Culture Vulture

Why don’t you all fade away,
Don’t try to dig what we all say.
Not trying to cause a big sensation,
Just talking ‘bout my generation.
From “My Generation,” by The Who, 1965

Another milestone in the endless re-play of 1968, the signature year of “The Sixties,” is coming up next week, with the anniversary of the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Robert Kennedy.
All year we’ve been reminded about how 40 years have gone by since the tumult of 1968. Like a few others in history, it was one of those “big” years: 1776, 1848, 1914 are others that come to mind. So much history was compressed into that brief 12 month period.
Kennedy’s assassination, along with that of Martin Luther King, obviously stand out. Both were products of a culture clash that had been gathering steam for at least five years — since the assassination of President John Kennedy, the event that truly unleashed the forces we think of today when describing the Sixties. But you could of course go back further into the 1950s and detect the cultural stresses that were starting to emerge. But for me, the defining issue of the 1960s was Vietnam, and the fruitless and wrongheaded war the U.S. waged there. Those repercussions fueled all sorts of other tensions — civil rights, sexual freedom, the liberties that an unprecedented level of affluence brought people whose parents and grandparents could scarcely have imagined — all of which led to a creative explosion in the arts and music that still arrests your attention today.
Add in the emergence of the huge cohort of the “baby boom” generation coming of age during a time when the certainties of an earlier age were dissolving, against a back ground of an unpopular war, with a heady new age of musical expression set off by the Beatles and the Rolling stones, with recreational drugs that had been the province of ghettos and jazz bands up until then, and you have quite a mix.
It all came together in a big bang in 1968.
We forget it wasn’t just an American phenomenon, but a global one. Students rioted in France and Germany. The Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia to put the lid on “socialism with a human face.” In Vietnam, we saw the Tet offensive put the lie to claims of steady progress towards winning the war. The U.S, military won virtually every battle fought, but the politicians lost sight of the fact that Vietnam was always about the politics, and support for the war began to crumble after Tet.
It’s interesting that the 40th anniversary has been seized upon as such a convenient point from which to look back and reflect the meaning of all those crazy events. The 40th anniversary of D-Day, in 1984, was made into a big deal — probably because after that, death began to thin the ranks markedly of those veterans who took part in that momentous event. So it may be with 1968 — in another 10 years those who were in their early 20s will be in their 70s and the gap in time may be too much to allow for the same impact.
There are so many ironies to explore. 1968 was all about — or at least largely about — a revolt of the young, giving the middle finger to the ‘establishment.” Now, we are the establishment, and about to pass through the exit door instead of the entranceway. 1968 was about the present, the now; now it is about the past. We see all the mistakes and missed opportunities. Some of it seems real silly. But it was also a time of real commitment, of passionate beliefs, and that, seems in comparably short supply today when it comes to the issues of 2008. The possible exception to that seems to be the environment, but even the specter of global warming and food shortages hasn’t galvanized the same level of participation and engagement.

So I really wanted to write about my now much maligned generation, we baby boomers, using 1968 as a jump off spot. I’m real tired of getting beat up on, caught between the pincers of the remnants of the “Greatest Generation” — who let me hasten to add, I have the utmost respect for, and the slackers of Generations X,Y and Z who are so impressed, apparently, with their collective coolness. Back in the 1960s you often heard talk of a “generation gap” between us boomers and our elders — “The Greatest Generation” before they became great. Now it seems like there’s a gap between us and everybody. The cultural and political rebels of the 1960s became the “me generation” of the 1970s. Well, the 70s were definitely a bad trip, no question. Watergate, energy shocks, inflation, disco — who can get nostalgic about that?
Still, it seems so ironic that we who practically invented generational politics should be regarded as some kind of low point. Now we’re going to mess everyone else over again as we retire and drain what’s left of Social security and Medicare. Nothing will be left for the Xers. Serves those kids right.
I really think that if you stack up all the monumental achievements of the boomers in terms of politics, social change, music and art and any other barometer, we stack up pretty well. Oh, and did I forget computing? Thank you, Steve Jobs. What’s dragged us down is having suffered through two boomer age Presidents, Clinton and Bush, who won’t make anyone forget about Roosevelt or Kennedy. We need someone great to come along to match the greatness of our generation. Too bad Barack Obama, technically a boomer, chooses to distance himself from his own generation in his rush to identify himself with some vague kind of post-partisan politics. Barack, ain’t nothing gonna change, brother. You’ll still be cutting late night deals like everyone else has done since time immemorial.
Unlike Roger Daltrey, the lead singer for The Who, I hope I don’t die before I get old. Life is as much fun now as it ever was. I’m glad I was alive to experience ‘68 though. It was some kind of ride, particularly if you were fortunate enough to not be face down in a rice paddy, like far too many of our generation found themselves.