They’re talking about their generation. Again.
With the three-day celebration of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 50th birthday (an event that required two more days to complete than the White House conference on child care), Baby Boomers have found yet another excuse to gaze at themselves in the mirror and marvel, once again, at the reflection that stares back.
Never mind that they already went through this just over a year ago, when Bill Clinton turned 50. Never mind that, with Boomers entering their sixth decade at the rate of one birthday every seven seconds, they will get their very own opportunity to blow out the candles with all the breath they will expel discussing the occasion.
Nope, the first lady’s birthday is a sociological landmark, the embodiment of the challenge facing Boomer women, the sweeping aside of stereotypes about the latter half of life, the dawning of a new Age of Aquarius, a phenomenon worthy of analysis everywhere from “Oprah” to “Time.”
But don’t blame all the fuss on the media. Blame it on the Boomers in the media who, like their counterparts throughout society, are inclined to view every event in their lives with the wonder of an infant discovering its toes.
“Whatever happens, Baby Boomers are the first ones to experience it,” said Neil Howe, an economist, historian and Boomer who has co-written several books on generational theory.
“Whatever phase of life that Boomers are entering is popular, full of meaning and significance,” he said. “And, as soon as Boomers exit it, it will be tired and unpopular.”
This can be a frustrating experience for those who find themselves in the wake of the biggest demographic wave in history. Like kudzu, the Baby Boomers blanket the cultural landscape, swathing everything in their riotous profusion and leaving subsequent generations feeling a bit smothered.
For more than three decades, their sheer numbers have driven what gets played on the radio, aired on television, sold in stores and talked about in government. And, just when you thought they might begin to gracefully f-f-fade away, the generation that brought us the 16-cupholder minivan and the classic rock station is gearing up to bring us the golden years.
They’re not getting old. They’re “redefining middle age.” For now, they’ve decided to redefine it as “mid-youth.” Who knows what term they’ll come up with for old age. Maybe “still-young-youth” or “semi-mid-youth.”
Imagine, then, what this portends for the next century. The still taut and tiny septuagenarian Mick Jagger twirling about Soldier Field like a windup music box ballerina while thousands of fans shake their walkers in approval. Oliver Stone, having already exhausted the most popular themes of his generation’s heyday–Vietnam, the Doors, Kennedy and Nixon–turning his talents to the decade’s lesser lights, like, say, Spiro Agnew or Petula Clark.
In any event, it has become increasingly apparent that when the time comes, they won’t do the decent thing and retire en masse to Florida to drive big cars and write cranky letters to local newspapers.
They refuse to even acknowledge that they’re aging. When the consumer research firm Yankelovich Partners recently asked Boomers when they thought old age began, they pinpointed its arrival at 79.5 years.
The fact that the average life expectancy falls 1.5 years short of that mark apparently made no difference. And they say the younger generations are bad at math.
In demographic terms, the Baby Boom extends from 1946 to 1964, when 78 million Americans issued forth from their mothers’ wombs in an unprecedented expression of national fertility. Culturally speaking, though, the span is shorter.
Many social historians and marketers date its end at 1960, when the birth-control pill became commercially available and began to bring about the decline in birth rates. People born between 1960 and 1964 are considered a hybrid group, melding into the next generation, which covers 1965 to 1979.
Friction between Boomers and those who followed them has always been remarkably high. The very names bestowed upon the subsequent generation ring with disdain. The Baby Busters. The Thirteeners (for being the 13th generation since the American Revolution, but not a number even an elevator wants).
And, of course, the label that stuck: Generation X.
Ask a Baby Boomer about Generation X, and you’re likely to get an assessment similar to that issued by Gerald Celente, author of “Trends 2000” and founder of the Trends Research Institute in Rhinebeck, N.Y.
“There’s a difference between talking about history and being a part of history,” he said. “The Boomers had causes . . . the younger generation, there’s not one cause they’ve fought for.”
It’s remarkable how much that comment sounds like what Bob Dole said about Bill Clinton’s generation during the 1996 election, when he called Boomers the “corps of the elite who . . . never did anything real, never suffered and never learned.”
While intergenerational hostility is nothing new, it’s more typical for a generation to stand between the two warring groups. Dole, for example, is part of the GI Generation, born before 1930, while the so-called Silent Generation preceded the Boomers. And the Boomers’ attitude seems twisted because they coined that bit about never trusting anyone over 30.
The Generation X explanation for this phenomenon can be summarized in one memorable salvo issued by reluctant Xer Douglas Coupland, who unwittingly introduced its label with his 1991 novel “Generation X.”
In an essay about reaction to that book, Coupland wrote, “Feeling pummeled by the recession and embarrassed by their own compromised ’60s values, (Boomers) began transferring their collective darkness onto the group threatening to take their spotlight. The result? Xers were labeled monsters.”
By this point, more than a few Boomers are likely grumbling over their Sunday morning bran flakes–health food being another Boomer-inspired trend–that Xers are just envious of them. And they have a point.
The Boomers got free love. Xers got free condoms and a lecture about AIDS. They got psychedelic drugs. Xers got “Just say no.” They got Woodstock. Xers got Live Aid and Lollapalooza. They got Kennedy. Xers got Ford, Carter and Reagan.
It’s two other presidents, though, who best represent the divide, and the gap is less about envy than exaggeratedly different experiences growing up.
The first president is Nixon. Even though most Generation Xers remember Watergate, if at all, as little more than an endless drizzle of talk that pre-empted the after-school cartoons, it established the shape of their world as surely as World War II set the stage for Boomers.
The postwar years brought prosperity and rising expectations, and the Vietnam War protests and Watergate convinced Boomers of their power to change society and root out corruption.
For those who came later, though, the aftermath of Watergate, followed by Whip Inflation Now, Carter’s national “malaise” and almost a decade of Reaganomics created a cynicism and detachment from the political process that persists. Less than a third of Xers voted in the last presidential election.
That brings us to President Clinton, the First Boomer. Some Boomers, like Celente, like to disavow Clinton, saying that anyone who claims not to have inhaled is an inadequate generational representative. Nonetheless there’s no question he still stands as its premier symbol.
“Big ideas. Can’t shut up. Very self-righteous. Telling us how to live,” is how Frank Gregorsky, with the Discovery Institute, a Seattle-based think tank, summarizes Generation X perceptions of the president and his counterpart on the Right, Newt Gingrich.
Misunderstandings linger on both sides of generation gap, but a recent study by Yankelovich Partners indicates that Xers have gotten a particularly bad rap from their elders. In contrast to the stereotype of a generation of nose-pierced slackers working at Starbucks, Generation Xers showed themselves as a markedly ambitious and independent lot. They described themselves as confident of their own success and are starting their own businesses at three times the rate of people ages 35 to 55.
This doesn’t mean, however, that Xers will get their time in the sun. “They’re stuck between booms,” said J. Walker Smith, a managing partner at Yankelovich.
Squeezing the Xers out in the coming years are the Millennials, who are mostly the children of Boomers and a demographic bulge themselves. Born after 1980, they are expected to come to the fore in the 21st Century.
Still, Boomers are likely to wield their influence well into the foreseeable future. Even the hoopla about 50th birthdays is likely to last another eight more years, because the median age of Boomers is 42, predicts Cheryl Russell, a leading Boomer watcher and author, most recently, of “Mid-Youth Market.”
On the positive side, Russell estimates that the days of Ed McMahon hawking life insurance on television to seniors are numbered because that marketing strategy won’t appeal to Boomers. “They’re dragging the youth market into old age,” she said.
That’s not the only thing Boomers will drag into old age. As far as popular culture goes, time is still on their side.
“It’s a stranglehold,” Howe said. “That repertoire of 1,200 Boomer songs? We’ll hear them on the radio for the next 40 years.”
