Balsamic Dreams is a witty, acerbic take on the “contribution” of the Baby Boomers to American life. It’s author is self-loathing Baby Boomer, Joe Queenan. Baby Boomers have defined the last 40 years of American life. Their power was manifest early as a consequence of the youth-led civil rights movement, anti-Vietnam War activism, and the fallout of Nixon’s resignation. The generation includes everyone from Abbie Hoffman, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Meryl Streep, most of today’s academics, and the authors of much else that is execrable about life today.
The author does a good job of separating the core Baby Boomers–liberals, “bo bos,” folks into yoga, draft dodgers, middle managers who are in bands, etc.–and the numerically larger mass of indifferent, more blue collar folks born at the same time. Just as Thomas Paine and George Washington define the generation of 1776 (and not the loyalists), the anti-war-activists-turned-Goldman-Sachs-traders define the Baby Boomers. And what is it that unites this generation in Queenan’s view? A litany of sins that amount to perpetual adolescence: self-absorption, ignorance, ingratitude, coarseness, and a mania for the trendy and the self-important.
The thread that runs through most of their crimes is a kind of eternal present, a naive and ignorant conceit that others before them had not raised children, discovered other cultures and cuisines, or dealt with moral dilemmas. This ignorance makes their own ersatz solutions brilliant in their own eyes; they think they’re addressing issues no one has noticed before. All that precedes the Baby Boomers is the stuff of contempt whether in music, politics, or family life. Their belated tributes to The Greatest Generation stand in sharp contrast to earlier invocation of “pigs” and “squares” to describe authority figures during the revolutionary Sixties. The Gen Xers are seen as lazy and cynical in contrast to the high-minded idealism of dodging the draft during the Vietnam War only to pursue material indicia of success in workaholic fashion as soon as the threat of war had receded. The fact that the Xers are the product of Boomer negligent child-rearing philosophies is not often discussed.
As the Baby Boomers have moved towards middle age and beyond, their tragicomic obsession with youth can be seen everywhere, not least when the Rolling Stones go on tour. Whatever happened to “don’t trust anyone over thirty?”
Queenan’s book is useful because it pins down the “bourgeois bohemian” phenomenon that David Brooks has discussed as a generational phenomenon. And, unlike Brooks, it sees little to recommend in the Baby Boomer flirtation with Eastern Religions and their paeans to “life changing trips to Burma.”
Queenan’s lack of charity is, at times, stunning. For example, he writes:
Boomer culture derives from a pathological need to have everything and its exact opposite. I want to dress like I’m poor but actually be rich. I want to dodge the draft but also vote for John McCain. I want to make movies that ridicule people who are lame, tired, out of date and hapless, but still get to be Danny Aykroyd. I want to spend the whole of my youth reading books deploring the moral bankruptcy of any parents’ generation, then when i am in a position to inherit their life’s savings, ostentatiously cover the coffee table with stacks of kick-ass My Pop the War Hero-type memoirs praising their extraordinary valor.
Yet this lack of charity is basically justified; just as only Nixon could go to China, Baby Boomer Queenan has the moral authority to deliver. The Baby Boomers are the generation that unraveled standards. On their watch, divorce, drugs, STDs, cynicism, illegitimacy, crime, increasingly coarse language, and contempt for the past. National unity became passe. Worst of all, the past has been re-written as if every generation before the Baby Boomers is equally guilty of bringing about radical change and hating their parents, but this is not the case. Social revolution did not happen in the 1830s, the 1870s, the 1910s, or any other American generation until the post-WWII generation. It was a generation whose beliefs were uniquely authored by up-start intellectuals like Abbie Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Gloria Steinam, Angela Davis, etc. Outside of the South, the exhausted WASP elite gave up without a fight.
The book is a good read. It’s not high sociology, but it has a lot of useful insights . . . most of them depressing.
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[...] 1minutebookreviewswordpresscom wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptQueenan’s book is useful in that it looks at the “bourgeois bohemian” phenomenon that David Brooks has discussed as a generational phenomenon. And, unlike Brooks, it sees little to recommend in the flirtation with Eastern Religions and … [...]
Thanks for the review, I see these types of people almost every day where I work (service industry). I just don’t get them, but this looks like it will give me some insights – depressing or not.
Mr. Queenan’s book reminds me of the story of the woman who visited a friend’s home and was amazed that, after dinner, the friend’s teenaged son got up from the table to clear and wash the dishes. “I could never get my son to do that”, she exclaimed. “Why not” her hostess rejoined, “didn’t you raise him?” The evil trends and the pied pipers who led them belonged to the “greatest generation” who raised up the boomers.