legions of frustrated young women: The limbo doesn't bring out the best in them."

First off, I’m a little old for this generation — my Generation X is older than this unnamed generation (please do not call them Generation Y — what are we going to do next: call the succeeding kids Generation Z, followed by Generation A¹ or AA?) Even so, my "older" generation of workers mostly in their 30s (let’s say 28 to 42) is barely struggling to maintain financial independence at an age when our parents had more securely achieved that goal. Given that, and given that the Baby Boomers are living longer, working longer and holding on to the better jobs longer, is there any surprise for this apparent extended adolescence, and is that such a bad thing?

(Digression: With a lack of advancement opportunities — or an effective outright blockage to enter into certain fields because of lingering Boomer hoarding — workers under 40 have shown they can and must excel in new industries and media, shunning the traditional roles and companies that Boomers have clung to for so long. Members of Generation X and this succeeding generation have long known they must carve out their own niche and hustle to get what they can — the good ones do this, anyway. Hymowitz is correct about that "responsible self-reliance" she mentions. The others are idle and waiting, and, yes, perhaps lapse into wasting. But for both the hustlers and the idle ones, their daily decompression, like the new economy, is new, perhaps raw, and it is fueled by the easy retail credit creating this false affluence in this country. It is a way of dealing with growing into flexible careers in-flux unlike anything their parents dealt with. If anything, the next battle will be between the older Gen X’ers and the Next Gen of workers 10 to 15 years younger looking to take their jobs).

Curiously though, author Hymowitz excludes criticizing women from this prolonged adolescence phase, and focuses her attention on the deficiencies of men. In her argument, your average modern 20-something woman is an overachiever who spends her disposable income on evidently worthy and traditional pursuits such as shopping, travel and dining with friends. So in her world, “Sex and the City” = good. “Entourage” = bad.

Meanwhile, she seems to long for the days of the 1950s and ’60s while at the same time clearly seems to be praising the "hyperachieving" "New Girl Order" (her words) and rising female power in the workplace. So she seems to want men who are breadwinners and do the laundry. Well, I suppose that's essentially what every man wants, too, so I guess we're even.

Except a man's pursuits, be it today's XBox and "Maxim" magazine or the social clubs and "Field and Stream" magazines of yore are unworthy. Side note: one of her good points is that men's aversion to settling down is not an entirely new phenomenon — past generations of men simply got married then avoided their wives in social (and exclusionary) clubs. But at least those men got married and had kids, she seems to be praising.

I mean, didn't she ever see “Mad Men”? Oh sure, let's bring back the ’60s, when white men only had to compete with other white men in the workplace marketplace. Is this what she is arguing for? A return to the repressed old days, when a woman like her would not be able to find a place in the marketplace, because there was largely no marketplace for women professionals? How many happy marriages from the 1950s made by teenagers and kids in their early 20s resulted in divorce, broken homes, affairs, or, perhaps as bad, a lifetime of general unhappiness, unfulfillment and uncomfortable silences? On the one hand she is praising modern women's power, ingenuity and drive and on the other she is asking for a return to young marriage when an inexperienced woman on her wedding night was as likely to been given the following advice by her own mother: just lie back, think of old England and let him do his thing on you.

If these men should in their 20s simply need to "grow up," then whom should they marry and have children with but women in the same age? And anyone from my mother's generation to my wife's will tell you how much harder it is to build a career with a child. So, this writer's response would be is to tell the man to help shoulder the burden of childrearing so the woman can continue with her career. The predictable next criticism (based on this logic) would be that the man would next be criticized for not being enough of a bread-winner.

Even today's men who do becomes ostensibly good dads today aren't good enough for her. Far be it from me to defend shameless self-promoting author Neal Pollack (Alternadad), but she nails him for being a doting father by focusing on his urge to turn his son into a little version of himself — um, so you're not supposed to share interests with your kids? In her world, she'd rather have the distant, unemotive, cold and tactical male leader as a dad, sort of like Hugh Beaumont on “Leave it To Beaver” or the guy on “Father Knows Best,” presumably so he ran raise a daughter or son who will grow up hating him for being so distant, unemotive and male-dominant.

Her opening financial arguments are equally as weak. You work in a cubicle and live in an apartment because the Baby Boomers took up all the good fucking housing and then drove the market nuts in buying second homes and McMasions. The only way you could get your own home was to take out a variable-rate mortgage, with unfortunately predictable results (read: U.S. Economy, January 2008).

Her selective use of statistics is also interesting, and the classic ruse of someone with nothing real to say. She cites the rise in the median age of marriage for men and the percentage of married 25- and 30-year-olds — and runs with it. Everything else is anecdotal evidence and riffs against box-office and best-selling successes targeted at the audience she criticizes. Excluding for same-sex marriages, more unmarried men means more unmarried women. But somehow this only the fault of men, based on her conversational evidence — "in contemporary female writing and conversation, the words 'immature' and 'men' seem united in perpetuity." No stats to back this up, of course (it "seems" indeed). And is the "contemporary female writing" she cites the same as "chit lit," that genre that celebrates single, unmarried women of the “Sex and the City” variety? If this is a problem (and I am in no way saying it is) this is a problem for both genders.

(I, myself, use no statistics in presenting my argument, but I'm a blogger, not a senior fellow at an important conservative think tank whose stuff shows up on NPR occasionally and who, incidentally, I can't get a handle on: in 1994 she evidently argued in the New York Times against sex education in schools (in favor of apparently benign ignorance) but also smartly argued against marketing to young children (she told the Times in 1999: "One of the great things about childhood in the U.S. used to be that kids were protected by the market and allowed to grow their own ideas. Now there is no time to be a kid separate from those pressures. You may have always had kids who are little princesses, but now there are 8-year-old boys that are extremely uptight if they don't get the right Abercrombie & Fitch sweat shirt.").)

(A digression: where can I get one of these research and writing jobs at a Manhattan institute or some other think-tank? Or were the last ones swallowed up by Baby Boomers, who again locked the door on the way in?)

(One other side note that I can't argue with her is the inner-city atmosphere of young boys going out to the corner in their teens to "be a man" and support their single mothers (with dads largely absent). Though not addressed in her "child-man" piece, in fairness to author Hymowitz, a Google search shows that she has addressed this issue many times elsewhere, so we'll call it a wash on this matter.)

Where are the men still living with their parents? Most of them are out by 24, and if they remain, or if they room up with a few other guys in an apartment — it's only because a Baby Boomer-favored real estate market conspires against them. Most of them are saving for their own place. The rest of them are the small-majority who will continue to live with their parents, remain unmarried into their peak earning years and then still live at home to care for their sickly and now-burdensome parents in their late-twilight years.

The author strangely attributes the ground-zero event of this generation to the debut of "Maxim" magazine in April 1997. Strange that an entire generation can be ruined (in her implication) in the debut of a magazine that featured the girl from the Drew Carrey Show (the hot one, not his plus-sized heavily made-up co-worker) on the cover.

Let's take a final look at these irresponsible 20-something lads. The newest television show to appeal to this grouping (a show she curiously doesn't mention, though it would seem to fall exactly into her category) is “Entourage.” At first glance, it is seems to be everything she hates — a male wish-fulfillment fantasy depicting 20- or 30-something men with outlandish money at their disposal (the main character is a Hollywood actor) and obscene access to beautiful women. It celebrates partying, hanging with your bros, even video game-playing. The only married guy on the show (the agent Ari) envies the young men's unmarried freedom.

But what this author forgets, and on closer glance this series depcits, is the hustle that is needed to make it in this world domianted by the Boomer economy. The main actor, his best friend and manager, the less-talented brother, especially the agent but even the lackey friend are all constantly hustling, either for the next movie deal or simply to make a buck. It's a comedy, so often this hustling is humorous or pitiful, but the show doesn't condemn the characters' efforts. That some of this scheming often involves bedding other women is part of this wish-fulfillment scheme of the show.

But you're telling me sex and the opposite sex are not on the minds of any same-aged single women?

(Special thanks to WAMC.org's "Roundtable" for linking to the original Dallas article on its Web site.)

(One final point: the photo that City Journal uses for this article? Is that from, like, 1999? Those controllers are so PSOne.)

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There's always a quote saying that Generation Xers don't want to be labeled as such, to be pigeon-holed into a category and easily defined. But to me, that's what is appealing about the label of "Generation X" — that this generation is not easily defined, that it is vast and diverse and has only one overriding thing in common — its birth years.

There is no doubt that when you were born colors how you see the world, how you react to world events, and how others see you. A 13-year-old experienced very different feelings on 9/11 than a 33-year-old or a 63-year-old. It is the prism of experience and simply life-living. And while people of vastly different ages can, in fact, see many things in the same manner, there is no doubt how a certain age set will be called upon to tackle different things — and that, my friend, is a generation. Whether it is today's 18- to 25-year-olds fighting overseas, or the 30- to 40-year old set who will be called upon to pay the debts of the bloated and overspending Baby Boomers now entering retirement and a prolonged old-age en masse.

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