I, Me, Mine

If the grim task hasn’t been started already, someday soon some demographic-minded scrivener will doubtless begin calculating how many of the 76 million Americans, famously branded and rebranded ad infinitum as the baby boom generation, have already died and how many will die at what rate until the last of their dwindling numbers disappears from the scene some time after the middle of the 21st century. As they have lived--as an obsessively studied and resented and widely despised actuarial army--so will they perish, sent to join their ancestors on a wave of vague loathing and schadenfreude.

In newspapers and magazines, the headlines drip with invective: “Why I Hate Boomers,” “How Boomers Ruined America,” “Crybaby Boomers,” “The Baby Boomer Wasteland,” “The Great Boomer Bust” and (a favorite of mine, from Cosmopolitan) “Baby Boomers: Are They Still Babies?” In a recent Esquire screed titled “The Worst Generation: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Hate the Boomers,” former Clinton administration aide Paul Begala rails against “that garbage barge of a generation,” “a generation of selfish pigs.” In online forums and other nooks and crannies of popular culture, amateurs enthusiastically indulge in similar bouts of vituperation.

Marty Asher’s “The Boomer” is less frontal, but at heart it is no different in its scornful animus directed against the cohort of Americans born between 1946 and 1964. This curious, enigmatic little volume is being marketed as a novel, even though it functions more as a kind of sociological lament. Consisting of exactly 101 brief one-page chapters, some only a single sentence and none longer than a few sentences, it tells the tale of an unnamed, almost wholly generic and paradigmatic protagonist, “the boomer,” from birth to death.

At first “The Boomer” seems intent on being perhaps the most banal book ever written for adults, but soon its jokey reductiveness begins to deliver a tiny but nasty kick. Speeding through its short declarative sentences and tersely narrated episodes of childhood, adolescence and young adulthood, the reader encounters a Dick-and-Jane-style primer on a man of no distinction who possesses no real inner life. With mounting aggression, the author arranges to have his character suffer for remaining an ineffectual, baffled nonentity. Here is Chapter 10 in its entirety:

“School was predictable. When a teacher yelled at you, they were almost always right. Sometimes his mother hit him for no reason at all.”

Here is Chapter 16:

“The boomer looked forward to his father’s coming home from work so he could read the movie pages. When he grabbed the paper without saying hello, his father said sarcastically, ‘The newspaper is home.’ ”

And so it solipsistically goes, through school days, girls, college, sex, drugs, career (“a good job in a large company”), therapy, marriage, the death of parents, fatherhood and a move from a city apartment to a house in the suburbs. When he throws a party for the people in his office, “the boomer felt he was like some of the people on television.” When his toddler son hugs him, “it felt stiff and unnatural.”

After many brief set pieces that come across like John Cheever distilled into a telegram, Chapter 64 is a kind of turning point: “The boomer’s wife loved him with an unshakable devotion and loyalty. It enraged him.” His son, now in college, announces he’s gay. The boomer’s dog dies, and he becomes depressed. He drives his Saab through the front of his house and into the living room. His marriage ends, he meets a new woman, he meditates, he gets sick (“despite all his healthy habits”) and then, without a bang or a whimper, he dies.

In Chapter 99, his ex-wife puts his ashes in a vase, and the boomer’s family--his ex-wife and her new husband, the woman the boomer later lived with, his son and his lover and their adopted kids--smash the vase to pieces with golf clubs. The shards and ash are buried in a cemetery with a view of the ocean. Chapter 101, the end: “The boomer would have been touched.”

“The Boomer’s” prankish micro-minimalism (it is barely 3,200 words long) stands in inverse proportion to an ever-expanding galactic cloud of words devoted to the history and collective characteristics of the baby boomers. Given the unsuppressed hostility--the veritable death wish--that the novel directs at its antiheroic stereotype, “The Boomer” can be best understood as a roman a clef driven by an oblique anger at the generational theorizing that has been a dominant feature of our cultural landscape over the last 25 years.

Thus Asher adds his Lilliputian fiction to a Brobdingnagian body of snide pop journalism whose star practitioners include New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. Dowd loves to deride Bill Clinton as the epitome of boomer fecklessness and is a keen participant in the orgy of invidious comparison that has accompanied recent paeans to World War II veterans of “The Greatest Generation.” In one column, for example, she writes, “Suddenly, baby boomers realize that despite a buzzing economy and a passel of luxury goods, we are going to die without experiencing the nobility that illuminated the lives of our parents and grandparents.” In other words, thanks to our long-running economic prosperity, the entire boomer “generation” is now believed to possess the vices that once belonged to the hated subset of “yuppies.”

Like Begala, who was born in 1961, Dowd belongs to the ranks of self-hating boomers who are fond of offering some specious distinction that sets them apart from the general herd or who disingenuously employ what the lexicographer Robert Claiborne has called “the evasive ‘we.’ ” Thus Dowd can assert that we boomers are all going to go to our graves like ignoble jackals, yet she doesn’t feel obligated to produce evidence of any individual boomer’s selfish corruption.

Of course, baby boomers are not the only ones playing this game. With typical poor timing, presidential candidate Bob Dole tried to deploy his greatest-generation credentials against the boomer White House at the 1996 Republican convention, two years before Tom Brokaw’s book and Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan.”

“It is demeaning to the nation,” Dole declared, “that within the Clinton administration, a corps of elites who never grew up, never did anything real, never sacrificed, never suffered and never learned should have the power to fund, with your earnings, their dubious and self-serving schemes.” Innumerable Gen-X commentators have joined in the denounce-the-boomers fun, even as they partake of it and deny it in themselves. It is, in fact, a game no one can win.

Like so much that passes for social truth in millennial America, the truth about generations has been determined by contemporary culture’s never-ending struggle over the meaning of the 1960s, by an inexhaustible preoccupation with relative economic standing and by a ferocious intensification of marketing in public life. Still, despite the decisive multilateral importance of the ‘60s, we are beginning to gain the distance and perspective necessary to understand how crucial was the decade of the 1970s, when the defining myth of the baby boom generation was created and shaped, with fateful consequence.

The two founding documents of this myth, its declaration and constitution, are Tom Wolfe’s article “The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening” (published simultaneously in New York and New West magazines in 1976) and Christopher Lasch’s “The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations” (1978). Following the collapse of revolutionary fervor at the end of the ‘60s, these works argued that therapeutic cults of self-improvement had replaced political engagement, with laughable (for Wolfe) and morbid (for Lasch) results. Wolfe, in particular, traced the change to its economic roots: “Namely, the thirty-year boom. . . . It has pumped money into every class level of the population on a scale without parallel in any country in history.”

I would nominate a third document for this pantheon, a seminal work that deserves dubious recognition for the huge influence it has had on pop sociology and pop anthropology over the last two decades: Landon Y. Jones’ “Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation” (1980). In this book, Jones acknowledges his debt to Wolfe and Lasch but insists that, in their analyses of contemporary narcissism, “neither deals with what I believe is the crux of the matter: the baby boom.”

Jones, a former editor of Time Inc.’s People and Money, brings a Timesman’s eager marshaling of public opinion polling, market research surveys and trend analyses to bear on the arguments that demography is destiny and that generational literacy is an essential tool of cultural criticism and journalism. But it is his pervasive tone of melancholy determinism, his implicit counsel of despair, that has subsequently lurked between the lines of all the generational commentary that has followed, no matter how frivolous or cheerful it has been on the surface. Jones writes:

“Even if the baby boomers were not inclined to think of themselves as a generation, they would anyway because there is a large number of people who have the incentive to want them to think that way. They are the nation’s consumer-goods corporations and particularly their allied market-research firms. . . . By creating and marketing products aimed directly at the boom generation, these entrepreneurs intensified the generation’s self-awareness. . . . Thus developed what is the hidden generation-based mechanism that will bind the baby boom for the rest of its days. The Media Generation’s spending power and group consciousness are linked in an unending feedback loop.”

This same trap was described more elegantly, if no less devastatingly, in George W.S. Trow’s brilliant “Within the Context of No Context,” published in 1981: “Since the history of their time has been demographics, and not history, what they have been and what they have wanted has been the history of their time.”

In assembling a vast catalog of life choices interpreted as consumer preferences, Jones succeeded in forging an unbreakable link between the tropes of narcissism and selfishness and the idea of the baby boom generation as cultural juggernaut. He had created the kind of ersatz truth that Nietzsche once described as “a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms . . . which, after protracted popular usage, poses as fixed, canonical, obligatory.” And so the Me Decade became the Me Generation, and the ‘80s became the Greed Decade. Taking their cues from the infantilizing term “baby boom,” Jones’ successors have given us an endless parade of diminutive, dismissive labels: yuppies, buppies, DINKS, Busters, slackers, Gen-Xers, echo boomers, baboos, bobos. Envy, resentment and nightmares of displacement have suffused public discourse. Headlines like “Baby Boomers Have All the Jobs” and “Screw the Young” segued to “Move Over, Boomers” and cover stories about careers that are “Finished at Forty” and about Gen-X managers lording over boomer workers.

Even as the 30-year boom begins to look like a 60-year boom, the media follow tides of money with an obsessive attention to minute variations in degrees of affluence: “The Haves vs. the Have-Mores,” as the Wall Street Journal put it; the Millionaire Next Door eclipsed by the shockingly youthful billionaire on a hill. A covetous deathwatch is established as the Greatest Generation passes from the scene: “Baby Boom to Inherit Nearly $10.4 Trillion.” Yet even as the federal deficit disappears and the national debt is retired, baby boomers, it is believed, will consume the Social Security trust fund and leave nothing for the rising generations. Meanwhile, a baby boomer turns 50 every 7.6 seconds.

“The inspiration for writing this novel came when I was looking at a shelf of CDs I had accumulated over the years,” Asher has written in an author’s note posted on Amazon.com. “It occurred to me that when I died someone might well judge my life by the music I had listened to.” Indeed, several chapters in “The Boomer” are made up of lists of CDs owned by its protagonist (“he collected 219 CDs in his lifetime”); Asher is an alert student of our time in intuiting an ultimate generational significance in the stark matter of spending habits. But there is something hateful and destructive in all this tinny generational rhetoric teeming throughout the zeitgeist, and its negative force is undiminished by the attacks and indictments heaped upon this or that aspect of one “generation” or another. This, of course, is how repression works: as an idea or thought that thrives by being denied.

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What is being repressed is the honest recognition that contemporary generational thinking is largely junk and that it crowds out real questions and goals, discourages unsentimental political heroism and insults human dignity. Also repressed is the dark truth about the deadly significance of belonging to a generation. Like death itself, being trapped with our contemporaries in the web of time is an existential catastrophe, a source of profound anxiety and a predicament that incites ferocious symbolic struggles. The empty talk about generations obscures the reality that none of us occupies a privileged position from which to observe the bloody pageant of generational succession. Every human being has parents and most of us have children, and all of us are enmeshed, slanted, blinded and prejudiced by our own particular family romance. We are still waiting for a genius who can follow in Freud’s footsteps and open the door on the secrets of generational aggression, socialization and neurosis.

The notion of generational identity began in the 19th century as a chronological tool developed by German art historians to analyze the succession of styles and influences. From that modest, specialized usage, it began to be popularized as a way to characterize lifestyles, a habit strongly influenced by a remark by Gertrude Stein that Ernest Hemingway included as an epigraph to “The Sun Also Rises”: “You are all a lost generation.” (Little noted was Hemingway’s own later remark about Stein’s coinage in “A Moveable Feast”: “But the hell with her lost-generation talk and all the dirty, easy labels.”) In the 1960s, just before the deluge, the art critic Harold Rosenberg heaped scorn on this dumbed-down way of thinking. “Except as a primitive means of telling time, generations are not a serious category,” he wrote. “Belonging to a generation is one of the lowest forms of solidarity.”

Rosenberg could not have envisioned the dismal success that generational rhetoric would come to enjoy or the triumphant way it continues to ring like a deafening minor chord in books like “The Boomer” and in the torrent of words the novel draws upon to provide its resonance. It is a death- and defeat-haunted mode that will continue to proclaim the iron victory of fate over choice, just as Landon Jones ends his “Great Expectations” with a vision of 21st century survivors of the baby boom generation as dwindling “custodians of a dead dream.” He concludes, with no apparent comprehension of the horror of his vision, by declaring that “the tribe of the baby boom will live and die believing more than anything else in itself.” What miserable prophets these rhetoricians of generational orthodoxy have been, how blind to the grandeur and terror of life’s great challenge in our time! “A generation is fashion: but there is more to history than costume and jargon,” Rosenberg wrote. “The people of an era must either carry the burden of change assigned to their time or die under its weight in the wilderness.”