THE NOVELIST JAMES ELLROY once described Joe Queenan as “half-Calvinist, half-nihilist.” But, for most of the 1990s, the nihilist seemed predominant. From The Unkindest Cut to Confessions of a Cineplex Heckler, Queenan continued to double back on his own well-trodden steps, making a living by skewering movies, celebrities, and the odd fat cat. Even My Goodness, last year’s chronicle of a tongue-firmly-held-in-cheek attempt to clean up his act, mocked mostly liberal Hollywood do-goodism. He practiced “Random Acts of Kindness” and “Senseless Acts of Beauty” and started the “Make a Wish, As Long As the Wish Doesn’t Cost More Than Fifty Bucks, Foundation.” Through all of this he resisted the urge to drop his apolitical cloak (taken up after the flop of his attack on Dan Quayle, Imperial Caddy) or engage in broader cultural criticism. But now, with Balsamic Dreams: A Short But Self-Important History of the Baby Boomer Generation, Queenan chucks the cloak and finally attempts to think Big Thoughts. The results are mixed. In response to his impending doom by some undiagnosed disease in the summer of 2000, Queenan immediately “started taking piano lessons.” “It was something I’d always wanted to do,” he explains. He picked up the works of Proust and Gibbon to read, signed up for cooking classes and flying lessons, and stopped by the YMCA to hire a personal trainer because he “wanted to look sharp at the funeral.” Queenan looked into all the options for where to have his ashes spread, finally deciding upon the Seine in France. When the doctor finally diagnosed his ailment as nothing more than a particularly bad bout of hay fever, he was relieved. He canceled all of the newly scheduled diversions and thanked his lucky charms that he would be around to enjoy his wife and two kids. But that night, his sleep was “deeply troubled.” Queenan realized just how “venal and self-centered my reaction to the specter of death had been.” No last confession, no attempts to reconcile with aggrieved friends and relatives, no bequests to charity, no last advice for his children—only one last rush to fit in all that cool stuff he’d missed out on. “I was quietly coming to terms with the fact that [underneath] the lovingly crafted façade of charm, wit, sophistication, and class that masqueraded as a personality, I was a basically worthless person,” he says. AS HIS JUSTIFICATION FOR THIS probably apocryphal tale, Queenan pleads peer pressure: “a prototypical product of the Me Decade, I only knew how to respond to the world insofar as the world responded to moi.” According to this theory, the root cause of Joe Queenan’s boorishness is not his own indifference but the tide of the generational zeitgeist. He uses the story to denounce his peers as an “appalling generation” who started out good but quickly degenerated into one of the biggest demographic duds the world has ever known. “THE SINGLE MOST DAMNING, and obvious criticism that can be leveled at the Baby Boomers,” Queenan writes in the chapter entitled “J’Accuse,” “is, of course, that they promised that they wouldn’t sell out and become fiercely materialistic like their parents, and then they did.” Worse, boomers compounded the problem by insisting that they had not, in fact, sold out. Thus, even as they made a killing on the stock market, sent their kids to expensive private schools, and began to grasp the various toggle switches of power, they insisted on doing daffy things like voting for Democrats, eating Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, and refusing to age gracefully. Most of the short work is spent describing and denouncing such obvious inanities peculiar to boomers as retroactive political correctness (removing the beaver fur around Ben Franklin’s neck on $100 bills because we just don’t go for that sort of thing any more) and the glorification of pop culture (Andy Warhol). There are flashes of the unrestrained viciousness that Joe Queenan fans have come to treasure, but the center of Balsamic Dreams is Joe Queenan’s attempt at ad hoc sociology. Here, for instance, is Queenan on Seattle’s eyesore/rock museum/tragic, tragic mistake, the Experience Music Project: [The museum] is a series of micro-museums of what is personally important to a select group of Baby Boomers. “Here’s a load of crap associated with third-tier Pacific Northwest bands I used to listen to when I was growing up. I really liked them; they meant a lot to me; I hope you enjoy them.” In the end, it’s a bit like opening a Museum of Black Leather Vests. Here’s my vest, circa 1975. Here’s my vest ten years later. Here are my friends’ vests, circa 1976. And here are some vests that belonged to some guys from Tacoma back in the 1960s. God, did we look cool in our vests. Don’t forget to check our gift shop so you can do the most ridiculous thing of all in post-Baby Boomer America, which is to buy pointless memorabilia in a museum devoted to pointless memorabilia. In the penultimate chapter, “Aging Disgracefully,” Queenan makes a series of suggestions for how boomers can recover some semblance of dignity and curry favor with their children, who will have something to say about the choice of nursing homes. On the merits, his suggestions run from the good “massively reduce videotaping” to the basically sound “rethink the dancing issue” to the invaluable “stop sharing your feelings.” My personal favorite: “Fear not the Republican within.” He ends with a “personal note” that expresses hope for the future of his generation. Boomers may yet “recapture the idealism of our youth” and “reassert ourselves as the crusaders we were” in the 1960s. In order to accomplish this feat, however, they “have to stop the incessant navel-gazing [and] reacquire a sense of personal dignity. Most important, we have to stop talking about ourselves.” THAT UTOPIAN “idealism” for which Queenan pines is at least partly the cause of the boomers’ casual attitude to the norms that kept their parents from going off the rails. But, still, if you’ve ever had to listen to the boomers rhapsodizing about their idyllic youth—and who among us has escaped this torture?—all you can say after reading Balsamic Dreams is: Amen. Jeremy Lott is senior editor of Spintech Magazine.
