FBG - Ferris Bueller's Day Off Generation

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off - Part 1


Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, a cute 1986 film but not one or our generation’s classics, was a good buy recently on the $5 shelf. It was interesting to view the “special features” section which included a number of both vintage and contemporary commentaries by those involved with making the film. I’ve always enjoyed this movie if only for its impertinence which somewhat mimicked that of our time; but I have never considered it the icon in the same way some others consider it.

It struck me that there may be a deeper story in Ferris Bueller. Remember when, during the recent health care debates, Obama made the quip that it might be time to "give granny a pill” when she got too expensive to care for? That comment reminded me of a notorious 3000+ word piece written by Paul Begala for an Esquire magazine in 2000 entitled, “The Worst Generation.” Begala’s contemptible rant railed against our generation. If you want to read his harangue, you can easily find it using a Google search using key words: Esquire Begala Worst Generation

I mention these thoughts only to introduce a notion that I think there is a real hatred for us and our times that rests in today’s 50-somethings—those born roughly from 1955 to 1965. Something seems to have affected this generation of 50-somethings that has yielded a thoroughly loathsome group of people that really hate us. As for me…I’ve never given them much thought. Maybe that’s what has them stirred up...few of us gave them much thought.

Did you notice about 25-30 years ago when these 50-somethings started coming on line as new adults in the late seventies to mid eighties and were staffing the local fast food drive through windows? It was about then that you had to start checking your bag because if you didn’t, you invariably got home only to find that you had been shorted—you could no longer trust getting your correct order at the drive through windows.

The problem was wide spread enough that the national press even coined a name for it…”scamming,” and published a number of articles about the growing problem. Some of the stories I recall reading involved interviews with the youngsters of the time telling of their various scams, and they were proud of their cleverness.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off - Part 2


If you haven’t read Paul Begala’s harangue about our generation yet, please take a moment to do so here

Begala’s rant provides a fundamental statement of what I believe is a seething hatred so many in his generation believe about you and I. Couple that thought with the drama playing out now on the national stage noting that what passes for leadership consists largely of people of his generation.

Carrying on with my Part 1 Ferris Bueller’s Day Off introduction of the thought (See Part 1 first), the film starts with Ferris working a scam on his parents—he fakes being too sick to go to school. Next, Ferris scams his friend, Cameron, to induce him to take his father’s very expensive Ferrari out on the day’s lark, then he scams the school to get his girl friend out early, next he scams the exclusive restaurant for preferential seating, scams a Chicago downtown parade for a place miming the lead singer on one of the floats, and closes with a series of quick dodges to preserve his full day of scams.

The stars of the film are a trio of neatly dressed preppies of that day, shown barging around in a stolen Ferrari and conducting a series of scams.

As interesting as the film, are the reminisces of the cast, producers, director, and others that are contained in the “special features” section of the CD. One after another, they wax fondly about the film, its execution, and the premise—everyone involved in the film are the from Begala’s “generation” born roughly 1955 – 1965; among them Matthew Broderick (b.1962), Barak Obama (b.1961), and Paul Begala (b.1961). And they hate us—Begala terms us that “garbage barge of a generation.” What a thoughtful little fellow.

Wrapping this Part 2 up, it’s very interesting to note that in the crowd rousing scene the song that got everyone up and partying was “"Twist and Shout”—one of the anthems of our generation…and few, if any of us even knew what a Ferrari was. But an an "Eat Me Float"? Chances are we knew various versions of those:




Ferris Bueller’s Day Off - Part 3


The Ferris Bueller generation (FBG’s = those born 1955-65) are actually the second half of the baby-boomers where we were in the leading edge of the bulge. We were fortunate to have lived in an interesting era during our youth, but I would say that it wasn’t quite the euphoric experience the FBG’s seem to think it was. The music was great and we’ve been blessed that it was good enough to stand the test of time…maybe that’s what has Begala and his pals ticked off. But then again, take a look at the picture above…who would you have rather have had as your friends? Otter, Bluto, and the gang or some gaunt little preppies?

I recall observing the FBG’s emerge from college in the late 70’s to early 80’s and thinking at the time that they were in a huge hurry to acquire big houses, fast cars, and whatever else they thought would enhance their personal sense of worth. You and I likely followed our parents’ examples and started out modestly, then built ourselves up when we could. But they, the FBG’s, seemed to be remarkably detached from the reality that it usually takes time and work to build a substantial life that may or may not include some of the trappings they so much wanted.

The FBG’s also came across as lacking integrity and willing to screw others to have their way. In observing them operate, it was clear they considered a lie as useful as the truth if it furthered their ambitions...and more troubling they seemed utterly devoid of conscience. During a circa 1980 casual conversation with a VP of a large regional employer, I asked it he was seeing anything like this in his interviews of potential new recruits from the ranks of late 70’s to early 80’s college graduates. He emphatically replied, YES—they expect to be managers and VP’s in a couple of years!

I know it’s both risky and unfair to generalize about an entire group…so, bear with me as I continue to generalize. I think people develop their life-long sensibilities by the time they reach adulthood. And I think that by reviewing the history of their times, their popular music, and their taste in movies an amateur psychologist might form a fairly illuminating opinion of what kind of people populated a group when they became adults.

Think about that for a moment…our parents went to war and saved the world; we went to war and (for better or worse) changed the authoritarian order of things; and courtesy of our parents and ourselves, the FBG’s weren’t burdened with war and have worked on perfecting the art of the scam during their entire adult lives.

The last part of this series of thoughts will sum things up. As you have probably surmised, I don’t like the FBG any more than they like me. I think they are whiners without soul, without good judgment, and when their lives are summed up there will be absolutely nothing memorable about them or their times. Think about it for a moment: Do $50,000 4-wheel drive SUV’s make any sense whatsoever on smooth roads where they’re most frequently used?

And will anyone really recall the music of their generation…Boy George and Cyndi Lauper?

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off - Part 4

To finish my little FBG (those born 1955-65) rant…I think these mutts were like our younger brothers and sisters…old enough to see and understand some of the things we were experiencing, but not old enough to participate in them. And when their time came, what was left for them? By my recollection, not much. Leisure suits…18% interest rates, jobs were scarce…if you recall, those were the beginning years of the great Southwest S&L debacle. By the way, we had to deal with that stuff ourselves.

There’s no doubt in my mind that we drew a good hand, just as there is little doubt that the FBG’s drew one that was not as good. However, any generation must deal with the hand they're dealt; the FBG group shouldn’t expect anything different. So, why do they continue to whine and blame their troubles on others, especially us? Who knows? One thing is true…it’s their’s now…business, government, education. How are they doing?
Of course, not all of them are reprobates…Santorum (b.1958); J.C. Watts (b.1958) are good guys. There are more, I’m sure. But then there is Osama (b.1957) and Emanuel (b.1959). What do you think of them?

What am I bitching about? When you identify a particularly vile bastard, take time to look up his or her birth year. Chances are it will fall within the range 1955 - 1965. Today they are 45 – 55 years old and they are taking leadership positions in both the public and private sectors. How are they doing? Both sectors are in shambles and this group of cry babies are either whining that they inherited their problems, or going to the basement to hang themselves, setting the autopilot south to the Gulf of Mexico, bailing out and trying to fake their demise. I didn’t say they aren’t creative.

The FBG’s have grown up in some kind of delusional world of their making that I really don’t understand. They have bastardized our language to form a code of their own: functionality; send a message; teachable moment; take a deep breath; enhance; online experience; solutions, solutions, solutions—pizza solution, toilet paper solution, global, scalable…a lot of it came from the Silicon Valley techies.

In the early 1990’s I noticed what seemed to be a gathering surge of something odd in the atmosphere around us. As it considered the obvious lack of professionalism in the adolescent Clinton administration, a 1993 WSJ editorial asked, “Are There Any Adults in Charge”? The decade wrapped up with America’s second Impeachment of a president and the rupture of the “dot com” bubble taking a lot of our retirement money with it. Nearly a decade of Executive Branch negligence almost certainly contributed to the successful 911 attack.

Wasn’t it bizzare when they lavishly celebrated themselves as returning Desert Storm warriors with that 1991 NYC ticker-tape parade? The so-called war was a 100-hour event that left more to be done—that, of course, wasn’t their doing. Losses: 493 KIA – 467 WIA, or about one week’s Vietnam losses in 1968.

In the ensuing 20-years I’ve noticed that everything these prima-donnas touch has to be promoted as some kind of superlative…the greatest, worst, biggest, best ever, etc. Yet, in their hands entire airlines shut down in clear weather, power grids fail their customers by the millions, gas mains explode entire neighborhoods, and Interstate Highway bridges collapse as a result of neglected upkeep.

Well, as some of us have been known to say, "F**k 'em, if they can't take a joke."


Adios

Ferris Bueller's Day Off - Part 5

Risky Business was a 1983 film that launched Tom Cruise’s acting career and became another iconic film of the Ferris Bueller Generation (FBG). Regular readers will recall that I do not like the FBG. Where Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was a story about scamming, Risky Business was a story about running a whore house out of the parents’ home while they were on vacation. Guido the killer pimp, prostitutes, and scams…with their late adolescent characters formed by films like these, no wonder the FBGs are unlikable today.

Be that as it may, this film has some cute scenes and lines. One of my favorites is the school scene with Nurse Bolik posted below. Maybe you had some of the same emotions about school as Cruise's character voiced…I know I did.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High & FBG

If you have read any of my FBG series then you may recall that I don’t like the FBGs, those born from 1955-1965; the 45 to 55 year olds of today.  Known also as Gen-X, these people have, in my opinion, excelled at little more than becoming a generation of whiners and worse.

I’m adding Fast Times at Ridgemont High to a couple of other films, (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off & Risky Business) that I think chronicle this generation of people pretty well.  I do like this 1982 film which was released when we were about 37; then again, who couldn’t have been smitten by Phoebe Cates’ part in it; in fact, that may have diverted my realization that this film fits in with the other FBG films and may be the best descriptive example of all.   

The screenwriter actually went back to high school for a year in order to better understand that particular crop of youngsters before he wrote his script.  The result was a fairly accurate snapshot of teen life circa 1982, just before they started taking their places as young adults in our society.  At that time the 17-27 age group were born from 1955-1965…they were the FBGs.   

Actually, this film is even more illustrative of that generation than are the other two.  It accurately depicts their after school and weekend jobs in local malls and their peculiar tribulations.  It may be the earliest film to depict that aspect of life, since the large regional malls were only built in the early to mid-1970s.

My recollection of 1982 for us was of outrageous interest rates, a dead housing market, the mid-west rust belt, huge unemployment numbers, an abandoned Gulf coast oil patch, the exodus of American manufacturing to foreign sites, and the first personal computers.

For the FBG youngsters, there were few substantial opportunities and AIDS made its appearance about then…that effectively sounded the last gasp of our Sexual Revolution period and, their music was synthesized crap.  All things considered, it wasn’t a great time to come of age, so I can sympathize with their unfortunate situation.

It was probably during those years that these people started turning their ire on us.  From their limited point of view, we had it all—nice homes, great music, fancy cars, new families, jobs or professions.  Many of them were our younger siblings. 

Of course those years were difficult for us also, but in different ways.  I recall thinking that I was glad I wasn’t one of them.  I couldn’t have gotten excited about working in a fast-food joint, or trying to get involved with their music, or facing that job market as a young adult.  

On the other hand, I employed a number of youngsters at that time and a couple of my in-laws were that age and from what I observed of them, they were lacking.  I didn’t see in them the spark that we had, nor did I see any sense of willingness to pay their dues and work up to better things.  They were in a hurry to achieve what we had achieved and for reasons I never quite knew, fully expected that they could skip the hard work.

Most of our government and business leaders are now FBGs.  How are they doing and what kind of people do you see?  Here is one of them…as an FBG employee, he tangled with an Arby’s meat slicer and lost.  

 Adios

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.