PARTING SHOT

For those of us counting the days, the Eighties (The Age of. . .Reagan? AIDS? The VCR? Crack?) are now reeling into their final year, having long overstayed their welcome. More than a year ago Newsweek declared the greedhead Eighties cold and stiff, the cause of death being the stock market crash. That’s as good a marker as any, because decades are not neat, symmetrical blocks of time ended by years ending in nine: 1960-69, 1970-79, etc. Looking back at the Sixties, for example, it seems clear that the years 1960-62 are only distant, embarrassed relatives of that bizarre decade. The political chaos, social ferment, and musical innovation that made up the Sixties began well after the Kennedy assassination and ran on considerably after the decade’s calendar end. The animating spirit of the time began to dissipate when the draft was ended and evaporated only after Richard Nixon was driven from the White House in 1974.

The Sixties then ended because there was nothing more for them to be about. It was an era of symbiotic rebellion, and young rebels can exist only when an obliging Establishment gives them something to push against. With the threat of military service and the hated Nixon gone, most of the renegade youth were ready to become good consumers. And Madison Avenue was ready to sell them stone-washed denims, cute li’l jeeps, sexually liberated perfumes, exotic coffees, CD players, and so on ad nauseum. It was, after all, time to grow up. Power to the pesto.



AS ALWAYS, THE NEW YEAR BROUGHT ITS stack of summations and forecasts, all of them pimpled with the bb-word: baby boom. Boomer this, boomer that. The pig bulging its way through the python of time. Is anyone else just sick to the gills of our generation’s endless preening and self-absorption?

Okay, The Big Chill was tolerable, but its whining offspring are starting to clutter up the house. I’m not sure I can take another movie or television series about the wonderful old days of headbands and Arlo Guthrie posters and the Mobe and Janis, back when we all took abnormal psych and thought we were crazy, and like, isn’t it amazing that now we have kids who don’t know who Spiro Agnew was and probably think that Hoffman, Rubin, and Hayden were a law firm, and why didn’t The Greening of America have a chapter on asking for a promotion?

It reminds me of the Southern matriarch who got tired of her no-’count husband hitting the Rebel Yell and waxing on about the deah ol’ antebellum South. “Honey,” she would tell him, “if we’d been that good, we nevah would have lost that war.”

That goes double for Sixties-worshipers, and we’re not just talking about the Vietnam War. It’s fine to remember baking in the mud at Lewisville Pop and getting tossed out of second period math for wearing a black armband during the Moratorium. And don’t forget when you saw Easy Rider and how, when Captain America and Billy got blown away, you sensed for perhaps the first time the violence and greed that haunt the American psyche. Fine, but what came of all that energy and discontent and so-called idealism? Not a lot. Certainly not enough to justify the eternal hosannas that boomers sing to themselves.

If the Sixties meant anything beyond a bunch of people growing hair and yelling, they meant some fragile dream of a communal solidarity that would transcend race and, more importantly, class. Obviously, as Captain America said in the movie, we blew it. And, thinking the world began when we did, we overlooked the fact that we were not the first generation to have large dreams, and we sure weren’t the first to fall short of achieving them. So even our grandiose guilt is undeserved. When it comes to delivering Utopia, every generation blew it.

But not every generation has spent so much time in navel-gazing, watching home movies of ourselves toddling toward awareness in coonskin caps and tie-dyed shirts. Having lost the revolution, we declared video victory in order to preserve our narcissistic belief that we are unique. The deification of boomerism in movies and television comes in two flavors. There’s Boomer Light (“Murphy Brown.” “Almost Grown,” “thirtysomething,” “The Wonder Years,” Baby Boom) and there’s Boomer Dark (“Tour of Duty,” “China Beach,” and the boomerdoom classic. Platoon). To know irony, watch one of these TV shows in which thirtyish characters struggle with the twin burdens of Sensitivity and Success. Then come the commercials, worming their way into our minds via some once-treasured rock song. It started with Carly Simon selling ketchup with “Anticipation” and snowballed. Now it’s hard to name a hit song that has not become a Trojan horse for credit cards or tennis shoes-and honey, if the Sixties had been that good, we wouldn’t be buying those products.

The story has often been told but bears repeating. To the extent that there was any “culture” in the Sixties counterculture, much of it was found in rock music. It was not Shakespeare or Michelangelo, not even Scott Fitzgerald or Georgia O’Keeffe, but it was something fresh and genuine for a while. Now the dream of social transformation has faded, and it’s becoming fashionable to blame the poor and homeless for their own plight. I got mine, Jack, you get yours. Sadly, however, the music didn’t die with the ideas; instead, its power is harnessed to make rich people richer. These commercials are really the death rattle of the Sixties, a requiem with a 4/4 beat. You make me feel like a natural capitalist.



IT’S AN ODD THOUGHT. BUT MAYBE ROCK itself is partly to blame for rocksploitation ads. Boomer music was simple, optimistic, and triumphant even when it tried to be angry (“Light My Fire”) or world-weary (“A Day in the Life”). That makes it an easy mark for the hucksters. Put a few boomer-oids in a room with orders to sell that cute li’l jeep, and the result will likely be another rock-induced jingle: “I bought a jeep today, oh boy, two thousand dollars off the sticker price. . .” or “Doncha know the price is sweet, yeah! Doncha think it drives so neat, yeah! Gotta get it on the street!”

Madison Avenue might have a tougher time if we’d all grown up hooked on the blues. Since blues is a music of pain and limits, of hangovers and grunt work and missed chances, it would be harder to use in whetting yuppies’ appetites.

You went to see your broker, to sell yo’ IBM, But I caught you with him baby, in a new Mercedes-Benz!

You told me you was faithful, had your heart stuck just on me, But I took you to Chez Bontemps, and you left with the maitre d’!



Cause you gone upscale, pretty baby!

Lawd, I’m the last to get she news!

I got those lowdown. dirty rotten, Upwardly mobile blues!