The Worst Generation
Or, how I learned to stop worrying and hate the Boomers
BY PAUL BEGALA
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I hate the Boomers.
I KNOW IT'S A SIN to hate, so let me put it this way: If they were animals, they'd be a plague of locusts, devouring everything in their path and leaving but a wasteland. If they were plants, they'd be kudzu, choking off every other living thing with their sheer mass. If they were artists, they'd be abstract expressionists, interested only in the emotions of that moment--not in the lasting result of the creative process. If they were a baseball club, they'd be the Florida Marlins: prefab prima donnas who bought their way to prominence, then disbanded--a temporary association but not a team.
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You know who you are. If you grew your hair and burned your draft card on campus during the sixties; if you toked, screwed, and boogied your way through the seventies; if you voted for Reagan and believed "Greed is good" in the eighties; and if you're trying to make up for it now by nesting as you cluck about the collapse of "family values," you're it. If not, even if demographers call you a Boomer, you probably hate our generation's elite as much as I do.
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LET'S START WITH THE SIXTIES, the Boomers' dilettante ball. While a few courageous young people like John Lewis and the Freedom Riders risked their lives--and others like Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner gave theirs--the civil-rights movement was led by pre-Boomers like Martin Luther King Jr. (who would be seventy-one if he were alive today) and continued without strong support from the Boomers on college campuses.
Still, I must say this: If you were one of those young people who did risk their lives to fight racism in the sixties, who put their bodies on the line to register voters, who marched and sang and taught and preached against segregation, you stand as the best refutation of my anti-Boomer tirade. In that one moment of conscience and courage, you did more with your life than I've done in all the moments of mine. In a generation of selfish pigs, you were saints.
But the reality is that most campuses did not become hotbeds of unrest until the Boomers' precious butts were at risk as the Vietnam War escalated. They didn't want to end the war because they were bothered by working-class kids being blown apart; if they had been, they wouldn't have spat on those working-class kids when they came home from Vietnam, or tried to make heroes out of the Communists who were trying to kill them.
Yet as troubling as that may be, the sixties were in many ways the Boomers' finest moment. It was at least a fad then to pretend to care about racial justice at home and war abroad, to speak out against pollution and prejudice. But it was mostly just talk. As they came of age, and as idealism might have required some real sacrifice, idealism suddenly became unfashionable.
And so the Boomers careened into the seventies without a thought to picking up where King and the Kennedys left off. Without a war to threaten them, their selfishness came into full bloom. You know the results: Drug abuse, once a boutique curse of hip musicians, became more common than the clap. And speaking of sexually transmitted diseases, the Boomers began to fornicate with such abandon that rabbits were asking them to cool their jets. They didn't invent sex or drugs or rock 'n' roll, but they damned near ruined them all.
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But even more than music, our remarkable economy is what drives and defines the times we live in today. And as the generation in the economic driver's seat, the Boomers should get the credit for building this remarkable prosperity, right?
Well, not quite. Nothing can detract from the breathtaking entrepreneurship of Boomers like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. But what's interesting is that much of today's prosperity owes its origins more to the high-tech young nerds of the post-Boom generation than to the Boomers themselves. The most vital role the Boomers have in the current economy is to sit on their brains and invest in post-Boomer high-tech start-ups. The same folks who sponged off their parents when they were young are now, as they age, getting rich off the industry of their younger brothers and sisters.
Boomer political and economic values reached their most perfect expression under pre-Boomer president Ronald Reagan in the eighties: Screw your neighbor, lay off the factory workers, shuffle a lot of paper, build an economy in which a few people get the gold mine and most people get the shaft.
The same Boomer elites who hid in classrooms to avoid Vietnam while poor and minority kids got shot at used their elite education in the eighties to lay off the folks who got shot at and survived. The Reverend Jesse Jackson used to say that the eighties economy was based on three things: merge, purge, and submerge. Merge companies, purge workers, submerge communities. No more of this hippie, sixties, share-the-wealth crap now, fellow Boomers, it's every man for himself!
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It is telling that when he ran for reelection, Ronald Reagan got higher support among Boomers than he did from his fellow older Americans. Perhaps some of the Greatest Generation saw the selfishness in Reaganism, saw the shortsightedness, the mean-spiritedness in cutting school lunches and telling children ketchup was a vegetable, and turned away from it.
And perhaps the Boomers saw those same qualities, that savage selfishness, and embraced it.
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IT IS MY VIEW THAT THE TRULY CLASSIC Boomer politician is not Bill Clinton but the man who despises him: George W. Bush. A charming and disarming guy, Bush has coasted through life on his family's money and his daddy's name. He went to the best schools. And while at those elite schools, he served as the model for Otter in Animal House. He went into business (backed by family wealth) and failed. Tried again. Failed. And again--well, you get it. He finally struck it rich when his father's wealthy supporters made him the figurehead managing partner of the Texas Rangers. Bush used his Boomer charm to con the good people of Arlington, Texas, into raising their taxes to build his Rangers a new stadium. When the team was sold in 1998, Bush made a profit of more than $14 million.
And what does Bush offer us, after this life of wretched Boomer selfishness? Lectures about personal responsibility. We have a word for that in Texas: chutzpah.
The specter of Bush the Son striving to avenge Bush the Father brings us to the Question: How could the World War II generation--the Greatest Generation--have raised the Worst Generation?
I put that question to Tom Brokaw, chronicler of the Greatest Generation. Brokaw was born in 1940, so he's not a Boomer chronologically. Nor is he one attitudinally. "I have one foot on each side of the ice floe," he says. Raised with World War II values in the Midwest, Brokaw was busy having children and wearing a tie to work in the sixties. And yet he is charitable to the Boomers.
One reason the Boomers were so spoiled, Brokaw theorizes, was their parents' understandable desire to compensate for their own deprivation. "Even those who had not really known poverty in the Depression still had a harder life than most of us can imagine today," he says. "Think about it: Most men worked in manual labor. Most women did manual labor in the home as well. So many parents from that generation have said to me, 'We had so little, we wanted our children to have so much--and we spoiled them.'"
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Brokaw makes a good point. But let's not blame the parents. Good Lord, I said to him, we're talking about men and women who have reached middle age! You live a half century, your faults can't be blamed on Daddy anymore. Besides, every parent in history has wanted to give his child more than he had. And every adolescent wants to get laid. And since the first caveman spun around till his head got dizzy, every human being has experimented with methods of altering consciousness.
But only in the Boomers did parental indulgence and human craving trigger such a tsunami of selfishness.
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Brokaw has the difference pegged: "The World War II generation did what was expected of them. But they never talked about it. It was part of the Code. There's no more telling metaphor than a guy in a football game who does what's expected of him--makes an open-field tackle--then gets up and dances around. When Jerry Kramer threw the block that won the Ice Bowl in '67, he just got up and walked off the field."
That kind of self-effacing dignity is wholly alien to the Boomer elite.
But when that day comes, when they finally walk off the field--or what's left of the field--a few of us who've been trailing behind them will be doing a little dance of our own. 
Baby Boomers are the worst generation in recent history.
they should be put to sleep like a too old to adopt shelter dog. Humanely of course.
