Why baby boomers hate Bill Clinton -- and themselves

By TODD GITLIN Illustration by Zach Trenholm it's open season on baby boomers, not least the ones who live in the White House. As if there were such creatures as baby boomers. As if the president, ex-Georgetown, ex-Yale, shared a world view with a bricklayer or a CEO by dint of birth if the latter first saw the light in 1946 -- or 1956, or 1964, all technically years of the boom. Casting campaigns as generation wars is always a bit of an intellectual fraud. As screenwriter and essayist Jeremy Larner ("The Candidate") says, "The concept of generation is a bad and false idea that comes up in every generation." Jack Kennedy's rugged youth appeal masked all the continuities between his policies and Ike's. For that matter, Kennedy and Nixon shared a generation (and with Reagan, yet): How much does that explain? In a Newsweek puff piece about Bob Dole and his generation's valuing of "self-discipline over self-actualization," political columnist Joe Klein deplores "talking about yourself excessively, celebrating yourself...what passes for 'honesty' among baby boomers." (Newsweek, 2/12/96) Elsewhere, Klein writes that the Clintons' "low crimes and misdemeanors are mostly generation-specific...draft avoidance, marital squiggles, chemical enhancement...moral relativism, the assorted seductions and confusions of counterculture America....They bent the rules. They cut corners." (Newsweek, 1/22/96) Well, yes. And in 1940, the sainted John F. Kennedy's father intervened to keep his darling boy from being booted out of the Navy after the FBI tapped young John's cavortings with a Nazi spy. For that matter, who in the following list of Good War presidents did not cut corners, squiggle, seduce, strut his stuff on the low road paved with gold while proclaiming his highmindedness -- Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George Bush? The Good War generation produced dealmakers galore, men possessed of blue-sky ambition, if that's the self-discipline Klein has in mind. You'd think it was the Clintons' wealthy friends and not Reagan's who chipped in to buy the president a below-market retirement house. There's no generational qualification for Bob Dole's free trips in the Archer-Daniels-Midland plane -- only political power for sale. Klein -- a card-carrying baby boomer who wrote for Rolling Stone in its sex-drugs-and-rock 'n' roll heyday -- deplores the "self-indulgence and squalid confessionalism that have debased our public culture." (Newsweek, 2/12/96) A thousand amens. But I hadn't noticed that the recently retired Phil Donahue, who opened the fourth wall in the confession box, is a boomer, exactly. And while we're on this squalid subject, what of the Richard Nixon of Checkers, the Gay Talese of adultery, and the Norman Mailer of the men's room? In The New Yorker, (4/1/96) Michael Kelly, another baby boomer political scribe, sneers that Clinton against Dole is "Elvis against Bogart, the Vietnam War boomers against the Good War generation, the man of many words against the man of few, the feeler of your pain against the tough guy who doesn't even feel his own." Even the estimable Christopher Hitchens goes over the top in a recent Vanity Fair cascade. Hitchens finds his fellow boomers to be a bunch of teetotalling, butt-crushing, Stairmaster creeps with no culture worth cultivating. The cultural charge is merited, by and large, but the interesting question is why. Hitchens neglects the role of the gatekeepers of celebrity, not least the aforementioned Condé Nast magazines, which disdain to promote art that develops outside the galleries, publishers and theaters of Chic Ltd. Hitchens lavishes wet kisses upon the war generation which did, fortunately, fight the Good War, but a few years earlier generated the Bad Appeasement that led to that war. As for the boomers, they've had the bad taste to spawn a wilderness of bad seeds -- "affectless, caps worn the wrong way round, subliterate rather than even illiterate, moving in herds or gangs, haunting the shopping malls and cinema multiplexes...The thing about these kids is that they can't be blamed on anybody else. If the culture has declined into a brave new world of candified, soft-centered, massified, and mushy narcissism, on whose watch did this decline occur?" In Hitchens' view, the sins of the Xers are visited upon their parents. But where, one wonders, did these boomers come from? They seem to have been born bad in a fit of parthenogenesis. There's plenty to disappoint and irritate in the Clintons, God knows. There's enough political mediocrity among the so-called boomers (not to mention their parents) to fill the Senate and House. But when Nixon was under fire, neither Woodward nor Bernstein had the gall to trash Nixon's entire generation. Paranoia and lies were not taken to be infirmities of age. No, the intensity and sweep of today's outrage suggest a kind of generational fear and self-loathing. One's middle years can be distasteful. Finitude is a drag. You get a glimpse of unfinished business -- personal and political -- that's likely going to stay unfinished. Institutions lumber on, in all their corruption and inertia. So what's gone wrong? Why does life remain incomplete? Check out those pious tricksters in the White House! This shallow criticism comes out as another whine -- boomer petulance all over again. (Why isn't my White House as fabulous as the commercials promised?) The fear, afflicting all us moderns shuffling through this mortal coil, leads to the search for culprits. The self-loathing is more specific, more surprising and interesting. The so-called boomers were told, and told themselves, that if they wanted the world, they could have it now -- a shot or a pill away. Meanwhile, many of them thought it was their mission to save the world, for which extravagant hope some elders mocked them unmercifully while others waved encouragement. The world remained unsaved, though mightily improved in many respects, but the sense of failure nags -- a measure of the magnitude of youthful hopes. Add the fact that many of these folks bore their children late, at an age when they might have thought they would know -- as their parents didn't, quite -- how to steer the young. But they don't know how to usher their children through a sexed, drugged, grunged world. They believed in sex on demand, on request, in passing, even, and -- whoops, that got dangerous. They believed in rebellion, but not the nihilistic sort of rebellion their kids seem to fancy. They believed, many of them, in not going to war, and for two decades now they've been told they were chicken wretches who missed out on rites of manhood and will remain forever untested. They believed in doing as they pleased, because they grew up on the fat of the land, and now the land's not quite so fat, and it's their kids who worry whether they'll be able to afford to live in a house that's half the size of the one they grew up in. The impulsive now want to be impulse-controllers, and don't like the way that feels. It's hard, ma, when it's your kid that's bleeding, and when your worries are so close to the bone, and you don't know exactly what to do, you warm to the sound of "family values," wish you could assert your authority, and fill up with nameless guilts. But fear and self-loathing can't explain the entire phenomenon, since so-called boomers are not the only boomerangers. Riding this current, there comes Robert Bly, no boomer himself, in his new book, "The Sibling Society," to fulminate that "we navigate from a paternal society, now discredited, to a society in which impulse is given its way. People don't bother to grow up, and we are all fish swimming in a tank of half-adults....Adults regress toward adolescence; and adolescents -- seeing that -- have no desire to become adults." Bly asks: "How did we move from the optimistic, companionable, food-passing youngsters gathered on that field at Woodstock to the self-doubting, dark-hearted, turned-in, death-praising, indifferent, wised-up, deconstructionist audience that now attends a grunge music concert? That is the question we need to answer." Indeed. But many folk tales and theories of human nature later, answer the question of what Bly has not done. Like many university students, he doesn't know the difference between an assertion and an argument. Overstated description is an excellent skill in a surrealist poet from the Great Plains, but it is not much help in social anatomy. It is, in fact, self-indulgent. Too bad, because Bly's horror at the premature aging of children -- remember little Jessica, the seven-year-old pilot? -- is right, and his catalogue of the psychic and social risks of fatherlessness is important. An influential British feminist, Rosalind Coward, writing in The Guardian, recently made the point that many feminists are now paying the price for having too long cavalierly dismissed men. ("A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.") Bly is accurate, too, about the shriveled vocabulary, the syntactic breakdown, the distrust for coherent language, that fills television and turns the chat of everyday life into, like, television, as well. But again, the deploring is easy, the explanation hard. Bly's psychoanalytic arguments are interesting but ahistorical. If the root of cultural decline is TV saturation -- and a lot of it is -- then let's talk about that. The last time I looked, neither William S. Paley, David Sarnoff, nor Ted Turner were boomers. Bly comes closer to the point in a too-brief chapter about the deleterious effects of bottom-line economics, which has spawned a bottom-line culture. "Our society has been damaged not only by acquisitive capitalism," he writes, "but also by an idiotic distrust of all ideas, religions, and literature handed down to us by elders and ancestors." On the other hand, callow faith in the market is, let's face it, an "idea...handed down to us by elders and ancestors." Bly's ancestor-worship is indiscriminate -- a mystification. The problem of how to create (not only worship) authority worth the candle is not the boomers' problem in particular, it's democracy's and modernity's problem as well. America is in the undermining business -- that's, as Bob Dole would say, what it's all about. Bill Clinton wasn't the author of "How to Win Friends and Influence People." The confidence man, as Melville knew in 1857, is an American fixture. The new whines come in the oldest bottles. Good to the very last drop. Todd Gitlin is a professor at New York University and the author of "Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked By Cultural Wars" and "The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage." He was president of Students for a Democratic Society, from 1963-64. Todd Gitlin can be reached at gitlint@is.nyu.edu

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