when you gonna grow up

Okay, so here's how we all can just get along: We the boomers, the giant rat stuck in the python of life, can help generational peace by pretending to be younger

The Vancouver Sun

Thursday, April 20, 2006

By Peter Robb

If you listen carefully you can hear the drumbeats of a new war -- a titanic tussle of the generations.

The skirmishing is happening with increased frequency, the latest over a book by an American historian that stands as a defence of the baby boom.

Poor Leonard Steinhorn. All he wants to do is stand up for his age cohort, so he wrote The Greater Generation: In Defense of the Baby Boom Legacy.

But he couldn't even survive a panel on the CBC. He was overwhelmed by the earnest anger of the author of Generation Debt, the very young Anya Kamanetz, and the razor-sharp intelligence of Margaret MacMillan, the historian author of Paris 1919.

The verbal beating was greeted by chortling on the blog of Maclean's columnist Andrew Potter, who ended his commentary with a sinister reference to Soylent Green, a '70s sci-fi film where anyone over 65 is rendered into mystery meat and sold in cans labelled Soylent Green. Yum.

So how can we move on? It seems to me the only thing is for the baby boomers, my people, that giant rat stuck in the python of life, to admit their sins.

We boomers have been avoiding this confession for too long by, you know, living our lives, raising our kids, working, stuff like that. No more, we must own up.

Take global warming. We did that. Methane is a greenhouse gas, isn't it? Cancer, yeah, we did that too. The War on Terror -- we are really doing that one.

Osama bin Laden. He's a boomer. Bill Clinton is, too. So is W. Can you see the pattern of treachery? The whole generation is the spawn of Satan.

Personally, I blame my parents, who produced four boomers, although my youngest brother just made it inside the line. Hey, wait a minute, does that make my parents Satan?

It seems that the one thing the boomers have really failed at is producing enough kids. The devious generation that produced us figured out that if they had a lot of kids, they would be well looked after.

Boomers figured out the Pill and everybody else will be paying.

There is no doubt, however, that we are out to screw those poor souls who arrived on the planet after us. You know, our younger brothers, sisters and cousins in Generation X, Y and Echo, and our own children among the millennials. We might as well admit it.

Younger generations, smaller in numbers, seem to believe that they are going to have to shoulder a burden of debt that is not of their making but will be exacerbated when the great blob that is the baby boom enters a dissolute retirement -- whenever that is now that mandatory joblessness has been ended in many provinces.

What will they do if we don't retire?

We are, according to our critics, slothful, bloated, self-centred greed-heads who do nothing for anyone else in any other age group except pile on the debt and rip off their futures to enjoy our present. To top it off, we occupy all the good jobs and show no signs of giving those up.

I wonder if my thirtysomething boss knows about this. Or my twentysomething colleagues. Just a second, here. How did they get jobs? That's just not right.

And what about the debt? It was rung up by Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Brian Mulroney. Hey, wait one cotton-picking minute here. Those guys aren't boomers. In fact there have only been two boomer prime ministers in Canadian history -- Kim Campbell (who lasted a few months) and Stephen Harper. Maybe it's not our fault after all.

It is time for clarity and compromise and I have a good one -- the Grup. A term derived from a Star Trek episode in which Captain Kirk visits a planet ruled by children. All the gr(own)ups have died from a virus that kills adults.

The phenomenon has been identified by New York Magazine, which published a recent article by Adam Sternbergh on Grups.

The people are "40-year-old men and women who look, talk, act and dress like people who are 22 years old. It's not about a fad but about a phenomenon that looks to be permanent."

"It's about the hedge-fund guy in Park Slope with the chunky square glasses, brown rock T-shirt, slight paunch, expensive jeans, Puma sneakers, and shoulder-slung messenger bag, with two kids squirming over his lap like itchy chimps at the Tea Lounge on Sunday morning.

"It's about the mom in the low-slung Sevens and ankle boots and vaguely Berlin-art-scene blouse with the $800 stroller and the TV-screen-size Olsen-twins sunglasses perched on her head walking through Bryant Park listening to Death Cab for Cutie on her Nano."

It's about people who transcend the generational walls. Boomers can do that. We're always trying to get younger.

And if it will end all the generational cant and carping, I'm all for it.

Source: Ottawa Citizen

Up With Grups*

He owns eleven pairs of sneakers, hasn’t worn anything but jeans in a year, and won’t shut up about the latest Death Cab for Cutie CD. But he is no kid. He is among the ascendant breed of grown-up who has redefined adulthood as we once knew it and killed off the generation gap.

Grupsters: The New Adulthood

* Also known as yupster (yuppie + hipster), yindie (yuppie + indie), and alterna-yuppie. Our preferred term, grup, is taken from an episode of Star Trek (keep reading) in which Captain Kirk et al. land on a planet of children who rule the world, with no adults in sight. The kids call Kirk and the crew “grups,” which they eventually figure out is a contraction of “grown-ups.” It turns out that all the grown-ups had died from a virus that greatly slows the aging process and kills anybody who grows up.

By Adam Sternbergh

New York Magazine

April 2006

Let’s start with a question. A few questions, actually: When did it become normal for your average 35-year-old New Yorker to (a) walk around with an iPod plugged into his ears at all times, listening to the latest from Bloc Party; (b) regularly buy his clothes at Urban Outfitters; (c) take her toddler to a Mommy’s Happy Hour at a Brooklyn bar; (d) stay out till 4 A.M. because he just can’t miss the latest New Pornographers show, because who knows when Neko Case will decide to stop touring with them, and everyone knows she’s the heart of the band; (e) spend $250 on a pair of jeans that are artfully shredded to look like they just fell through a wheat thresher and are designed, eventually, to artfully fall totally apart; (f) decide that Sufjan Stevens is the perfect music to play for her 2-year-old, because, let’s face it, 2-year-olds have lousy taste in music, and we will not listen to the Wiggles in this house; (g) wear sneakers as a fashion statement; (h) wear the same vintage New Balance sneakers that he wore on his first day of school in the seventh grade as a fashion statement; (i) wear said sneakers to the office; (j) quit the office job because—you know what?—screw the office and screw jockeying for that promotion to VP, because isn’t promotion just another word for “slavery”?; (k) and besides, now that she’s a freelancer, working on her own projects, on her own terms, it’s that much easier to kick off in the middle of the week for a quick snowboarding trip to Sugarbush, because she’s got to have some balance, right? And she can write it off, too, because who knows? She might bump into Spike Jonze on the slopes; (l) wear a Misfits T-shirt; (m) make his 2-year-old wear a Misfits T-shirt; (n) never shave; (o) take pride in never shaving; (p) take pride in never shaving while spending $200 on a bedhead haircut and $600 on a messenger bag, because, seriously, only his grandfather or some frat-boy Wall Street flunky still carries a briefcase; or (q) all of the above?

newyorkmetro.com