Generations

If you think back far enough you can maybe remember a time when they sometimes talked about the “baby boom”. Of course that referred to the crop of children that resulted from the end of World War II and the patriarchal disregard for the reproductive rights of women held by most men returning from the various theaters of war after nearly, or actually, having their asses shot off saving the world from tyrannical domination. But those kids, those boomers, weren’t really referred to as belonging to the baby boom generation.

Then you started to hear about the “Beat” generation. Artists with a dark view of just about everything. They smoked all the time, drank lots of coffee and snapped their fingers as a rebellious substitute for bourgeois applause. They gifted us stream of consciousness poetry, citified folk music, the goatee beard, and Maynard G. Krebs, but of course hardly anyone alive today remembers any of it.

It seems that it was about then that things started to fracture. Men born before the war (again, always the men) started experimenting with drugs (one wonders if the Soviets may not have been behind it based on the affect they’ve had on our society) to expand human consciousness or for use as weapons, or whatever and then they crept into youth culture and we gave birth to the Hippy movement. At last, we were free to do our own thing. And what we did was disco.

During those years there were, of course, Yuppies. They were young, upwardly mobile professionals. In contrast to the hippies, yuppies kept their appearance neat. They wore nice clothes, drove nice cars, got MBA degrees and pretty much rule over us now, but then they were the object of attempted ridicule. No one was talking of generations yet.

Then we got glam rock in the eighties and people started talking about generational splits. Maybe it was the sociologists, but I’ve always suspected that the concept was cooked up by marketers as a way to better target product promotion. And so in the ‘80s we started to hear about “Generation X”. The Gen Xers. The slogan may have been “Aqua Net For All”. (which is a jab at big hair in case you weren’t around for it).

Next, of course, came the Nineties and Generation (you guessed it) “Y”. Generation Y is so cool that they get several nick names, sometimes being called “echo boomers” or the more plebeian “millennials”. But the hits just keep on coming. In a plot twist worthy of Tarantino, or Vonnegut, and not patient enough to continue waiting for the next generation, Tom Brokaw took a trip down memory lane, and wrote a book about the parents of the boomers and gave them the auspicious title of “The Greatest Generation”. Like the Stones going on after James Brown at the TAMI show, it’s a tough act to follow.

At the current end of this rather predictable progression is Generation (you guessed it again) “Z”. But are members of this crop of younglings that much different than those that came before, the echo booming millennials? And are they different in any substantial way (save age, as if age and the education, insight, and experience that come with it are trivial) from their older siblings?

And now, by some accounts, we’re already years into the as yet unnamed next generation. The fact that they’ve run out of letters so soon in this process doesn’t speak too well of thought processes of the people who thought the whole thing up. One has to wonder if all of this division and categorization is really helpful.

But, that’s just what an average guy thinks