Calling the hippie generation on the carpet

[unixronin]

Chez Pazienza writes trenchantly in the Huffington Post about the baby-boomer Me Generation and their 40 years of complete self-absorbtion:

Such is the real legacy of the 60s, as filtered through the haze of bong smoke still looked back on with fondness by many of those who were there:  It introduced the most narcissistic, self-congratulatory, self-indulgent generation this country has ever seen.  A group of people political satirist Christopher Buckley jokingly calls "The Un-greatest Generation."

As far as they're concerned, they own the world -- and to some extent they do, and have since they first went from being counter-culture warriors to being shallow, shameless Wall Street capitalists in the 1980s.  When Wavy Gravy gave way to Gordon Gekko.  When the Baby Boomers ascended to a position of real power in America, it was almost a certainty that they would do what they'd done since the 60s: shove their values (which always came down to one thing: them), their culture, and their nostalgia for their own childhood down our collective throats, allowing the rest of us the opportunity to fully grasp and revel right along with them in what they already knew so well -- their lives ruled.  It was this gargantuanly egocentric attitude that gave us the "Me Generation" during the 70s and went on to bankrupt parts of this country, both financially and morally, in the 80s and beyond.  No wonder "my generation" (no pun intended), the so-called Gen-X, eventually decided that the only way to fight back was to abandon all that phony, ultimately self-serving conscientiousness and just not give a shit about anything.

(via fruitylips, OOB)

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry you feel that way. For the record, I used "interesting" and "curious" because, quite simply, I was curious where you saw assignation of blame in that article that I did not.

(Aside, that is, from the immediate environs of the Gordon Gekko reference, and I think few people will deny that the generation of Wall Street speculators who arrived there in the 80s have since strip-mined the economy to the best of their ability. Since that was contained in the part I quoted, and I didn't see anything else in the rest of the article that I could imagine that you could have been referring to, it was natural to wonder whether you'd skipped the actual article and instead judged it solely by the excerpt I quoted. I thought it unlikely that you had done so; I merely considered the possibility, and was asking for confirmation that you had read the full article, not trying to imply that you hadn't.)