Peak Everything (27 page)

This is a generation that has practiced diachronic competition (that is, competition with
future
generations) more ruthlessly than any other since the dawn of our species. The implications are devastating.

I might dispute Brokaw's assertion that the World War II generation was the best in history (in fact I will do so below); nevertheless, a good case could be made that my generation, because it so threatens the perpetuation of its kind and the survival of countless other species, is the
worst
ever.

Of course, in a way the very idea of a “generation” is arbitrary. The notion implies discreteness where there is continuity. Worse still, discussion of “better” or “worse” generations entails a moral judgment where one is not called for, by assuming that all of the members of a demographic cohort somehow deserve equal praise or blame, when in fact this is never the case. It may make sense to speak of the moral triumphs or failures of individuals, but the application of such judgments to whole generations is problematic.

However there is one respect in which the discussion has merit: much of Brokaw's argument revolves around the truism that a demographic cohort is shaped by historical circumstances. Individuals within that cohort inevitably respond to events differently one from another and help shape subsequent history in divergent ways, yet members of each generation undeniably share a certain commonality of experience — notably so during periods of large-scale, dramatic change.

Brokaw's “greatest generation” was tempered by adversity. In contrast, the Boomers have been spoiled by abundance. In the US, one generation presided over that nation's ascendancy while the other is overseeing its peak in power and wealth and the beginning of its inevitable decline. The post-World War II generation in many other nations has likewise enjoyed the brightest years of material abundance, though there are certainly exceptions.

But if we follow the implications of this environmental determinist view, then we have to conclude that the World War II generation was not so praiseworthy after all, nor are the Boomers so uniformly culpable. All of us are mostly responding to circumstances beyond our control.

In this chapter I hope to explore some of the circumstances that have made us Boomers what and who we are, and to argue that,
having failed to live up to some of our expressed ideals and now finding ourselves in power just as the industrial world is beginning its decline, we may have one last opportunity to redeem ourselves.

Brokaw's book was in some respects a peace offering — an attempt to close the generation gap that opened up in the 1960s as young people wrangled with their parents over drugs, sex, music, hairstyles, and the Vietnam War. Steven Spielberg's
Saving Private Ryan
was another bouquet thrown from the younger (now aging) generation to its elders. The message implicit in both: We, the Boomers, appreciate and respect our parents' sacrifices and hard work, which made it possible for us to enjoy the peace, freedom, and affluence that we have mostly taken for granted throughout our lives.

The bouquet is no doubt deserved in many individual instances.
The Greatest Generation
is filled with stories of undeniable heroism (though for more politically informed anecdotal reports of the experiences and contributions of the elder cohort see Studs Terkel's
Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression,
published by Norton in 2000, and
The Good War: An Oral History of World War II,
released by New Press in 1997).

However, the freedom and affluence of modern Americans are due not just to courage and endurance but also sheer luck. Let us not forget that the people who inhabited the United States in the early 20
^th
century happened to be sitting on one fabulous pile of natural resources — everything from forests, fresh water, fertile soils, and fish to minerals (gold, nickel, iron, aluminum, copper) to energy resources (oil, natural gas, coal, and uranium). Moreover, the US has enjoyed geographic isolation from Eurasian intrigues, which enabled it to thrive during occasions when Europeans and Asians were tearing each other to bits.

Thus the payoff that came at the end of World War II carried an historic inevitability: with its resource base, factories, and highly motivated work force, the US had helped win the war without damage to its internal infrastructure. In contrast, Britain and the USSR had also emerged winners, but only after seeing their cities,
railroads, and factories bombed. While the rest of the industrial world lay in ruins, America stood unscathed.

Because of the American economy's stability, the US dollar was adopted as a reserve currency by other nations. American oil wells supplied over half the total amount of petroleum being extracted globally. Sixty percent of all export goods delivered throughout the world carried a “Made in USA” tag. General Motors was the world's biggest corporation and Hollywood films were on screens everywhere.

US factories made so many manufactured goods that Americans had to be cajoled into a permanent buying frenzy by the greatest propaganda system the world has ever seen — the American advertising industry — which made brilliant use of history's greatest propaganda medium — television. In fact, the consumerist project had gotten under way in the 1920s as fuel-fed American capitalism searched for solutions to the problem of over-production (a problem that was in fact one of the Depression's causes). But World War II's insatiable need for materiel and the post-war expansion of advertising and credit made the Depression vanish like a bad dream and sent the economy into warp drive. Indeed, in the 1950s human beings habitually came to be referred to not as “people” or “citizens” but “consumers.”

Having lived through a decade when starving would-be employees competed for the few jobs available, people worked hard when finally given the chance. They saved. They believed in the American Dream and in the essential goodness of America's international leadership. They bought homes and raised families.

And that's where the Boomers come in.

When people feel optimistic about the future and feel they will easily be able to support a large family they tend to have more children. And so, after the War's end, as soldiers came home and went to work building the suburban utopia, they sired the most numerous generational cohort America had ever seen. Demographers define baby-boomers as those born between 1946 and 1964 (as of 2007, members of the Boomer cohort are between 43 and 61 years of
age). There are about 76 million US Boomers, representing a quarter of the population. And their tastes, lifestyles, and ambitions have transformed the nation — and to a large extent the world beyond — in a myriad of ways.

The “Father Knows Best” years in which the Boomers grew up were ones of unprecedented abundance and safety. Yes, there was a Cold War, there were a couple of recessions, and the last few of the Boomer cohort's formative years (from 1968 on) were tumultuous. But compare this quarter-century to any previous one in history: in Europe — one of the wealthiest regions of the planet — hardly a decade went by for centuries without a significant famine affecting an entire region. For Boomers the word
famine
held about as much personal relevance as Biblical verses about leprosy or marauding Philistines. No one in America actually
starved to death
— at least not in modern times, and certainly no one
we
knew did so. Far from it: Boomers knew only supermarkets filled with a numbing variety of cheap packaged or refrigerated foods, all conveniently accessed by way of automobiles (every family now had one) rolling serenely over smoothly paved streets and highways.

One measure of this new abundance was power available per capita. In the 19
^th
century, most of the work being done in America was accomplished by means of animal or human muscle power. In 1850, fuel-fed machines supplied only about 18 percent of the total horsepower in the economy; the rest came from real horses, as well as oxen, mules, and human labor. Domestic servants were common. However, by 1960 machines were supplying virtually all of the power in the economy. People were still working, of course, and there were lots more of them (though by now there were far fewer working horses, and far fewer domestic servants), but their contribution had become inconsequential in terms of applied energy. Machines — and the fossil fuels that made them go — were supplying power for greatly expanded manufacturing, transportation, information storage and transmission, and so on. And so by the 1960s the typical American — even if his or her near ancestors had been slaves or servants — had access to as much power as that exerted by scores of laborers.

Two hippies at Woodstock, August, 1969.

In short, Americans had every reason to believe that they were living in the best of all possible worlds, in the greatest of nations, in the best of times.

Why, then, the generation gap? Was there trouble in paradise?

Again: people are to some extent the product of the circumstances and events of their historical era. The younger generation, growing up in affluence, was free to take survival — even abundance — for granted. And we are discussing a level of abundance significantly greater, in some respects, even than exists today: at that time, the US was still solvent, still a net exporter of credit. In the 1960s an entire family could live on a single average income. Rents were cheap, land was cheap, and college was cheap.

Therefore rebellion was cheap, too. The young people knew they were different from their parents, and they could afford to question their parents' seeming obsession with discipline and hard work, their conformity and unflinching patriotism.

Meanwhile America was visibly and quickly changing: graceful old downtown buildings were collapsing under the wrecking ball while monotonous suburban housing developments and strip malls were sprouting where farmland used to be. America's wealth was being spent in a tasteless nouveau-riche spectacle designed by overpaid Madison Avenue huckster-bureaucrats in gray suits. The older generation was mostly proud of this transformation, but many young people couldn't help but notice the vapidity and emptiness of the corporate-sponsored theme-park way of life, and they had the free time to indulge in irony and sarcasm.

As Boomers went to college (a greater percentage of them did so than in any previous generation) they started asking questions, and the answers they found were troubling. They learned that the shining image of America the Free and Brave hid a history of slavery and genocide. Moreover, in their extracurricular reading they discovered that an increasing share of US wealth was emanating from an international imperial system enforced by the American military and the CIA.

This latter fact was driven home by the greatest single perception-shaping circumstance of the Boomers' young-adult lives — the Vietnam War. Pampered American teenagers were being called up, trained, and airlifted around the world to fight and die in a conflict they didn't understand. And an alarming number of them were coming home in pine boxes or body bags. Was this a heroic campaign against a malevolent foreign enemy bent on our destruction? Or was it an imperialist war of aggression against a Third-World nation led by a man widely regarded by his countrymen as the indigenous equivalent of George Washington? Disputes over the war divided families across America — my own included — and ran deep: for people on both sides of the debate what was at stake was nothing less than the essential character and future of the nation.

Many of the happily memorable moments of the Boomer generation's early years are etched into the national psyche and have been recalled endlessly: teenage girls' shrieking response to the Beatles' first appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show; the Summer of Love in San Francisco in 1967; Grateful Dead concerts jammed with tripping, giddy hipsters; communes and head shops; Woodstock. But other images are more sobering and significant: the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and Martin Luther King, Jr.; the police riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention; the shootings at Kent State; the stirring to life of the Black Power movement, the American Indian Movement, the women's movement, and the Chicano/farm workers' movement; and the massive antiwar demonstrations that closed many colleges and universities in 1971.