The Long, Slow Death of Baby Boomer Ideals

They had the best selection,
They were poisoned with protection
There was nothing that they needed,
Nothing left to find.
They were lost in rock formations,
Or became park bench mutations,
On the sidewalks
And in the stations,
They were waiting, waiting.
So I got bored and left them there,
They were just dead weight to me
Better down the road
Without that load.

Neil Young, Thrasher (1978)

The 1960s have died many times over.

We all have our own personal favorite moment as to when the decade and its high ideals had become kaput: There was the break-up of The Beatles; the assassinations of King and RFK; the victory of Nixon; the resignation of Nixon; Altamont – you can probably go on with your own list.  But the death of 60s was not limited to the end of the decade or the onset of the 1970s.  We can look at the song “Boys of Summer” written by Don Henley of The Eagles which contains one of the most telling lines of this phenomenon: “I saw a Dead-Head sticker on a Cadillac/ A little voice inside my head said ‘Don’t look back, you can never look back.’”

And indeed there was no going back to the ideals of a decade that was filled with them – or was there?

Two recent examples of Baby Boom culture and its bathetic tinge have been TV commercials for – of all things – financial advisement companies.

Last year we saw the ubiquitous and obsequious Paul McCartney – who went from “Back in the USSR” to being a capitalist shark of dubious reputation – shilling for Fidelity Investments.  Let me first say that I would not deny the right of Mr. McCartney – or anyone else for that matter – to make a living.  That Macca is an obscenely wealthy country squire who has pretended for oh so long to be “jes’ plain folks” gives us a clue as to what he is doing with this Fidelity business.  Making a living is one thing, collecting obscene amounts of income yet another.

The Fidelity ad, aired on the Super Bowl, showed a robust, youthful and idealistic Macca in the context of the 60s outfitted in full Beatle regalia.  The ad linked the heady days of the 60s to the present – forcing a kind-of Pavlovian response from the Baby Boomer viewer: The Baby Boomers were here being asked to remember the great and awesome times of the 60s and link them to their present Middle Class world.  The ad was a brilliant example of the ways in which this sort of media can create a web of associations for the viewer, permitting him to bathe in the comforting waters of the past while forming a tight connection with the present.

The key to the poetics of the commercial is continuity; the ability for those who have been through many tumultuous changes throughout their lives to feel a sense of unity between their past lives which luxuriated in the moral and spiritual ideals of a bygone era and the current era which luxuriates in – well, luxury.

The materialistic and consumerist aspects of all this is meant to assure the viewer that their lives have been lived well and that there is nothing for them to feel guilty about.

By using the licensed and paid-for image of Paul McCartney the circle is now squared: The idealized Hippie values of the 1960s are now part of a semiotic continuum that privileges an integration of life choices – revolution in the 1960s, acquiescence and consumerism in the present era – that are unique to the White Middle Class Baby Boomers who are being targeted by the ad.

A new commercial from Ameriprise – the financial advisory division of American Express – deepens this theme and makes the connections even more explicit.

The Ameriprise commercial intercuts scenes of Hippie revelry with the no-nonsense values of Baby Boomer retirement.  The ad tells us that the way that life was lived in the 60s – with gusto and idealism – should color the values of retirement for the present generation of Baby Boomers.

The commercial asks the question – “Would the Baby Boomers accept anything less than the best from their retirement?” and answers – emphatically – “NO WAY!”

This is not a commercial about current US policy – domestic or foreign – nor is it about ideals of social justice and equality.  It is an ad selling financial security.  It is a tool of the oft-hated capitalist class – demonized by the Hippies way back when – that speaks in a language which bridges the rebellion of the past and the complacency of the present.

But what struck me about the commercial, and why I found it so significant, was that the way in which the 1960s was presented was not in the context of its ideals, but in terms of the total freedom of the 60s “Trip” that had so much to do with money and the freedom it can afford those who have it.  In a coded way, the ad speaks to the Baby Boomer in a way that reminds her of the lack of responsibility that accompanied the burning of draft cards, marching on campus and smoking weed at a Grateful Dead concert.

The experience of the 1960s is here seen in a way that reflects the White Bourgeois foundations of its youth culture.  From a certain perspective, the perspective promoted by the Ameriprise commercial, the 1960s was about the PARTY rather than the obligations of conscience.  This is what has been distilled from the Hippie era and has been commodified by the svengalis of the present media age.

And indeed, we see the transformation of Baby Boomer values as not being absolute in terms of its moral vision, but as in some way being more consistent with a slacker version of the 1960s.  This slacker vision is reflected in the way that the Boomers were not truly serious about their ideals of social change and political revolution, but were just in it for the dope and the sexual freedom.  And while this is a generalization that is not meant to comprise all those who lived out the values of 60s idealism, it is more prevalent than would be marked at first glance.

We can see this in the endless magical ride of the Dead-Heads – who had the money and leisure time to maintain the life of vagrants; just as so many of them paradoxically became, as Don Henley well-understood, 1980s corporate raiders and Reaganites.  And from this it is easy to understand that so many of these people have now become ardent Bushies and Tax Cutters – and their generation has created a world in which the very idealized values of the Hippie era have been lost to the new transformation of a Baby Boom universe that has now become morally hollow and corrupt.

In the Jewish community we can see this in the way that the old Baby Boom guard has maintained a vicious and racist form of Zionism that feeds off of the old 60s value system – where Zionism was once a “revolutionary” movement – and which reproduces the White Bourgeois values of the Fidelity and Ameriprise commercials, replete with its materialism and lack of concern for the less well-off.

In the minds of these Baby Boomers there seems to be no contradiction between the high ideals of the 1960s and their current approach to the world and to other human beings, even though at a conceptual level there is so much bad faith – another favorite term of the Hippies – that we cannot even begin to articulate it.

Just the other day I bought a copy of the re-issue of the first album from Crosby, Stills and Nash – one of the seminal points in the Hippie era.  Along with the Grateful Dead’s “American Beauty” and “Workingman’s Dead,” Neil Young’s “After the Gold Rush” and “Harvest,” Joni Mitchell’s “Blue,” and the first couple of Jackson Browne albums, the CSN debut was the fuel that animated the so-called Woodstock generation – the sign par excellence of the 1960s and its communalism and peace ethic. 

While listening to “Crosby, Stills and Nash” – a record that has its own resonance for me as a person who though a bit younger than the average Hippie experienced the era in my own idiosyncratic ways – I felt a nostalgia tinged with a deep ambivalence and a complexity that made me truly think about many of these issues.

What made me think about all this was the beauty of the music and the performances – the record is now being linked to an older musical tradition, which I have subsequently learned about, of harmony singing in the tradition of the Louvin Brothers and other classic American duos and trios – and the debased subsequent history of the three members of the CSN grouping.  Unlike Neil Young, the (in)famous “fourth” member of CSN&Y, Crosby, Stills and Nash never presented themselves as iconoclasts – in their time they indeed represented the ties between corporatism, freedom inspired by financial independence, and the libertinism of the 60s. 

Young has remained what he always was – a crotchety rebel who marches to no one’s tune – Young has remained a free spirit because he always was a free spirit and never capitulated – as CSN, the Dead and many others did – to the slacker aspects of Hippiedom.  Along with The Band and The Allman Brothers, Neil Young and his garage rock group Crazy Horse understood the 60s counterculture in a much different way; and it is their deeply resonant historical and cultural insights that remain the true high water marks of an era whose icons have sadly deteriorated into cartoons and clichés.

“Crosby, Stills and Nash” thus signifies on two levels: It is a product of the American tradition of harmony singing and on this level it is a masterwork.  But at a deeper level, the record is supercharged with the solipsism and the self-serving “love” that the 60s reveled in.  Hearing these voices after many years, they seem to speak with “forked” tongue; there is the promise of freedom for all coupled with the reality that “freedom” is limited to a certain class of people – those Baby Boomers whose roots were in the post-War financial boom and who tried to be inclusive of others – up to a point.

It is here that a parallel between George W. Bush, himself a Boomer, and the icons of the 1960s makes a great deal of sense.  In the context of the new market economy that has become the standard since Ronald Reagan – a figure who was the enemy of the Hippies, only to become their hero on the back-end of the “Death of the 60s” – the Baby Boomers are looking, as the commercials promise, for the financial edge that will permit them to maintain their comfortable lifestyles. 

And here we can see how in an ultimate sense the 1960s was a cheat of the highest order: Rather than seeing the 60s as a time of change, we can see it as part of a holding pattern that found a way to use its own bourgeois resources – daddy’s trust fund – to stay out of the Vietnam War – and to create a lifestyle based on personal predilection rather than on social justice and equity.

So the Baby Boom generation has as its current markers the figures of George W. Bush and Paul McCartney – there is no John Lennon left.  The iconoclastic Neil Young is not a Baby Boom symbol and his restlessness and lack of capitulation to the bourgeois norms remains the exception rather than the rule.  The Hippies have by and large not only been tamed, but have themselves become a part of the ruling elite that they once claimed they were rebelling against.

But perhaps they were not rebelling against the status quo inasmuch as they were looking to supplant that status quo and take over its privilege and its perquisites of power and socio-cultural elitism.

Even though we have not spoken of the current generation, it has often been said that it lacks the passion and the idealism of its 60s counterpart.  Indeed, there are many young people who would prefer to listen to the Rolling Stones than to groups of their own era.  But in looking at this even more closely, we may ask ourselves what if the Hippie Baby Boomers took their own faked rebellion as a tool with which they could dominate and control all generations which followed them?  What if the Baby Boomers had found a mechanism that could upend any attempt to rebel against their own hegemonic status, because they themselves had created and developed so many of the mechanisms of rebellion themselves?

As we sit here today, we can see that there is a Baby Boomer nostalgia that has reframed the current political debate and reinforced the Bourgeois roots of the Hippie phenomenon that have been exposed in these new media campaigns by the financial companies we have spoken about above.  The TV ads mark for us the final victory of a Baby Boom generation, now led by George W. Bush politically and by the example of Paul McCartney in the field of cultural commerce, that does not look to make the world a better place; the point of all this is to massage the egos of the privileged and to empower the ex-Hippies and to find a way to make legible the often contradictory values that Boomers now espouse.

One need only think of the way in which Paul McCartney and his Beatle compatriots once invented Apple Incorporated as a means to create a neo-Socialist corporation in the middle of Carnaby Street-era London.  Now Macca shills for his peers in ways that are defiantly anti-Socialist – and he evens denies ever having been a Socialist in the first place!

And such hypocrisy permeates the ranks of the Baby Boom class.

The world created by the Baby Boomers is far worse than the world that they were born into.  The current economic imbalance and lack of equal opportunity in our American society stand in stark contrast to the high ideals and hopes that once existed in the early 1960s and its heady mix of Civil Rights fervor and social change.  Filtered through 1968 – the high water mark of 60s hedonism – we see that the ideals were just so much ephemera and that what the Baby Boomers really wanted was to own things and control things. 

And do not be fooled by the pseudo-Hippie corporate empires of Microsoft and Starbucks.  These Hippie-inspired entities toe the line when it comes to the in-group/out-group ethos of the Hippie culture: Inside Microsoft is probably a great place to be; but just try to compete with Microsoft, or have your work be conscripted by Bill Gates’ venal corporate machine; the perfect model of Baby Boomer malevolence mingled with a falsely constructed image of altruism. 

Outside the cuddly internal Microsoft universe is a cold hard world where it is dog-eat-dog; a world that is propounded by the cut-throat version of capitalism that Microsoft and similar entities practice.

So we now watch paeans to the Hippies and the brilliance of their swindle on our TV screens.  We have Paul McCartney singing songs of innocence and hope for an audience of people who have, along with the singer, killed our hopes and extinguished our ideals.

So long as the money keeps coming in, the Baby Boomers will find a way to keep themselves and their lives in the public eye and to continue to dominate and at times tyrannize those who have not been lucky enough to have been born with a silver joint in their mouths.

David Shasha