February 20, 2015
P.J. O'Rourke taps into the collective memory of the Baby Boomers.
He's talking about his new book — a memoir — called "The Baby Boom: How It Got That Way (And It Wasn’t My Fault)(And I’ll Never Do It Again)."
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26 comments:
PJ is a great writer, always enjoyable books. I especially enjoyed Parliament of Whores from way back.
I went to see him speak in late '01 in Rockford at his book tour speech at the Coronado. Due to the context, the speech ended up as a shellshocked tale of 9/11 in DC and not terribly funny.
I asked him in the book signing line what he thought about what happened to Bill Maher (his famous kerfuffle and firing from ABC, and the context kept me from asking him at the podium). His response was one word, "Shitty".
Cool guy.
I have a pretty low opinion of the baby boomers, the children of the greatest generation turned out to be the sorriest generation. Just look what they done to our country.
Some of my best friends are Baby Boomers. Not that I'd want my daughter to marry one.
Technically I'm not a baby boomer but in reality that is my generation.
In the fifties and sixties our country was about 90% white and about 10% black and it was a great time to grow up even though a lot of us were poor. I grew up in a farm house that didn't even have locks on the doors, there weren't any drugs, only booze was an occasional problem.
Twilight of the Boomers. Ronald Reagan was a traditionalist in spades. And guess who else in one? His name is Walker.
I'll pretty much read anything and everything PJ puts out, but I didn't find this last one as entertaining as some of his others. Perhaps it was because I'm a Gen X'er?
I have the book. Not P.J.'s best. Starts off pretty well talking about Boomer childhood, but he's used up all of his best material about young adulthood. Some good lines, but it doesn't hold together well. Paragraph by paragraph, P.J. is always pretty good.
I have a pretty low opinion of the baby boomers, the children of the greatest generation turned out to be the sorriest generation. Just look what they done to our country.
If the "greatest generation" were so great, how come they raised such "sorry" children?
I agree we suck.
As it always is, progressive-ism is at the root of Baby Boomers big mistake.
Progressive LBJ kept the war and the draft, going. We had no choice but to 'get political', to literally save our own lives. Then once in, we found we 'liked the game', and the leviathan fed and grew from there.
If you actually look at a list of things that messed up the United States, you'll find that virtually all of them were done by people from generations before the Baby Boom -- the so-called "Greatest Generation" or the two generations before it.
Destruction of the inner cities by misguided entitlement programs and the drug war? Thanks, "Greatest Generation"!
Destruction of the institution of marriage through no-fault divorce laws and "palimony" law? Thanks, "Greatest Generation"!
Country being bankrupted by Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid? Thanks, "Greatest Generation!" Thanks, FDR!
Hell, even ObamaCare -- sure, Obama *signed* it, but it was actually put together by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, both of whom are from the generation before the Baby Boomers.
Food for thought.
In the fifties and sixties our country was about 90% white and about 10% black and it was a great time to grow up even though a lot of us were poor. I grew up in a farm house that didn't even have locks on the doors, there weren't any drugs, only booze was an occasional problem.
The crime rate is lower now than it was in the 1960s and most of the 1950s.
Also, rates of drug use were higher in the 1950s than they are today. Tobacco's a drug, remember.
"Also, rates of drug use were higher in the 1950s than they are today. Tobacco's a drug, remember."
Watch the movie Winter's Bone to see what is happening in small rural towns, drugs are destroying people's lives and there was nothing like that in the fifties and sixties. Also, I don't think you would be willing to go to bed tonight without locking your doors and that use to be a common practice.
As long as they keep the taxes down, no need to break laws to have a smoke.
Actually, if you look closely, it pretty hard to find a plant that doesn't contain drugs.
@Althouse, I followed your link, clicked on "look inside" and clicked several times on "surprise me."
What I read would have to come up several notches to reach the level of sophomoric.
"Destruction of the inner cities by misguided entitlement programs and the drug war? Thanks, "Greatest Generation"!
Destruction of the institution of marriage through "no-fault divorce laws and "palimony" law? Thanks, "Greatest Generation"!
Country being bankrupted by Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid? Thanks, "Greatest Generation!" Thanks, FDR!
Hell, even ObamaCare -- sure, Obama *signed* it, but it was actually put together by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, both of whom are from the generation before the Baby Boomers"
The baby boomer liberal elites embraced and advanced all of those and it was mostly liberal elite baby boomers who push Obamacare and I blame them for multiculturalism too which is also hurting our country.
The baby boomer liberal elites embraced and advanced all of those and it was mostly liberal elite baby boomers who push Obamacare and I blame them for multiculturalism too which is also hurting our country.
What a load of bullshit.
You don't think liberal baby boomers elites pushed Obamacare?
Do you deny that liberal baby boomer elites pushed multiculturalism?
Be specific what is it that you consider bullshit?
The worst thing about the baby boomers is that now they are working on living forever.
You don't think liberal baby boomers elites pushed Obamacare?
Do you deny that liberal baby boomer elites pushed multiculturalism?
You remind me of Cedarford, who would always blame "progressive Jews" instead of just "progressives".
Sure, Obamacare was supported by progressive Baby Boomers -- and progressive members of every other generation. Blaming it on the Baby Boom generation in particular is retarded.
The biggest socialist ever to serve as an American President, Franklin Roosevelt, enjoyed *overwhelming* support from the so-called "Greatest Generation". Obama on his worst day hasn't done one one-hundredth the harm to this country that FDR did. He hasn't even done a fraction of the harm the Lyndon Johnson -- a "Greatest Generation" president overwhelmingly *opposed* by Baby Boomers -- did.
Is ObamaCare bad? Yep. Is it in the top ten biggest atrocities committed by American politicians in the last century? No, not even close.
"Sure, Obamacare was supported by progressive Baby Boomers -- and progressive members of every other generation. Blaming it on the Baby Boom generation in particular is retarded."
The post was about baby boomers and I'm blaming liberal baby boomer elites.
You want collective memory from the Boomer's 1960s renaissance? You can't handle the true collective memory.
The media were peddling The Age of Acquarius and the Summer of Love for profit and as a superficial excuse for the rich 10% of the draft age college kids who were into a flood of illegal drugs, sexual license, self destruction, Hard Rock insanity and eastern religious cults du jour.
The other 90% of us still had to go to class and go to work sober. So we avoided breaking drug possession laws for cheap highs. We went into marriage and raising children that we took to Churches where many experienced a renewal of the Holy Spirit for a season. And we supported it all by working hard jobs under Wage and Price Controls.
By then the patriarchal authorities had mostly surrendered and gone home because a few War Protestors had offended their Greatest Generation self image, culminating at the televised 1968 Democrat Convention.
But with God's help we made it. And along the way we help to end segregation and sexist employment discrimination.
The post was about baby boomers and I'm blaming liberal baby boomer elites.
And your kids will blame you, with roughly the same justification.
I think there is some truth to O'Rourke's idea that the boomers were acting out some of their parents' fantasies. And certainly there was experimentation in education and child rearing, not always with the best results. The great generation were also the generation in which divorce began to become common, although I think that that came later in their marriages than it does now.
As the to failure of Boomers to be as libertarian as one might expect, I think the problem was simply that the politics and anti-war movements were taken over by the new left, a movement dominated by red diaper babies. Nothing good has ever come from the totalitarian left.
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