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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Tuesday, December 20, 2005

“As soon as she
reconnects with her llamas,
Susan feels a sense of peace."



I've been having this recurring nightmare. I am trapped in a tiny room full of very dull people. They look a little bit like me -- played out, slightly decrepit. They can't stop talking about themselves and how tough things are for them. Their aging parents are a burden. Their children don't appreciate them. The talk is about money, money, money.

After a few unsatisfying conversations, I walk over to the door. But the door is locked. I try another door. It, too, is locked. There is a small sign on the second door, and I lean in -- my eyes aren't as good as they used to be -- to read this message: Welcome to the rest of your life, Boomer!

Is there any club one would want less to be a member of than the so-called baby boomers, the generation of Americans born between 1946 and 1964? Their parents fought the big wars, their parents created the most prosperous nation on earth, now here come the graying spongers, bent on retiring early, living forever, and enjoying the ''good life." That means bleeding entitlement payments out of their own children, consequences be damned.

Never forget the boomers' mantra: I've got mine, and the devil take the hindmost.

The first baby boomers start turning 60 next month, and of course there is a rush to analyze What It All Means. Newsweek arrived early to the prattle-fest, blathering in a cover story about the boomers' ''existential journey" and how they have ''leveled the decades-old walls between the races . . . and the genders." Will someone please inform women and black people? They'll be delighted to hear the news.

Inside of Newsweek's boomer-torial sits an eight-page Fidelity Investments advertisement, featuring ex-Beatle Paul McCartney. Message: Being a billionaire is good work, if you can get it.

Here's what it all means to me: The continuing cultural hegemony of the boomers means that, for the rest of my life, every time I turn on a radio, I run the risk of hearing the song ''A Horse With No Name." Now there's a reason to move to Canada.

How does one loathe the boomers? Let me count the ways. Their obsession with money borders on the comical. About half of them were planning to live off their stock portfolios up until the dot-com crash of early 2001. Oops. Time to recalculate. The Wall Street Journal has predicted that a hot book of 2006 will be ''The Number," by former Esquire editor Lee Eisenberg. The title refers to how much money the typical boomer will need to ditch the rat race and fulfill his/her biological destiny: doing nothing.

Here is an excerpt from Mr. Eisenberg's portentously important work: ''For tens of millions of middle-aged travelers, this is an odd moment, riddled with paradoxes. We are at once old and young, parents and kids, generally prosperous yet uneasy." Two uncharitable thoughts occur: Editors should stick to editing, and, instead of fretting about The Number, Mr. Eisenberg might pay attention to The Word.

The logical extension of the boomers' breathless self-regard is their plan to live forever. (Newsweek sadly notes that several hundred thousand boomers have already died -- how can this be?) The Pied Piper of boomer immortality is inventor Ray Kurzweil, who gobbles 250 pills a day and says, ''We have the means right now to live long enough to live forever." Whatever that means.

A particularly insipid public television series called ''Boomers! Redefining Life After Fifty!" (Please! Enough with the exclamation marks! This show really stinks!) offers boomers tips on ''lowering your real age," and provides innovative health advice like ''Eat your spinach" and ''Floss your teeth." Happily, WGBX-TV (Ch. 44) plans to air this show at 9:30 on Sunday mornings, when most viewers are asleep.

Also sponsored by Fido and Sir Paul, ''Boomers!" must have hired Lee Eisenberg to ghost-write. A boomer woman is shown retreating to her farm: “As soon as she . . . reconnects with her llamas, Susan feels a sense of peace." This may have been the moment that my wife stood up from her chair and said, ''I think I'm going to be sick." Eat your spinach, dear. Maybe that will help.

You may think all this is exaggeration, but I'm just talking about my (ghastly) generation.


Alex Beam,
Boston Globe