Baby Boomers may take some perverse pleasure in helping to trash an American culture that they thought was too stuffy anyway. But the real disaster of the Me Generation is the death of serious political debate.
This week is the 40th anniversary of Woodstock — the high-water mark for the generation born immediately after World War II.
This week will also see the 64th anniversary of the apex of their parents’ generation — Victory Over Japan Day.
A big, dirty party for 400,000 bourgeois bohemians versus total victory in a war that killed 417,000 American troops. Heavy, dude.
The myth of Woodstock as an “Aquarian explosion” propagated by the film that came out the year after the 1969 festival has been a poisonous one. No one was there to make a movie about the thousands of dazed kids who didn’t want the party to be over, and sat around in the mud waiting for the new age to dawn, eventually to be dispersed by police.
But the three-day freakout was just the distillation of a larger movement that transformed Western civilization, just not in the way its participants intended.
We see everywhere the social consequences of the shoddy youth culture that was born with the boomers. From the desperate face-lifts of the 60-something men and woman who grew older but not wiser to the 40 percent of children born to unwed mothers, the debris of petty hedonism is all around us.
Our culture has gotten worse and stupider because marketers in the 1960s realized that grown-ups with children make bad targets. Their money is already spent on tuition, groceries and snow tires. Kids, thanks to their parents, have entirely disposable incomes.
Like perfect suckers, young people believed what Madison Avenue told them in the early and mid-1960s: Old fogeys who wasted years fighting fascism or working a job were stuck in Squaresville. Saving, waiting for rewards, and meeting obligations were old rules for an old generation.
Why wait to get what you want when you can have it now? Have a Pepsi, buy a fresh stack of records, turn on “The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis,” and have some fun. You’ll only be young once, even if you’re immature forever.
The corporate exploitation of youthful ignorance created an endless feedback loop that advanced truly rotten values. Eventually the phony counterculture became the dominant culture and America was marooned in a postmodern world without right and wrong. And without the possibility for cultural opprobrium, there can’t be a culture.
One of the collateral victims of the rise of youth was the value of experience. And experience, the only soil in which wisdom can grow, is what allows a republic such as ours to function.
Ironically for the hippies, the hard-won experience of the World War II generation helped usher in a new liberal era in America.
The experimentation of the New Deal and the massive mobilizations of the war taught the leaders of the 1950s and 1960s about how to make big dreams come true. The old squares like Dwight Eisenhower and Lyndon Johnson helped secure civil rights for all Americans, expanded the safety net for the poor and elderly, and put a decent education within reach of every American.
The Baby Boomers managed to end the Vietnam War, but that came not with a breakthrough like the integration of the Little Rock, Ark., school system, but in a series of unsatisfying moments — the last chopper off the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, the refugees cast adrift on the Pacific, the carnage of the Cambodian killing fields.
Though baby boomers tended to be very liberal, they have delivered little political change to a system that they once promised to upend, other than driving older voters right as a reaction to the counterculture.
There is a huge fight going on the top remaining liberal issue of universal health care. And the effort is failing pretty spectacularly. Americans are recoiling from an impossible-to-explain plan that would drive government even deeper into the lives of Americans and be cripplingly expensive.
The reason for the train wreck is that Democrats, always aglow with Aquarian nostalgia, could not resist the appeal of Barack Obama: young and inexperienced, but rich in symbolic meaning.
In another 10 years, they’ll celebrate the 50th anniversary of Woodstock, with old hippies being wheeled out like the Boys of Pointe du Hoc.
Maybe by then, liberals will have gotten serious again.
Chris Stirewalt is the political editor of The Washington Examiner. He can be reached at [email protected]
