Everyone hates the Boomers

I was pleased to read Michelle Cottle’s take on the NY Times’s new Baby Boomer column today, in particular this paragraph:

But by far my favorite part is Winerip’s attempts to elevate his cohort’s relative stature by going on at length about how not-so-great their Greatest Generation forebears were. (In your face, Tom Brokaw!) In addition to Winerip’s pointing out the broad-based shortcomings of the boomer generation’s parents–especially in the area of sexism, Winerip’s principal preoccupation–he also shares with us what an asshole his dad in particular could be. (He had such a vicious temper that Winerip’s mother claimed not to miss him after he died.) How like a boomer to turn his personal daddy issues into a cultural commentary. Indeed, with every self-pitying, self-justifying line of the column, Winerip serves only to confirm all those whiny, entitled, narcissistic stereotypes he seeks to dispel.

This has become a running meme; as the Boomers get older and realize that they haven’t lived up to the ideals of their forebears, they get busy tearing down that idealization. You could see a similar idea at work in Sam Mendes’s dreadful “Revolutionary Road.” As I noted in my review for the Washington Times,

The big difference between [“American Beauty” and “Revolutionary Road”] is generational. The Wheelers are firmly entrenched in the “greatest generation”: Frank is a World War II vet who takes a nice office job and a house in some anonymous Levittown. “American Beauty’s” Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) was a baby boomer/Gen Xer, a mirror for Mr. Mendes, generationally speaking.

It wasn’t too surprising for audiences that a boomer like Lester would succumb to personal gratification at the expense of his family; one doesn’t expect much more from that self-absorbed generation. However, to see a guy who lived through the Great Depression and World War II behave the same way? Now that’s shocking.

The goal here is a subtle one: The film’s authors are making the argument that the idea of a greatest generation of stoic happiness is a lie. Every generation hates life; the boomers simply were the first to be honest about it. Family responsibilities should always come second to personal happiness, or tragedy will result.

The psychological term for this is projection; the critical term is nonsense on stilts. It’s telling that the Wheelers’ children are rarely seen and even more rarely heard. They’re little more than props crafted by the art director to stifle the personal fulfillment of Frank and April.