By, For and About Baby Boomers

The first generation to have almost universal access to higher education may also be the first generation to give up reading. Unless they are reading about themselves.

If the newspaper business is in big trouble it’s because it has failed to pamper baby boomers. Newspapers must cater to them and entertain them the way “Howdy Doody” did. The alternative press has figured this out. It understands that baby boomers are incredibly egocentric. So it has created a literature by the boomers, for the boomers, about the boomers.

Look, I’ve been up to my ears in baby boomers since I was a baby. I’m willing to bet that if you are a baby boomer you are reading this simply because it is about you.

A group of weekly alternative papers recently put an ad in Advertising Age flaunting this generational love-in. There’s good news and bad news for newspapers, says the ad. The bad news is that newspapers are losing readers and “skewing older.” The good news is that weekly alternatives deliver “a prime, targeted, upscale audience of 8.5 million young professionals.”

Put that in your pipe and skew it.

One way these papers are attracting baby boomers is by understanding that the boomers are style freaks. The beautiful ads in some of these papers are often more attractive than the stories. If you see something in a newspaper that looks like a Gauguin but is actually an ad for a futon sale then you are reading a paper that is catering to baby boomers.

Baby boomers won’t grow up. Only those who worshiped at the church of Peter Pan themselves actually understand this. (I believed in fairies! I clapped!) There’s money to be made in the never-grow-old service sectors. Picture Marlon Brando as he looks today, on a motorcycle in black leather as he appeared in “The Wild Ones.” This is where a generation is heading.

You’re either on the Jeep or you’re not.

Weekly papers that are anti-Establishment appeal to baby boomers who will do anything to maintain the image of themselves as young and rebellious. They detest the label “middle class” as much as they detest middle age.

Baby boomers are divided into three classes: those who have to earn a living, those who are waiting to inherit wealth and those who already have their inherited wealth. The last group cares the most about the environment because they already own it.

The baby boomers are always looking for safe working-class neighborhoods and working-class hangouts for sociological field trips. If a restaurant reviewer describes a place as having “working-class ambience,” pretty soon you’ll have a trendy place filled with people in Levi’s Dockers drinking imported beer out of bottles.

Baby boomers define art in terms of rebelliousness, not aesthetics. They will watch “Twin Peaks” even if it makes no sense. They will declare any junk “art” if it is attacked as pornography. If I were a situationalist artist, I would invent a situation in which some old man called me “dirty.” Then I’d sit back and let the Village Voice make me famous.

Baby boomers carry on their rebellion when they have babies by insisting that they are raising their children differently from the way they were raised. Boomers all feel they were victimized by their childhood. Someday, we will have ads in the back of the weeklies for Adult Children of Adult Children.

But grow older they will, and as they do, baby boomers will become nostalgia devotees like generations before. Already, we have seen Woodstock replacing Iwo Jima as the symbol of a generation’s emotional commitment.

Ye Olde Newspaper could fit into that nostalgia craze, but only if mainstream newspapers indulge the indulgent baby boomers. Otherwise, they’ll take their 8.5 million marbles and go watch cable.