Kids, stop moaning and just leave the baby-boomers alone
Bashing my generation is the new sport for anyone born after 1965. But could anything be more fatuous?
o Catherine Bennett
o The Observer, Sunday 11 July 2010
The way things are going, it probably makes a lot of sense to denounce baby-boomers. Especially if you actually are a baby-boomer and thus likely to excite peculiar hatred in the eyes of subsequent generations. Indeed, for all the advantages of having being born between 1945 and 1965, boomers do face one looming disadvantage: that of being cared for, in the era of assisted dying, by people who hate their guts.
This category includes, one gathers, members of the boomers' own families, as they wait and wait for the selfish old monsters to part with their inheritance. On websites where baby-boomer crimes are itemised, use of the word "cull" is commonplace. As the reformed boomer Francis Beckett says in his protracted piece of public self-criticism, What Did the Baby-Boomers Ever Do For Us?: "The generation war has started." Will his personal contribution be enough to stop a future young carer lashing him to a commode or similar? To be on the safe side, he might want to consider accessorising his confessions with a dunce's cap (assuming the boomers have not already used up all the world's available dunces' caps, leaving nothing for future generations).
The youthful mood, as Beckett reports, is unforgiving. He quotes one typical endorsement of his analysis, addressed to this country's heedless and corrupt boomers: "Your selfish and arrogant generation makes me sick."
It is futile for non-rentier members of this cohort to wheedle to their impatient critics that, like the occasional good German, they did not personally speculate in property or raise tuition fees. Quite a few of them, history suggests, must have actively opposed Blairism and Thatcherism, the latter excitingly described by Beckett as "crouching beneath the bridge of the 70s like a malignant troll".
But at its purest, intergenerational strife is beyond petty distinctions of innocence and guilt. "Of course, not everyone born between 1945 and 1955 wanted the Iraq war, or the NHS turned into a market, or huge proportions of the nation's resources to be given to the nation's bankers," Beckett allows (by his boomer definition, I am glad to say, I am instantly pardoned). "But the baby-boomers' chance to change Britain for the better came and it went."
Younger victims of boomerism, who speak with special contempt of their enemies' luxurious taste for Saga holidays, pampering and costly gadgets, are yet more unmoved by individual innocence. So you were, in fact, a redundant miner who never went abroad, or a grammar school reject forced to leave school at 15, or a subservient housewife, or a carbon-neutral founder of an organic smallholding? So what? Neither history, nor luck, has anything to do with it.
Neil Boorman, a brand expert turned full-time hammer of boomers (or "glut of needy pensioners"), explained this in a pre-election manifesto called It's All Their Fault: "Each generation has a collective personality, which is shaped by the events of the time." Or, alternatively, by the prejudices of its successors. In any event, he argued, young people should vote only for non-boomers with the exception of the Conservative universities minister David Willetts, whose recent book, The Pinch, has made him the darling of young boomerphobes and guilty boomers alike. Though his claim that boomers refuse to pass on their wealth could still, some think, be disproved in future by enhanced legacies to their children. "No one writing in 2010 can speak with certainty about the extent to which the baby-boomers have let down, or will let down, their children," says the economist Tim Congdon.
If you struggle to understand why angry young redistributors would lionise a wealthy Thatcherite Tory who has just described degree courses as "a burden on the taxpayer", this may be because you are too old. "This isn't a fight between left and right or Labour versus Conservatives," says Boorman, steering his followers away from conventional engagement, "it's between Generation Debt and the Baby-Boomers." If so, it could be years before this disaffected cohort participates, seriously, in organised politics. What luck for the Conservatives.
For those members of Generation Debt who are not insulted by it, the chronological approach must also simplify things. "Boomers are easy to identify," says Boorman, reassuring those who worry that, without a scarlet B, it might be hard to spot some of the more Botoxed offenders. "As of their birthday in 2010, they'll be aged between 46 and 64." Another benefit of age-based politics, to judge by online confrontations, is that it transforms everything that has coincided with boomers roaming the earth into a potential grievance against them.
While Willetts restricts himself to a story of economic betrayal, fellow campaigners, such as Francis Beckett, diagnose a more comprehensive moral bankruptcy on the part of Britain's soixante-huitards. Yes, we can blame the tanned, postwar phonies with all their If and free love and Blowin' in the Wind for the reimposition of school uniforms. "We are forcing our children into prison uniform," writes this spiritual descendant of Holden Caulfield, "so they will be instantly recognisable when they scale their prison walls." So much for the Human Rights Act. And, also, for University Challenge. Once, says Beckett, the students had lovely Bamber Gascoigne. But now: "Jeremy Paxman sneers at them, bullies them and holds them up to ridicule."
His sympathisers are no less inventive. HIV also emerged on the boomers' watch, along with CCTV, Islamist terrorism, paedophile scares, expensive nursery places, golf courses and excessive workplace sobriety. "We're not allowed the pint at lunch which was considered quite normal during our parents' working lives," complains a victim, one of many who never seem quite sure whether to envy or to denounce the boomers for their decadence, real or imagined.
Challengingly, for the ascetic tendency, there is little evidence in the technologically accomplished generation of any fundamental horror of material acquisitions, self-indulgence or cheap flights. But perhaps that, too, is the boomers' fault? It will be for the coming leaders of this generation to establish which of its complaints should be prioritised, so as to prevent older politicians dismissing protests about jobs, house prices and pensions, along with school uniform and the lack of wine fountains, as mere pretexts for emoting by a generation that appears to be adopting "This Be the Verse" as its anthem.
As it is, even with the next anti-boomer tract, Jilted Generation, written by actual young people (Ed Howker and Shiv Malik), there seems little prospect of the understandable fury among the boomers' jobless descendants expressing itself as anything more constructive than indiscriminate resentment. Yet again, the pre-publicity promises the story of unclouded youth's betrayal, not by a specific ideology, party or political system but, simply, by all the repulsive old people who got born first. "Jilted Generation is a call to arms that will make sure you never look at your parents (or your children) in the same way again," say the publishers. That sounds marvellous, darlings, well done.
Bashing my generation is the new sport for anyone born after 1965. But could anything be more fatuous? | Catherine Bennett | Comment is free | The Observer
Kids, stop moaning and just leave the baby-boomers alone
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