Name-Calling -- Pulling Out Yuppie Label

In writing the other day about a retirement home for rock ‘n’ rollers, I recalled that the rebellious generation of the 1960s had a slogan: “Never trust anyone over 30.”

Morgan Spector of Pasadena writes to protest that “Never trust anyone over 30” was not really the slogan of that generation, but merely a remark that the media picked up and perpetuated.

Spector recalls that when the Free Speech Movement was in full cry at Berkeley, the university named a man in his early 30s to negotiate with the FSM, thinking his relative youth might make him more acceptable. When the press asked Jack Weinberg, an FSM spokesman, whether he would negotiate with the appointed young man, he said, “No, we don’t trust anyone over 30.”

Spector says Weinberg was merely stalling until he could consider the young negotiator’s proposals; but the press, which is “always looking for catchwords, fads, and gimmicks,” seized on the phrase and “made considerably more of (it) than anyone in the movement ever did.

“At the time it was a joke, nothing more, and would have disappeared altogether from the lexicon had the media not kept it alive, even going so far, as I recall, as to track Weinberg down on his 30th birthday (to his apparent embarrassment).”

Spector argues that the word yuppie , “which lumps children of the truly wealthy together with middle-class strivers,” is unrealistic. “Even the phrase younger generation is of this sort, suggesting that any diverse population can be understood in the aggregate based on the distinction of age.”

I know a Vietnam veteran on the Westside who might be considered a yuppie. He was born in 1945, before World War II ended; he has a wife and three children and a large mortgage; he sells insurance. The other day he had a frightening incident and he wrote the following about that day.

“It was an ordinary day. Up at 7. Drive to work. Answer the phone. Do the mail. Skip lunch. Answer the phone. Justify our rates. Answer the phone. Solve problems. Deal with angry clients. Answer the phone. Work past 5. Talk to the janitor. Work past 9. ‘Gail, I’m almost done, say good night to the kids.’ Prepare for tomorrow. Work past 12. Drive home.

“Eat at 1. To bed at 2.

“6 o’clock. There’s an elephant on my chest. Gail mopping my brow. Hyperventilating. Fear. Sirens. Paramedics. Gurney. Worried looks. ‘Take care of the kids.’ Out the door. Rain on my face. Ambulance.

“Am I dying? What’s important, anyway?”

It was just stress. Not life threatening. But scary. A message to slow down.

Is it fair to call his generation yuppies and libel them as greedy and materialistic?

Even my own generation wasn’t so bad, though we were over 30 when it was not fashionable. Tom La Belle sends me a column I wrote nearly 18 years ago, after seeing a play about World War II. It began:

“We went to the Music Center to see ‘Lovely Ladies, Kind Gentlemen,’ and it reminded me that we were good men, the young American men of World War II.

“We seem to have fallen into disrepute. Our young rebuke us; the wealth we created with our energy threatens to bury us in waste; we have got us in a war for which history will despise us.

“Yet most of us are only Capt. Frisby, a generation older, still idealistic and hopeful, looking here and there for lost dreams like a man looking for a misplaced cuff link.

“Capt. Frisby is a misfit, like all of us were in that war. It was good to be a misfit; it means you were not a soldier at heart; you hated war, but you would win because you were American and it was right.

“Yes, mostly we were good. We had humane priorities. First, we wanted the war to end. Then, we wanted to go home and to acquire a girl, a car, a house, and some children, loosely in that order; and we wanted to work and make money and give our children peace and the best life ever heard of.

“We damn near made it. We were magnificent.”

Are we that much different, when you read the testament from that young man on the Westside, from the yuppies of today?