Baby Boomer Issue(s) Grace Bauer Maybe it was all the recent news stories about the very first baby boomers on the verge of retirement—and the warnings about the financial havoc this was bound to wreak upon Social Security and the national economy, which was already in pretty dire straits. Or the headlines, one after the other over the last few years, announcing that cultural icons ranging from Ginsberg’s Howl to Motown Records to the peace sign—even the ever youthful Barbie—had hit the half-century mark. Maybe it was the ads for Barneys NY in a December 2008 New York Times Magazine, wishing the world a “Hippie Holiday”—complete with DayGlo-colored images of those fifty-year-old peace signs and a declaration that the store was “having a COUNTER-CULTURE moment” “remembering 1968 forty years on.” Or the advance reviews in the Arts & Leisure section for the reopening of Hair on Broadway. Maybe it was because the daily reports on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were sounding vaguely like the reports on Vietnam more than thirty years ago (which is maybe why they are restaging Hair). Maybe it was the recent election of Barack Obama, which reminded at least some people of the election of JFK—not since then had they seen so much youthful exuberance and idealism so unabashed it even led to “an open apology to boomers everywhere” from Gen X’er Heather Havrilesky on salon.com, where she said “We’re sorry for rolling our eyes at you all these years”—though she couldn’t resist mentioning those of us who might be wearing socks with sandals or smelling like we’d “been on the bus with Wavy Gravy for the last three decades.” Maybe it was just that, to paraphrase a boomer-era song, “something’s in the air”—which is maybe just my own personal sense of “time’s winged chariot” (disguised, perhaps, as Wavy Gravy’s bus or a compact SUV) drawing nearer. But when Hilda Raz asked me once again to stand in as acting editor of Prairie Schooner while she enjoyed a semester of well-earned leave, and asked further if I might want to do some kind of special issue, I [End Page 5] immediately said “Baby Boomers!” A bit self-serving, no doubt, since I’m a writer who was born in the midst of that boom, but I wanted to see what such a gathering might look like, and so I set out to see. Perhaps no generation has been written about as much as the so-called baby boomers—those born between 1946 and 1964, give or take a year or so on either end. They—okay, we—have been scrutinized, analyzed, catered to and criticized, romanticized, ridiculed, and reviled. No one may ever call us “the greatest generation” but that we are “a generation” is commonly accepted as fact. Of course, the eighteen-year span of the post-war boom in babies should tell us this “generation” is a far less monolithic mass than the generic term suggests. By 1964, when the last of the boomers were just being born, the oldest of them were getting ready to head off into adulthood—jobs or college. Or for some, Vietnam. By 1981, when the last of the boomers were coming of age, the older boomers were realizing they had to trust people over thirty, because they were themselves. Those on either end of the boom grew up in vastly different decades. We experienced different political and social climates, watched different tv shows (some of the oldest boomers might actually remember the monumental occasion of their family first getting a tv), listened to different music, read different books. As Malcolm Jones points out in his article “Our Books, Ourselves” in a March 2007 issue of Newsweek, “Older boomers were more likely to own a copy of On The Road. The youngest were more likely to go with Bright Lights, Big City.” The 60s and the 80s may have both been decades of excess but certainly of a very different kind. But like it or not, we are lumped together as boomers, and there...
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Oct 12, 2024
Yulun Zhao 
