Behind THE Bulge : As they watch the baby boomers noisily age, the nation’s ‘busters’ wonder if they’ll ever make it into the spotlight.

A breaching whale on the sea of American demographics, the baby boom generation shocked its elders early on. They rocked out with Elvis, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. As teen-agers and young adults, they turned to civil rights, the women’s movement and anti-war protests, launching an entire fashion industry of rainbow-hued hippie clothes in the process.

In contrast, the “baby busters”--born right after in the so-called “birth dearth” years--slam-danced to the Sex Pistols and the Dead Kennedys. Lately, they have taken to head-banging with groups such as Guns N’ Roses. If they seem quiet compared to the generation that once preached “sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll,” it may be because they have inherited the ever-darkening boomer fallout: an era of safe sex, “just say no” to drugs and Tipper Gore’s battles to censor their music--when it manages to get a note in edgewise amid classic rock. The fashion-minded among them have preferred nihilistic black--worn with black accessories. Since this age group became old enough to buy household furnishings, even black toasters and flatware have become stylish.

Some say it’s an apt color for a generation that’s going to have an uphill fight to match the boomers’ impact on American life. And now that the busters are teen-agers and young adults, some of them say they are beginning to resent the No. 2 position.

“Being a baby buster is like being an American in France. It’s clear they’re not speaking your language and you’re not in charge. You’re a guest. Busters look at TV and they don’t see themselves. They see the generation older than them,” observes psychologist/gerontologist Ken Dychtwald, author of “Age Wave.”

Many baby busters sadly agree. They’re weary of the endless boomer hoopla, and are fond of pointing out that Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney are pushing 50. They worry that all the good jobs will be snatched up by the boomer hordes ahead of them. And they wonder, given the

growing markets for Retin-A, Minoxodil and Clairol, if their elders will ever grow up and cede the mass media spotlight.

Everywhere, they point out, are the artifacts of boomer youth culture, from “The Donna Reed Show” reruns to the resurgence of bell-bottoms.

Meanwhile, their culture has barely been defined.

“We’re sort of like a lost generation,” sighs Christy Mozilo, 24, a Hollywood set decorator. “We weren’t at Woodstock. When we talk about how we grew up, it was in the era of punk and Reagan. There’s nothing for us to identify with. The media underplaysour intelligence because we weren’t part of anything historical or political.”

Bruce Elliott got so sick of boomer-born classic rock and retro-boomer TV shows such as “The Wonder Years” that he founded an organization to jolt aging boomers out of their prolonged adolescence: the National Assn. for the Advancement of Time.

“When is it going to be this (baby buster) generation’s moment in the sun?” asks Elliott, a Los Angeles rehabilitation social worker whose clients are drug users and the mentally ill. “You’ve got the sheer numbers (of the estimated 76 million baby boomers) weighing against it.”

By comparison, Elliott laments, his generation “doesn’t have demographic critical mass. (The baby busters) weren’t raised in an age of an expanding America. They matured against a background of decay and despair, a far more interesting and sobering attitude.

“What is hardest for a lot of people to realize about this group is what their fondest dreams are. (Baby busters) just don’t have any. They weren’t brought up in an era of expanding optimism. For a lot of these people, the first president they can remember is Nixon. Nobody ever asked them what can they do for their country . . .

“These people have little faith in anything. This includes their own teachers, poets, rock stars. They are people without heroes. Consequently, they’re a more self-reliant bunch.”

Though 28-year-old Elliott is technically a tail-end baby boomer, he finds he has little in common with the boomers and identifies more closely with the busters, America’s abandoned demographic.

Just how lost is today’s youth generation?

Even the U.S. Census Bureau admits it has done few studies of busters as a group. According to bureau statistician Arlene Saluter, there were 36.8 million Americans age 15 to 24 in 1988. The bureau knows that young busters live with their parents longer than boomers did (among 18- to 24-year-olds, 54% were still living with their parents in 1988, contrasted with 48% of like-aged individuals in 1980).

But that’s about it study-wise, says Saluter, adding that she has seen no demographic examinations of busters done outside the Census Bureau.

Cheryl Russell, editor of American Demographics magazine and author of “100 Predictions for the Baby Boom,” affirms the lack of serious research on busters. What has been written about them has been based on anecdotal findings, she says.

But even without facts and figures to bolster their suspicions, many busters conclude that because they follow such a huge group in the populace, they face undue competition in the job market. While entry-level job openings may be plentiful because of the fewer numbers of young people to fill them, many busters complain that the pathways to more satisfying positions are already clogged with baby boomers.

Consuelo Preciado, for example, is a just-graduated USC journalism student who has been looking for newspaper work--so far unsuccessfully.

“It’s seems so competitive. It’s a pretty scary feeling I’m experiencing. I haven’t been able to get any job offers that are impressive. Someone in Washington, D.C., offered me a job, but it wasn’t permanent. It was for a year. I feel as if I’m being overlooked by employers, and I know a lot of qualified college graduates who are having the same problems,” she says.

“We’re not being offered the kinds of jobs that would be considered careers. . . . A lot of people say because I’m a minority and I have bilingual skills it’s supposed to be easier. But I know I’m going to have to struggle twice as hard--because I’m a minority and I don’t have the experience that baby boomers already out there have.”

According to some experts, the job market is only one area in which many busters will experience difficulties.

“There are a large number of young people who just don’t feel life is going to turn out well for them,” says Dychtwald, an Emeryville, Calif.-based lecturer and consultant whose clients include Time Inc. and CBS. “America has aged up with the baby boomers and paid less attention to youth. In politics, increasing amounts of dollars are being spent on people in their 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s, and there’s a decreasing amount of money being spent on youth.”

Dychtwald points out: “If you pull resources away from older people, they already have their values established. They may be lonely and poor, but they have already been formed as humans.

“However, if you pull resources away from young people, it can mean they will never have an education and values,” he warns. “They will be going through life without these foundations. There’s not a lot of emphasis and nourishment and support for the baby busters.”

Dychtwald sees the consequences of such policies in everyday decisions about the American Dream: decisions on whether or not to take drugs, whether or not to commit a crime, whether or not to go to work. And, he notes, those options can be profoundly influenced by a lingering feeling that “No matter what I do, life isn’t going to turn out well. What have I got to lose?”

Thus, Dychtwald predicts that as busters move into adulthood, they will fall into three categories:

* A small group that succeeds no matter what and proves Social Darwinism’s survival-of-the-fittest theory.

* A large group that settles for a lesser version of the American Dream, telling themselves such things as “I may not be able to buy a BMW, but a Chevy Blazer’s just fine.” These people will emphasize recreation and self-satisfaction rather than career achievements.

* A significantly large underclass of disenfranchised, disillusioned busters.

Already, some in the first group feel they will have to help their disenchanted friends as well as restructure an entire society as it disintegrates.

“Me and my peers feel we have this burden to fix the country because of the problems that have occurred with baby boomers. The ‘thirtysomething,’ white bread, yuppie mentality has been very damaging. It’s intellectually very sterile,” says Steve Lerner, a UC Santa Cruz sophomore majoring in economics and Japanese studies.

“I know I have a secure future. But this country is going to be a nation of elderly people, with government money all being squandered on pet projects, Star Wars, and a military economy instead of a peace-time economy. Those of us who are in school are acutely aware of the problems ahead.”

So are some boomers. Listen to Dennis Berry, who founded the Westchester, Pa.-based American Assn. of Baby Boomers:

“Social Security is a very good deals for today’s retirees. It’s a bad deal for the baby boomer. And it will be an absolute financial disaster for the generation following the baby boomers. The reason is that the benefits are financed by taxes on today’s workers. Today, there are three to 3 1/2 workers paying the taxes for the benefits to support each retiree.

“By the time our generation, the baby boom generation, has retired, there could be as few as 1 1/2 workers paying taxes to support each retiree. . . . And what if they cure cancer? What if they cure heart disease? People are living longer and they’re drawing these benefits longer. Something is going to have to change.”

Some experts--and busters--are confident something will. “The fact is that social structures are continually adapting to different population changes,” says Vern Bengtson, professor of gerontology and sociology at USC. “There is going to be enormous technological change between now and the year 2000.”

Bengtson maintains that education is the key to buster survival: “If you have an education, you’ll be able to take advantage of those technological changes. There will always be avenues of opportunity for people who are well trained, well qualified and hard working. The danger is for the undereducated. Their mobility will be blocked by the undereducated of the previous generation.”

The 48-year-old professor knows firsthand what it’s like to be part of a baby bust generation. “I was born in 1941,” he explains. “There was a baby boom in the 1920s. There was also one between 1900 and 1910. We have had cycles of a baby boom or a baby bust that seem to come about every 30 years. Today’s young baby bust generation seems to be totally unique, but it’s happened before.”

In fact, Bengtson doesn’t believe the baby bust picture is all that bleak: “My generation was highly advantaged because we were fewer than our predecessors. The previous generation had opened up new social positions for us. That’s the case today. The baby boomers have opened up new social positions and institutions. The baby busters who follow will have it relatively easier than the baby boomers did.”

Landon K. Jones, managing editor of People magazine and author of “Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation,” concurs: “They (busters) are overlooked. They are frustrated. The youth culture today is more segmented and fragmented and alienated than ever before. But the one thing they have going for them is that, because they’re in shorter supply, their economic opportunities are better.”

There is considerable agreement and disagreement on this issue, among busters and buster observers.

Some, such as psychologist/consultant Ross Goldstein, president of San Francisco-based Generation Insights, insist busters will eventually be in great demand: “Right now, they’re not. But in the next 10 years, there will be a shortage of skilled people to take the places of the baby boomers. Highly qualified and technically skilled baby busters will especially find it’s a seller’s market.”

And some busters are not only optimistic about their futures but admit to enjoying boomer legacies, especially the music.

“All people my age listen to music of the ‘60s, and a lot of kids think the quality of the songwriting and singers was better than what’s out now,” enthuses Tatiana Palmer, a recent graduate of Santa Moncia High School who plans to study psychobiology and other neurosciences at Williams College in the fall.

“I feel pretty confident about the future,” she adds.

But Palmer does have one observation about the different values of boomers and busters: “My mom’s always encouraging me to take risks and be wild and crazy, and I’m more conservative.”

Other busters similarly report only incidental frustrations. Ad Hardin, a senior in the independent scholar program at Vermont’s Middlebury College, suspects he might have missed something, but only when he turns on the radio.

“What bothers me is that when ‘My Generation’ by The Who comes on, I know that when people listened to it originally, they knew it was about them. It was a very empowering feeling,” he says. “When someone from our generation hears that song, it’s pretty clear that it doesn’t apply to us.”

Many busters claim to be totally untouched by such generational distinctions. Of those interviewed by The Times, about half had not heard of the term baby buster and many, like Karen Kubiani, feel the comments and analyses of demographers have little relevance to their lives.

“This hasn’t affected me at all. I didn’t even realize that’s the generation I’m in. I haven’t had any kind of problems looking for jobs,” says Kubiani, 23, a personnel recruiter for the Los Angeles-based law firm O’Melveny & Myers. Kubiani also maintains she is unfazed by the media’s preoccupation with boomer lifestyles.

“Baby busters should be grateful for their moment out of the limelight before they really start being studied and hounded by marketers,” advises Thia Golson, editor of The Boomer Report, a newsletter published in New York City. “They don’t have to worry about being overlooked for long. The American marketing community will always smell out money.”

Perhaps rather shortly. The leading edge of the baby busters turn 25 this year, the age at which consumers become prime advertising targets, according to marketing aficionado Andy Shoun. He is the 25-year-old program director for KROQ-FM, a radio station whose listeners are chiefly in the 18 to 29 age bracket.

Shoun, who finds himself relatively unscathed by any baby bust downside, suggests his generation possesses distinct advantages. Prime among them is knowing, in advance, the pitfalls of such boomer experiments as yuppiehood.

“I see a lot of young people not going so much with material things as with quality of life,” Shoun reports. “They want to live someplace where it’s quiet, instead of someplace that has marble floors. They want a shorter commute, and they want to breathe clean air on the weekends.”

Indeed, in Dychtwald’s opinion, perhaps the richest legacy of baby boomers will be the results of their ill-fated test runs. “The baby boomers went off and tried out hundreds of different lifestyles from which the busters can now pick and choose,” he says. “The busters don’t have to clear all those paths. The boomers are the R & D (research and development) group for the busters.”

Eugene Dillenberg, 30, who co-founded with Elliott the National Assn. for the Advancement of Time, agrees. Sort of.

“The advantage of being a baby buster is you’re not a baby boomer. Hopefully, you don’t have to repeat their mistakes,” he declares. “No group is completely worthless. They can always serve as a bad example.”