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In one of the gorgeous pieces of generational self-congratulation in which it specializes, Rolling Stone published a cover a few years ago. It was a huge picture of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., entitled "Hero to a Generation". Inside was one of those polls, showing that Rolling Stone readers had overwhelmingly selected him as their icon. Yeah, right. Lots of good feeling all around. Dr. King was in his late 30s when he was murdered in 1968, so he was no boomer. He gave up his life to hard study, hard work, and charitable labor. Only in his sex life was he promiscuous. And yes, a few thousand young people did go south to give him a hand. But many civil-rights workers were King's age. In the year of his murder, which was also the first year the boomers got to vote, the winner was Richard Nixon. Faced with war and domestic crisis, the boomer generation for the most part didn't resist, didn't participate, didn't sacrifice. The key words of their activity are "evasion" and "avoidance".

A merciful history may spare us the judgment of having been the generation of Gary Hart — but that's only because of accident and caprice. Instead we have the boomer twinship of Big Bill and Plump Newt: a brace of self-regarding and superficial egomaniacs looking for esteem in all the wrong places. For this bunch to claim Dr. King as an icon is like Ronald Reagan claiming to have borne arms in the Second World War. In the longer view, the symbolic boomer political figure may not even be the wretched Clinton. It may be J. Danforth Quayle.

To be a spoiled person is not to be well-off or favored by fortune or protected from brute realities. It is to be well-off and favored by fortune and protected from brute realities and not to know it. The post-1945 generation has been, at least until recently, free of the fear of untreatable disease and mass unemployment. It more or less grew up knowing that sex and procreation could be easily separated — the first generation in human history for which this was true. Every great book in the human record was available to it, for pennies, in paperback. Car ownership and cheap gas were rights, not privileges. Anybody who could read without moving his lips (and even some who could not) could and did go to college.

And yet, in the 50 years since the first boomer uttered the first wail, the wailing has never stopped. Will there be enough Social Security when it's my turn — for all the world as if the speaker had never had a turn? What about my retirement fund? Who's gonna take care of me? These people think that their parents, who could check off none of the privileges listed above, are greedy and selfish to be still hanging around and eating their grey heads off....

And what about saving others? For all the glib talk about social "concern", boomers have become more swiftly hardened to stepping over bums in the street, or stepping around panhandlers, than their parents ever did during a time of mass unemployment and destitution. A certain kind of cognitive dissonance seems to be at work. Let's deplore waste and ostentation while getting a new model of car every three or four years. Let's lament the decline of literacy and education while transferring our kids to extra-"special" schools and letting the public-school system (another wasted inheritance from a more thoughtful age) wither on the vine. Meanwhile, lose sleep over your air miles, or over the choice of long-distance telephone "carrier". Private affluence and public squalor used to be the name for this syndrome. In the therapy generation, which scripts even its own lenient satires, you are by all means allowed, if not encouraged, to feel guilty. Just as long as you don't feel responsible.

Posted 21 June 1996

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