Can I kick it? No, you can't.

Every time I begin to think that a generational shift may be occurring, I am bombarded with reminders from the Baby Boomer generation that they aren't quite done destroying the country, or making everything about them.

The 40th anniversary of the Woodstock concert?

No. The health care debate.

I couldn't help but notice that the same generation which took drugs in the mud of Bethel, New York in 1969, is now flinging mud at the best opportunity to give access to health care to all citizens of this country.

The grandma whose death-by-unplugging is so feared by multitudes of dimwits at town halls and online? She was at Woodstock, undoubtedly laying the groundwork for becoming a grandma, and probably any unwashed scumbag with a tab of acid in his pocket.

This greedy generation, which was all about peace and love when it was their turn to go to war, was all about rape and pillage in the 80s, when easy millions beckoned you from a different locale in New York.

But just selling out for money wasn't enough, you wanted power, too. That's natural. Your bloated generation, in numbers and size, thought nothing of sending other people's children off to war in 2003. Of course, in keeping with your "principles" the war wasn't about ideology, it was about another chance to make money with no risk to your own skins.

Have you achieved anything since 1969?

"Oh, sure," you say, "pick on George W. Bush. He's an easy target."

Yep, and you elected him. Twice.

"Can we at least get credit for Bill Clinton?"

I laugh, because you think that his presidency somehow validates your alleged principles. And I suppose it does.

The Baby Boomer's first president: A real triumph.

The Glass-Steagal Act of 1933, which established the FDIC and prohibited bank holding companies from owning other financial companies? Repealed by Clinton's signing the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999.

Any of you addled fatasses recall anything bad happening recently as a result of that?

Welfare reform in 1996: Threw millions of people off of the rolls, and actually increased poverty in the next decade.

Oh, and the Baby Boomer pièce de résistance: Health Care Reform in 1993.

Like so many other things you've failed at as a generation, you had good intentions. But once you realized that it would be hard, and might cost you a second term, you put your hands behind your back, started whistling, and shuffled off to have a one-sided chat with some intern.

You have achieved NOTHING since 1969.

And now you're feeling your oats again, storming town hall meetings where people might actually get to ask questions and learn something about the health care proposals, and instead drowning them out as you scream about fears that some bureaucrat might pull your plug when you end up in the hospital for your inevitable gastric bypass surgery.

I can't help but marvel at how much better off this country would be if Roe v. Wade had been passed in 1953 instead of 1973.

I am of the generation which follows you. The one that will be the first in American history to do less well than the previous generation, which is no coincidence. I am asking you for a favor, which would actually give you the opportunity to do something for someone besides yourselves.

Can you stop, just this one time, trying to keep everything for yourselves? You have Medicare, can you let the rest of us have something to keep us from dying when our appendixes go bad?

But since it isn't in your nature to do for others, will you at least consider dropping dead?

Where are we?

I don't know why this topic popped into my head today, but I am not being influenced by the date, and that is all I can say for certain.

I guess I was thinking about 9/11 a little bit today, which I don't do very often, like most Americans, I suspect. I was watching television, and I saw Ari Fleischer from some old White House press briefing, and it took me back to just how much he used to irritate me. It was still kind of early in Bush's presidency, and I wasn't yet used to the fact that the administration would just say things that were either incomprehensibly stupid, or patently false.

Oh, sure, by the time Scott McClellan took the job, I was almost immune to the lies, and was hardly ever throwing things at my TV anymore. Hell, by the time McClellan left the job, I actually felt bad for him a lot of the time, having to stand there, defending the hypocrisy and immorality of the Bush White House. Ugh, it was cringeworthy.

But Fleischer seemed to really enjoy making things up, and spouting talking points, particularly just after 9/11, when the entire administration was puffed up and fake brave. It was a strange time for a lot of people, and I remember a lot of people were actually in a state of mind, asking themselves, "when will it be okay to laugh again?" Everyone was watching what they said, except Bill Maher, and you recall what happened to him.

It sounds ridiculous, but it was hard to find anything funny and topical on TV or the radio right after 9/11. There was a lot of speculation that "irony was dead" and it was time for America, and especially smug prick Gen Xers like myself to start taking things seriously. This was our Pearl Harbor, our JFK assassination, it was like the time I could have met Mr. T at the mall. The entire day I kept saying, "I'll go a little later. I'll go a little later." And then when I got there, they told me he'd just left. And when I asked the mall guy if he would ever come back again, he said he didn't know.

It was pretty terrible, is what I'm saying.

But these many years later, irony isn't dead, which is good for the most part. Irony is a bit overused, and I think most people should leave it alone, but in the right hands, it can still do a lot of good, like a scalpel in the hands of a skilled plastic surgeon.

On the down side, any national sense of purpose that we had (or pretended to have) after 9/11 is long gone, we are mired in an insurgent war in Asia, the administration has been exposed in nearly all areas as criminal, malicious and incompetent, and like on September 11th. 2001, I am without health insurance.

I don't need nostalgia. I live in George W. Bush's America, where things don't change, and when they do, it is only to somehow become markedly worse.

So irony is not dead. Roger Rosenblatt, writing in Time magazine just after 9/11, was completely wrong. Baby Boomers all think that they are the center of the universe, and I suppose Rosenblatt is no different. I've gone on and on about this giant demographic, in numbers and in weight, often enough that I need not rehash it here. Boomers like Rosenblatt crave the good old days, when men were men, America was #1, and people knew their place. You know who I mean...

Well, it's the 21st Century, the Boomers are starting to hit their Viagra years, and the United States, in many measurable ways, is in as bad of a condition as it's been in many decades. I don't care to listen to the opinions of the people who have been fucking up my country for the past couple of decades. Your choices and actions from adolescence up to now have been consistently and tragically wrong, and you can't be placed in substandard retirement housing quickly enough to suit me.

To be fair, I can't imagine any of my generation being able to run this country at any point in the future. We have been raised with diminished expectations, and even I can admit that people like that should not be put in charge of too many things. Although certainly Bush and the rest of us would have been better served had he not been told as a child that anyone can grow up to be president some day.

So irony isn't dead after 9/11. The only thing that has truly expired is the credibility of people like Rosenblatt to say that the younger generations are soft, and don't know anything about hardship.

Stay skeptical. These people know nothing.

Monday, August 17, 2009

Sunday, April 01, 2007

Friday, March 11, 2005

Thursday, February 10, 2005