The Baby Boomers: What Went Wrong?

The great P.J. O'Rourke is coming to Portsmouth soon, to talk about his new book, The Baby Boom: How It Got That Way (And It Wasn't My Fault) (And I'll Never Do It Again). We're lucky to have him.

I haven't read O'Rouke's new book yet, but the title has got me thinking about the "Baby Boomers", people born between the years 1946 and 1964 — or, simply put, the children of the World War II Generation. 

I thought I'd pre-empt his visit by adding a shallow observation about the human race in general — and the generation that got us into this mess.

When I was a kid there were students in school who obviously thought quite highly of themselves. For the most part, they were the "rich" kids.

Being 9, 10, or 11, we really had no idea what "rich" meant of course, but these were the kids wearing the latest fashions, whose parents drove new cars, and who lived in houses that were a little bit bigger, in neighborhoods that were slightly nicer.

They weren't really rich; they just had a little more money than the rest of us.

Still, being a "cut above" — or rather, being told they were a "cut above", however thin the slice — some of them gravitated toward positions of favor with the teachers and the administration, and they always talked down to the rest of us, like they knew better.

It was a baffling experience for an immature mind, to be envious of their nice clothes but so loathing of the haughty airs. 

Years and wisdom teach us that these kids had no claim to their (self-declared) elevated status. None of them worked for the wealth they enjoyed; they hadn't even had a chance to inherit it yet!

They were kids of the rich, and any claim to an elite status was held only by accident of birth.

Kids learn from those around them, and no doubt many of the parents thought themselves members of an aristocracy, and the kids must have seen the deferential treatment their parents received from other, less fortunate adults, and perhaps from time to time the parents would disclose some hint of their supposed superiority to the kids themselves.

Whether they got it from the culture around them, or from within their own insulated world, they ended up thinking they were the cat's meow.

That might be what happened to a lot of Baby Boomers.

These are the children of the "greatest generation" — they're the unaccomplished children of people who actually did something: their parents fought the "good war" and "saved" the world from evil. 

Our culture spares nothing in lavishing the "greatest generation" with praise. No anniversary of Pearl Harbor or D-Day is allowed to pass without endless accolades to those who "made the ultimate sacrifice" to secure "our freedom" — or somebody's freedom, anyway — and everyone one of them an Audie Murphy or a Florence Nightingale. 

For the most part they are all dead and gone, but their spirit lives on in those sired in the hopeful, optimistic years after the war.

Like children of the rich, who have been told they are a breed apart from the rest of us, the Baby Boomers are the children, or at least the cultural heirs, of those declared "a cut above" by history. Who stands closer to those titans of American virtue than their own offspring? Who, better than they, can testify to the possible — if only they were given enough power?

(Of course, there is reason to question the very "success" of World War II. In the opening page of his brilliant work, History of the Second World War, British historian B.H. Liddell Hart wrote that "The Western Allies entered [the] war with a two-fold object. The immediate purpose was to fulfil their promise to preserve the independence of Poland. The ultimate purpose was to remove a potential menace to themselves, and thus ensure their own security. In the outcome, they failed in both purposes. Not only did they fail to prevent Poland from being overcome in the first place, and partitioned between Germany and Russia, but after six years of war which ended in apparent victory they were forced to acquiesce in Russia's domination of Poland — abandoning their pledges to the Poles who had fought on their side....At the same time all the effort that was put into the destruction of Hitlerite Germany resulted in a Europe so devastated and weakened in the process that its power of resistance was much reduced in the face of a fresh and greater menace" — this would be the Soviet Communist Empire — "and Britain, in common with her European neighbours, had become a poor dependent of the United States.")

The world agreed — they hadn't much choice — to let America run the world (or half of it, anyway), but in practice that soon meant rule by spoiled, elitist, hubris-driven brats who thought that because dad — or maybe their friend's dad — helped save the world, they somehow owned it. What followed was a half-century of military, economic, and political intervention, all in the name of remaking the world in the image of the new aristocracy — those who sacrificed, yes, but actually their oh-so-enlightened offspring.

Unleashed, with all the resources of the sole-standing industrial power, they would build heaven on earth, at home and abroad — and the mess we see around us today is of their making more than anyone's. One hand constantly meddling in others' affairs, the other held out expectantly, their sense of entitlement knows no bounds.