Every Generation Makes Mistakes

BILL HILL

STREET NAME = GRAPPA BOY

Every Generation Makes Mistakes

In his new book, Balsamic Dreams, author Joe Queenan describes the baby boomers as "stupefyingly self-centered, unbelievably rude, obnoxious beyond belief, and ... everywhere."

He carries on like this for the entirety of the book, more than 200 pages of insults and insights into the most wasteful generation in history. Some may find the excoriation of the boomers as funny as I did. Others, particularly if you're a male of more than 50 years who has an earring and a ponytail, might be offended.

Whether or not you find Queenan's ideas about the baby boomers amusing, he does have a point. I'm frankly surprised that he was able to chronicle all the boomer's offenses in less than 300 pages. This is the generation that danced naked in the mud at Woodstock and then elected Ronald Reagan president two decades later.

There's just no explaining that away.

According to Queenan, the Baby Boomers were not the "first generation to sell out, but they were the first generation to sell out and then insist that they hadn't." While this may be true, my generation, the twenty-somethings of Generation X, has an additional list of sins for which we can fault the boomers.

While the boomers were so busy selling out, most, if not all of them, were crummy parents to boot. Who doesn't have one crazy parent, or at least know someone whose folks are nutty? The boomers can be legitimately faulted for a socially annoying desire to videotape everything, but it's their kids -- my generation -- who really suffered at their hands.

This isn't to say that Gen X is perfect by any means. The boomers may be self-centered, but adding up the missteps of the twenty-something crowd is flat-out embarrassing.

We've been so lame that at times we make Nixon look hip.

Take piercing, for instance. When did it become a good idea to put pieces of metal through the more sensitive areas of your body? Who thinks this cute?

"My darling, that metal rod through your eye is soooo becoming."

"Why, thank you, dear. The steel shaft through your breast is just delightful."

I'll confess that several years ago my ex-girlfriend and I went and got matching nose piercings together. This was before the seemingly sweet lass ran off with our neighbor and joined a cult, but that's another story.

Prior to her departure, we got pierced, and we thought of it as a kind of `90s version of exchanging class rings. It didn't really take with me though -- I walked around with a nasty infection on the side of my face for about a year.

Tattoos are another bad idea that my generation has embraced. At one time, Marines and bikers got tattoos, and it should have stayed that way. Recently, the acceptable tattoo list has been expanded to athletes, NASCAR drivers and anyone who deals with firearms or explosives in a professional capacity.

Far be it from me to argue with someone who is armed or bigger than I am.

But when did every bobbed blonde sorority girl decide she needed Winnie the Pooh on her butt? How seriously can you take a guy with a jumping dolphin on his ankle?

This isn't cool. It isn't tough.

It is silly and they'll be stuck with it for the rest of their lives. How do you expect to explain something like this to your grandkids with a straight face? "Well, Johnny, you're three now so it's time I tell you about that wild night with the dwarf, the waitress, the bottle of paint thinner and this tattoo of a smiling rainbow that I have on my back." Perhaps my generation should stick with drawing on themselves with markers when they feel the urge for "self-expression."

Body mutilation notwithstanding, the worst sin of my generation is irony: we just can't take anything seriously. It's as if Gen X is firmly entrenched -- tattooed and pierced -- between a set of quotation marks. In the most recent New Yorker there was even an article about a guy who is into ironic tattoos. We can't even take our rebelliousness seriously -- this guy had Jerry Lewis put on his arm because he thought it was funny.

Between global warming, a jaw-dropping level of national debt, a bleak future for social security, Clarence Thomas and the ebola virus, my generation has been stuck with the bill for the boomer's party.

At the same time, I have to wonder if all our irony is simply a cruel joke at the boomers' expense. We may all be fried to death in an ozone-less world before long, but we will have made the boomers suffer through the Cure, Nine Inch Nails and a Henry Mancini revival before we all go down in flames.

If I were a truly helpful columnist, I'd offer some suggestion about reconciling the generations so that Gen X and the boomers could fade away together in one happy retro-hippie-super-techno-love-fest. At the very least I could provide some idea about how Gen X can stop joking around about everything and get to work saving the world.

Yeah, right. Whatever.

I've got to go put on my Hawaiian shirt and head up to Franklin Street. There's a blue cup waiting for me and MTV is in town.

Reach Bill Hill at wbhill@email.unc.edu.