Boomers, Before .... 

(Courtesy of Photobucket.com)

... And After 

(Photo from Radiotown.com) 

Tom Brokaw, not satisfied with making big bucks with his "Greatest Generation" traveling road show, has come up with a new one now that his target market is either dead or wishing they were dead as they suffer the indignity of riding it out in a nursing home somewhere.  Tom has taken to stroking the ego of the Greatest Generation's children, the Baby Boomers in a two hour special called Boomer$!.  The title has it all.  Our need for money and our need to be seen and heard through the exclamation point!  

Look at us!  Look at us! 

 Boomers.  You know, the guys in charge of the country for the past 18 years?  The ones who helped crater the economy?  The ones who started screaming at one another 45 years ago as some went the way of free love and "Dude, where's my bong?" while some stuck to the 50s credos of their parents and went off and fought the good fight in southeast asian rice paddies.  The ones who will continue screaming at each other in nursing homes over whether to put on Fox News or MSNBC and will beat each other with canes as they bitch and bellyache over whether or not the National Guard at Kent State was merely reacting normally as frightened kids under attack or a coterie of fascist bastards working for the man?

And all Tom Brokaw can do is call us "unrealized?'  How about unrealistic, unreasonable, unrefined, and unsuccessful for starters? 

And we won't let shit go!  We are the Hatfields and the McCoys bitching about issue after issue as younger generations roll their eyes and wish we would simply give it up.

 Bill Clinton, the Boomer poster child, said in his marquee interview with Brokaw, that Boomers had a "little tendency to sanctimony" and that it meant folks had a tendency to stop listening and it made folks "dumb."

A "little tendency," Bill?  Have  you listened to yourself, sport?  I realize the family values crowd can be insufferable, but, hell, they ARE standing at pulpits half the time, know what I mean?

Bill Clinton, the master of the understatment?  Who knew?

There's study after study of family run businesses and other such entities showing the third generation typically screws everything up.  The first generation gets the enterprise started.  They do the heavy lifting and drag the family out of poverty through their hard work.  They put everything they have on the line.  

Everything. 

Second generation understands both the need for hard work and sacrifice and the need to prepare for the worst, as they lived on the edge growing up.  So they keep working away, improving the family business and saving money because you just never know.  Henry Fonda in Grapes of Wrath haunts them.  It could have been them.

The third generation doesn't understand the sacrifices made.  Survival has never been in doubt in their lifetime.  All they see is that there's enough money to buy them toys, and they feel a divine right of entitlement to same because their father was never there for them given he was out EARNING the money.   They typically wind up cashing out of the family business or simply driving it into the ground as they spend more time chasing their next buzz rather than their next customer based on having learned how to party well in college paid for in full by their parents.

It's in business text books and the basis of much consulting on succession planning for family owned businesses, OK?  I am not making this stuff up.

Now let's run this thing along the lines of the WWI, WWII and Boomer Generations for a few yuks, shall we?

The WWI generation was our nation's coming out party on the international scene.  We finally went to what that laugh-a-minute, Donald Rumsfeld coined "Old Europe" and showed them there was a new sheriff in town.  We may have been viewed by Europe a little like the way Rodney Dangerfield was viewed by Ted Knight when he rolled in the Bushwood Country Club in the movie Caddyshack -- a Boomer movie classic if there ever was one -- but, tough.  It was our turn on the international stage.

The WWII generation saw that sacrifice, however.  They lived through the depression.  They saw the need for prudent controls on things, be it financial markets or simply saving enough for a rainy day. They truly knew what it meant to go hungry or to not know from whence their next meal would come.  It wasn't a cliche.  You didn't have to tell those people to clean their plate because of starving kids in China.  They were the starving kids, damn it.

They got it.

And, when they came home from WWII and having had bombs tossed skyward at them in B-17, 24s and 19s or launched at them in fox holes, they kind of let loose a little bit.  They screwed with reckless abandon as evidenced by the birth explosion that now has its hands on the wheel of the clown car that is our political and economic systems.  (Yeah, Gen X and Y, you are next, but Boomers are CEOs of 75% of the F500 right now. We may irrelevant to advertisers, but we are still your bosses.  Bite us.)

And they drank and smoked.  A lot.

Why not?  What could a little Canadian Club or Dewers with a couple unfiltered Pall Malls to set the mood do to them after having evaded German Tiger Tanks and Japanese Kamikazees?  They didn't expect to come home, let alone see 50, so fuck it.  Eat, drink, and be merry for yesterday we dodged bullet, after bullet, after bullet. 

So that was what the Boomer generation saw.  Not the depression.  Not the landing scene at Normandy brought to us by Boomer Pitchman Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan in a burst of nostalgic tribute before we bury off the last of those relics who saved Western Civilization.  

Nope.  We saw Morey Amsterdam getting cocked in Dick Van Dyke's office, insulting his boss, and pulling a jingle out of his ass.  They were old war buddies.  Anything was possible.  Hell, Dick got Mary after all.

Well not anything was possible.  Nobody was hitting on Rose Marie, a lesson to the ladies to stay pretty if there ever was one. 

That's what Boomers saw as generation three.  No hungry belly.  No bullet whizzing by a head.  An idyllic life in New Rochelle, New York for Rob and Laura Petri, while work was sitting around cracking jokes and busting the boss' balls.  

That was the PG version.  The real fun version had Sammy, Deano,Frank and related sycophants raping and pillaging the countryside.  Just the Rat Pack slamming whiskey and smoking butts and chasing broads.  Every day was a party.

So we partied our way through the 60s and 70s until such time as the bill came due once our parents had had enough of us after college.  Rifts arose all over the place.  Between us and the WWIIers and then internally as, impetuous little shits that we are, we became utterly convinced in the complete and total sanctimony of our political viewpoints.  Worse yet, we simply cannot contain ourselves from letting everyone know about them, to boot.

"Who Says You Can't Have It All?" Michelob Light sang to us.

The banks said we can't, that's who.   And now there are some uppity industrious places like Asia, Latin America, India, and the Middle East who will be gunning for us as well thanks to technology-enabled globalization.  It may not suck to be us, but it looks like it's going to suck to be our children.

And so here we sit with the front end of this squandering generation heading off into retirement fearful it does not have enough money saved because, in spite of its hard charging partying approach to life, it ought to last longer than the WWIIers, and it has not saved as much.  Likewise, medical science will find ways to extend our lives in spite of our habits as we decry rising medical costs while demanding more and more procedures as "rights."

So, yes, our nation's day in the international spotlight has likely been eclipsed.  This is not some funeral dirge implying we are going to wind up like some third world country, but we are no longer the EF Hutton of the free world.  With our cratering financial markets, capital formation will be taking place more in Arab and Asian centers with a different set of government/business rules than we have imposed on our industries here.

And Boomers controlled the levers off power in this county as the country's power slipped away.  It happened on our watch as Ronnie Reagan might have said.   Might have simply been the luck of the draw in a game of economic and geopolitical musical chairs, or it could have been partly the way in which we did things.  Nature?  Nurture?  A product of the times?  Whatever.  

With apologies (sort of) to Mary T. Kelly, "it is what it is."

Our grandparents came up from nothing.  Our parents knew true poverty and true international peril.  We knew nothing but a party until we hit early adult hood and Vietnam hit us in the face.  (Maybe our parents over-reacted, but they were a little touchy after the WWII experience.  I mean, it wasn't as jumpy as the McCarthy era, but Kennan's Containment Policy ruled the day.) And it pissed us off.  

From The Dick Van Dyke Show to Vic Morrow in Combat in one fell swoop.  Or, better yet, the transition from the raucous wedding in Deerhunter to bombs going off in Vietnam.  It was like dragging a needle across a record.  

Total buzz kill.

And we made it known we would do it differently.  We would get it right.  The hubris of youth did not leave us as youth left us. 

And once in power we bring the world Bill Clinton and W. Bush.  The former only the second President impeached in history and the latter, well, we all know that story, now don't we? 

And all Brokaw could call us was "unrealized?"  Tom is being too polite.  He's only 6 years older than the oldest of the boomers, but come on Tom, come at us, will you?  I guess you have to go easy on us if you want us to buy the product.

We deserve to be slapped around way harder than that for the way in which we have pissed away the legacy. 

Brokaw let us off easy.  Way too easy.