Introduction

April 1, 2000, 12:00 AM
The Worst Generation

Or, how I learned to stop worrying and hate the Boomers

By Paul Begala


AT A PRESS GATHERING just after the 1992 election, David Broder, the dean of Washington reporters, commented to me that my Clintonista colleagues and I seemed so, well, so young to him. "I guess you Baby Boomers are really taking over," he said.

That's when it happened. I'd never been called a Boomer before. Poor Broder. My eyes got squinty and my face got red. The veins in my temples throbbed. The look on his face was horrible. He must have thought I was about to rip off his head and spit down his neck. Which I was.

"I am not a Baby Boomer," I snapped. "I am so tired of hearing about the goddamn Baby Boomers! I've spent my whole life swimming behind that garbage barge of a generation. They ruined everything they've passed through and left me in their wake."

Broder shook his head and walked away.

But the garbage barge just chugs on. As they enter late middle age, the Boomers still can't grow up. Guys who once dropped acid are now downing Viagra; women who once eschewed lipstick are now getting liposuction. At the risk of feeding their narcissism, I believe it's time someone stated the simple truth: The Baby Boomers are the most self-centered, self-seeking, self-interested, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing generation in American history.

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.

Of course, it is as unfair to demonize an entire generation as it is to characterize an entire gender or race or religion. And I don't literally mean that everyone born between 1946 and 1964 is a selfish pig. But generations can have a unique character that defines them, especially the elites of a generation--those lucky few who are blessed with the money or brains or looks or skills or education that typifies an era. Whether it was Fitzgerald and Hemingway defining the Lost Generation of World War I and the Roaring Twenties, or JFK and the other heroes of the World War II generation, or the high-tech whiz kids of the post-Boomer generation, certain archetypes define certain times.

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.

It is my contention that the single greatest sin a generation can commit is the sin of selfishness. And it's from this standard that I draw my harsh conclusion. I'm not alone in this view, of course. The Boomer in Chief, my former boss, Bill Clinton, used to tell me about an influential professor he'd had at Georgetown. His name was Carroll Quigley, and he taught young Bill Clinton and hundreds of other Hoyas about something called the Future Preference.

I can still see Clinton doing his Quigley impression, eyes full of mischief, his voice an Arkansas version of a bad Boston accent, as we bounced around in a bus or flew through a thunderstorm on Air Elvis, our campaign plane back in 1992. "Mistah Begahhla," he'd intone as he looked at me through the bifocals perched on the end of his nose. "Why is America the greatest sociiiiiiety in human hist'ree? The Few-chah Pref'rence. At every critical junk-chaah, we have prefuhhed the few-chah to the present. That is why immigrants left the old waaahld for the new. That is why paahrents such as yours sacrifice to send their children to univehhsities like this wan. The American ideal is that the few-chah can be bettah than the paahst, and that each of us has a personal, moral obligation to make it so."

I'll get back to President Clinton in a minute. But first, let us conclude that by his old professor's test, the Boomers have been a miserable failure. At nearly every critical juncture, they have preferred the present to the future; they've put themselves ahead of their parents, ahead of their country, ahead of their children--ahead of our future.

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.

And don't give me this crap about Boomer music. The Beatles were all born before the end of the war. So was Janis. So while the Boomers can claim they had the good taste to listen to gifted pre-Boomers, when it came their turn to make music, the truest expression of their generation, what did they give us?

Disco.

The generation that came before the Boomers gave them Dylan. The Boomers gave us KC and the Sunshine Band. Thanks a lot.

Unfair? Perhaps it is a bit of an overstatement. Some friends of mine have suggested it's an outrage to ignore Baby Boomer Bruce Springsteen, for one. True enough.

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!

The orgy of greed, fed by a mountain of debt, ran the economy into the ground. The massive, selfish tax cuts produced even more massive deficits and debt, which the Boomers passed on to those who followed. Having grown up using their parents' credit cards, the Boomers found it just as easy to pass on their bills to their children. Boomers like Rush Limbaugh like to say we owe Ronald Reagan a debt we can never repay. Yeah, Slim, about $3 trillion.

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.

WHICH BRINGS ME BACK TO THE BOOMER IN CHIEF. It's not for nothing that Pulitzer-prize-winning author David Maraniss called his biography of Bill Clinton First in His Class. (It is interesting to note that the same Boomers who supported Reagan were less likely to vote for Clinton than the World War II generation was.)

But is the first Boomer president typical of his generation? That, pardon me, depends on what the meaning of is is.

Clinton's right-wing critics seize on his personal failings to paint a caricature of the ultimate sixties hippie: pot-smoking, draft-dodging womanizer; the Muhammad Ali of selfishness--the kind of guy Newt Gingrich called a "countercultural McGovernik." But Clinton's public agenda has, I believe, generally kept faith with old Professor Quigley. His basic political philosophy is to prefer the future to the present and to stress communitarian values over selfish individualism. His most profound emotion is empathy. To this day, he's widely mocked for declaring to a man who was dying of AIDS, "I feel your pain." But feeling someone's pain is true compassion, which literally means "to suffer with." A most un-Boomer sentiment, indeed.

In a classic example of preferring the future to the present, Clinton took a terrible political hit for raising taxes to pay down the deficit. His party lost the House and Senate, but over time the economic policies worked, and because he was willing to pay the short-term price, we enjoy the long-term economic benefits.

But if in his public policy Clinton has been anti-Boomer, in his personal failings he has given ample fodder to his critics and much heartbreak to those of us who love him. Having an affair with a young woman and lying about it is a stupid and selfish act. And Bill Clinton lives with the knowledge that he has caused his family immeasurable pain. But it was ultimately a sin against his family, not yours. You think he got away with it? Got away with it? Imagine how you'd feel if your daughter read a Starr report on the Internet, chronicling your worst, most shameful moment.

He didn't get away with shit.

And if I had to choose, I'd rather have a leader who was rotten to his family but good to the country than the other way around.

Still, I cannot deny that Clinton's personal sin--selfishness--is the very one I rail against his generation for. Perhaps the classically, tragically Boomer nature of his faults explains the sanctimonious outrage from some of his Boomer brethren in the media. It's as if they're saying, How dare he behave like one of us!

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.'"

The transformation of America from the forties to the sixties was perhaps the most rapid and radical in our history. "Parenthood itself became very different," says Brokaw. "Especially fatherhood. Many men of the World War II generation had been facing death in their teens." They'd known strict military discipline and knew their lives or their buddies' lives might depend on following orders from authority. They looked at their own children at seventeen, who didn't have any life-or-death reason to obey authority, who in fact had the luxury of challenging everything they were told, and the World War II generation didn't know what to make of it.

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.

IN THE LONG RUN, will it matter that one generation was so spectacularly selfish? Maybe not. In a great karmic irony, the Worst Generation may in turn be raising another great one. Having taught the children of the Baby Boomers off and on for five years now, at the University of Texas and at Georgetown, I find them to be the opposite of everything I despise about their parents--they are engaged in their communities, spending endless hours volunteering to build housing for the poor or to feed the homeless. They are concerned about their classmates, having calmed down the PC mania and replaced it with a sensible sensitivity to the feelings of others. They care about the future and are concerned about their grandparents. They are more responsible in their private lives and more engaged in our public life. I have no idea whether it's because of the Boomers or in spite of them.

And unlike me, who spews vitriol and venom at the Boomers, their kids roll their eyes and let out an ironic laugh. That's another thing: These kids are ironic but not cynical. They're Letterman's children. And they seem to understand that their parents are growing older but not growing up.

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.