The Boomer in Chief, my former boss, Bill Clinton, used to tell me about an influential professor he'd had at Georgetown. And it's from this standard that I draw my harsh conclusion. It is my contention that the single greatest sin a generation can commit is the sin of selfishness. If not, even if demographers call you a Boomer, you probably hate our generation's elite as much as I do. If you grew your hair and burned your draft card on campus during the sixties if you toked, screwed, and boogied your way through the seventies if you voted for Reagan and believed "Greed is good" in the eighties and if you're trying to make up for it now by nesting as you cluck about the collapse of "family values," you're it. Whether it was Fitzgerald and Hemingway defining the Lost Generation of World War I and the Roaring Twenties, or JFK and the other heroes of the World War II generation, or the high-tech whiz kids of the post-Boomer generation, certain archetypes define certain times. But generations can have a unique character that defines them, especially the elites of a generation-those lucky few who are blessed with the money or brains or looks or skills or education that typifies an era. And I don't literally mean that everyone born between 19 is a selfish pig. Of course, it is as unfair to demonize an entire generation as it is to characterize an entire gender or race or religion. If they were a baseball club, they'd be the Florida Marlins: prefab prima donnas who bought their way to prominence, then disbanded-a temporary association but not a team. If they were artists, they'd be abstract expressionists, interested only in the emotions of that moment-not in the lasting result of the creative process. If they were plants, they'd be kudzu, choking off every other living thing with their sheer mass. I know it's a sin to hate, so let me put it this way: If they were animals, they'd be a plague of locusts, devouring everything in their path and leaving but a wasteland. At the risk of feeding their narcissism, I believe it's time someone stated the simple truth: The Baby Boomers are the most self-centered, self-seeking, self-interested, self-absorbed, self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing generation in American history. Guys who once dropped acid are now downing Viagra women who once eschewed lipstick are now getting liposuction. As they enter late middle age, the Boomers still can't grow up.
They ruined everything they've passed through and left me in their wake."īut the garbage barge just chugs on. "I am so tired of hearing about the goddamn Baby Boomers! I've spent my whole life swimming behind that garbage barge of a generation. He must have thought I was about to rip off his head and spit down his neck. "I guess you Baby Boomers are really taking over," he said. At a press gathering just after the 1992 election, David Broder, the dean of Washington reporters, commented to me that my Clintonista colleagues and I seemed so, well, so young to him.
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