Finally, the obvious boomer.

I’ve always been annoyed when people younger than I identify “the sixties” with the stupid memes of Nehru jackets and bell-bottom jeans, etc. What I remember was that Time, Inc., coined the terms “hippies” and “flower children” to fabricate News out of them, as if they were real movements on a demographically significant scale. These times were meaningful to us boomers — because we lived them, not because of the labels and marketing BS. Remember movies like “The Trip” and “Beach Blanket Bingo”? This crap was exploitation of us, not something we created, and most of us found it repulsive. Sure, “Easy Rider” was reflective of the age, but Peter Fonda wasn’t a boomer (1940).

So, finally, someone has pointed out the obvious: young people don’t create the society they’re living in — they consume and respond to the world they grow up in. So the sixties, revolutions and tacky “modernism” and all, was mainly the product of the 20’s and 30’s (and some 40’s). In other words the “establishment” that a few of us were trying to get away from.

New Yorker Article

The subtler values of the sixties, represented by a very tiny percentage of us, are of course quite real, and are probably not very different than the visionary values of any generation. Laudable and insightful and cosmic, perhaps, but it doesn’t look like many of these dreams became real in the next generations. Some progress seems to have been made, but the orange idiot is himself a baby boomer (1946) bent on undoing as much as possible, right back to the 50’s, before our generation fades into oblivion and facile stereotypes.