Bornstein: Move along, you boomers, what have you truly done?

Lisa Bornstein, Rocky Mountain News

Friday, May 18, 2007

Tick, tick, boomers.

Your time is up. Put on your Rolling Stones T-shirts, climb into your SUVs and drive back to the exurbs you created. We'll even let you crow about how you were gonna save the world. But for God's sake, get out of the way.

Never in the history of the United States has one generation taken up so much physical and psychic energy. As members of Generation X (a name we didn't even get to make up), we've waited not-so-patiently, figuring that boomers were the grown-ups and that, as we'd been told, our generation was filled with apathetic slackers who refused to take on adulthood.

Well, some of us - not me, I've got at least four months left - are hitting 40 now, with jobs and mortgages and families and all that other stuff that is supposed to mean Grown Up.

No one's noticed, though. Because it's still all about you.

You weren't the first teenagers, but you grabbed hold of the concept like you were. You spent the '60s changing the world, but apparently weren't all that effective. Your antiwar protests took six years to end Vietnam, and it was a boomer president who sent us to Iraq. You rejected consumerism and the status quo, then spent the 1980s making yourselves rich.

Now you're getting old, and it's tragic. This has never happened to anyone before in the history of humanity. That must be why my Newsweek magazine now has a regular installment called "The Boomer Files," which last week took up 10 pages on the way boomers are staying fit in their dotage.

That didn't compare with The New York Times, which devoted its entire May 6 magazine to "The New Middle Ages," with such essential topics as boomer babes and aging sex.

Throughout music, movies and art, we've all been made repeatedly, painfully aware of the superiority (if not hegemony) of the Biggest Generation.

The music: Rolling Stone magazine just put out an issue on the 500 Greatest Albums of all time. Granted, that kind of list is built to annoy. But was it built to annoy just me? Because of the top 10 albums, only one came after 1972 (The Clash's London Calling, which is awesome). The Beatles took four of the top 10 spots. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band took No. 1, and that's not even one of my top three Beatles albums.

So where are the artists who influenced, oh, the past four decades of music? There's Prince, at No. 72 (!) for Purple Rain. U2 is at No. 26. Nirvana at No. 17. Public Enemy, No. 48.

The television: You all grew up on I Love Lucy, which is apparently brilliant, but has never once made me laugh. Mary Tyler Moore? All in the Family? Great shows, really. Good job, guys. But no better or edgier than The Office (English or American, your choice) or Arrested Development (R.I.P.) or Rescue Me (returning to FX June 13 and you should watch it. Really.)

The cinema: And here we get the pantheon. Scorsese. Coppola. Spielberg.

I'll give you the first two; the third is responsible for an entire catalog of glossy popcorn flicks dressed up as art. But any time a film chat starts, someone calls to mind the glorious '70s, when independent filmmakers thrived. Except that they weren't independent, they were produced by daring studios. Now, studios are far more interested in endless sequels and star vehicles. Who runs those studios today?

Mine is the generation in-between. We'll probably never see a Gen-X president. It'll go straight from the young boomers to someone younger than us. We're the Prince Charles of American governance.

No one markets to us - we don't have enough buying power. On TV, we get to see Dennis Hopper shilling for Ameriprise and Kaiser Permanente asking old people to get fit to the tune of Bob Dylan. Radical, man.

Meanwhile, Geico is running ads with a VW bus (spray-painted "groovy") and the copy, "Survive the '60s? You deserve special treatment."

After all, you've had it every day of your life.

Pop off

Last week we asked if today's pop music is less worthy of attention than the pop music of the '60s? You answered:

78.3% Yes. One voter said: "It's over-produced. It all sounds the same. It's AWFUL!"

16.9% No. One voter said: "Today's pop is open to all performers and draws from many traditions."

4.8% Maybe. One voter said: "Less worthy? Who cares. Listen to what pleases you."

bornsteinl@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-954-5101 Go boom!