The Greatest Generation's Last Hurrah
Not too long ago I was having a conversation in a bar, something I like to do, about the greatest generation compared to the generations that followed. We came to the conclusion that baby boomers are the worst of all generations and may be blamed by future generations as the perpetrators in the demise of the American empire ... maybe even human civilization.
The Greatest Generation is the title of a Tom Brokaw book about the generation that fought and won WW2, his parents generation, the generation of my grandparents. It's a great book, I highly recommend it. It's pretty much been decided that the generation born in the early part of the 1900's, especially those born around 1920 give or take 5 years, saved the world from facism. They also harnessed the atom, explored outer space and did a shit ton of other cool shit to advance mankind through science, technology and medicine. The mid 20th century is pretty fucking amazing when you measure it against the rest of our human timeline.
When the men who fought WW2 came home to Rosie the rivitor they got right around to fucking and planning, fucking and buliding, fucking and moving forward. There was progress! The nation exploded in a BOOM of housing, interstate highways, business, transporation, jets, television, manufacturing, growing suburbs, rockets and technology. Mankind was off to the races and America was leading the way while Europe was rebuilding. From the late 1940's through the 50's and into the 60's America was getting busy and a lot of babies were born, baby boomers. I'm one of them, born in 1961 at the tale end of the boom.
Life was good, the middle class was living well and the country was feelin' alright. Then shit got real.
The greatest generation was in power during the cold war, Vietnam, the Kennedy assassination, rock and roll, civil rights violence, MLK was killed, men in orbit, Bobby's murder, the counterculture, war protest, man on the moon, Woodstock, Kent State, the Arab oil embargo, recession, Nixon, disco, and Three Mile Island. America went through some drama, the times they were a changin' and the greatest generation didn't know what the fuck was going on or what to do about it. Their babies became hippies and yuppies and the good old days were over. The 70's were a clusterfuck that ended with Carter administration, an economy in ruin and the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979 ... my graduation year. My generation went to college, joined the workforce, voted, and began to envision and shape the world we wanted to live in because the world at the time wasn't looking so great.
Ronald Reagan was elected and shit started turning around, for some of us. On the surface America appeared to be pulling out of it's slump as people got back to work and a lot of wealth was generated. The 80's were good to me, I started a family and bought my first home, but under the surface were millions of people left behind. The middle class was a massive consumer class and corporations invented new ways of taking and making money, the gap between upper and lower income people continued to winden. Few in the middle cared, we had houses, two cars, a little money in the bank and a nice vacation every year. Life was good for the average American voter so after Reagan we elected Bush Senior to keep the good times rolling.
If you weren't doing okay in the late 80's it was your own danm fault. That's still a real attitude. People at the bottom just needed to work harder, right? Bankers and brokers were snorting cocaine off stripper's asses with rolled up hundred dollar bills. The investor class was making bank, living large and many in the middle class poured money into the stock market trying to get on that bandwagon. Gordon Gecko's line, greed is good, was the Wall Streer mantra in fiction and reality.
It's not possible to romanticize the industrial revolution but one hundred years before our time the weathiest men in America were builders. Vanderbuilt, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Mellon and a couple of dozen other barons amassed great wealth, but unlike much of today's 1% you could see the result of their work in factories, railroads, shipping and the skylines that rose from our landscape. They were called robber barons and ruled with an iron fist but they created jobs and built tangible empires. You cannot say that of the hedge fund managers and junk bond salesmen of the 1980's. They simply got rich playing with other people's money.
I believe this is a very important point in our recent history. Corporations, bankers and investors found new ways of making money. Instead of building, growing and hiring they saw profits in cutting costs, downsizing and closing factories. They sold off hard assets, buildings and machinery and turned a profit by scraping what was once a mighty manufacturing sector. Jobs became one of America's biggest exports. The greatest generation built America up but when they retired and handed the reigns of power to my generation, the baby boomers began tearing it down.
.... to be continued?