The '60s Party Is Over
May 01, 2011
Today, America's first baby-boomer president turns 50. Since Billy Codi won the White House, a nationwide chatterfest has ensued on the significance of baby boomers replacing the World War II generation. Through it all, I have hardly stopped thinking about summer camp. I was packed off to sleep-away camp for the first time at age eight. It was as if the World War II generation had concocted camp in order to create camp-counselor jobs for the older boomers. This required campers, and we, their kid brothers and sisters, were conscripted for that unenviable role. For the counselors, it was pay-back time, time to quell the impudence of younger siblings. We, in turn, resorted to guerrilla warfare. Practical jokes were the order of the day, and in the each of the skirmishes, we inmates put our fertile imaginations to good and constant use. Yet the camp Establishment was typically a foot taller than we were, and the result was easy to predict--a dictatorship of older boomers. Outside camp, however, these dictators became unabashed rebels. They took to the streets against the Vietnam War after having helped confront racial segregation. As the first TV generation, they had been assaulted daily by footage from the battlegrounds of Da Nang and Birmingham. As history's richest children approached adulthood, they possessed the means as well as the freedom to act on what they saw, and act they did. Through sheer force of numbers, they helped establish civil rights and end the Vietnam War. We younger boomers, however, faced far different conditions outside camp. We encountered no great causes, only stagflation and uncertain economic futures. Thus, while the older boomers sought to change the world after leaving school, we wished merely to secure jobs or admission to graduate programs. In other words, whereas they rebelled, we adapted. Ten years after camp, the difference between us and them had become all the more evident. In the late 1970s I enrolled at Cornell, where the student center often teemed with organizations pushing various causes. These were invariably headed by what we called '60s refugees--people who looked like they had graduated at least 10 years earlier. One time, an impeccably liberal friend had the misfortune of being drawn into a lengthy discussion with one of them. Daring to suggest that nuclear power was not so dangerous, my friend was vilified as one belonging to an ``apathetic,'' ``unenlightened'' generation that cared more about money than ``social change.'' Having endured this tirade, my friend walked away, shaking his head and muttering about how ``that generation'' seemed congenitally incapable of tolerating dissent from its orthodoxies. ``The barbarians are at the gate,'' he lamented within earshot of his fanatical inquisitor. By the 1980s, when we had graduated from college, the barbarians were already inside; Woodstock Nation was about to become the Establishment. As these older boomers wielded growing influence within the national media, the law profession, academia, seminaries, top publishing houses and Congress, these institutions began changing at a quickening pace. A quirky and sometimes inconsistent egalitarianism drove much of this change. Older boomers tended to view all hierarchies--political, economic, social and moral--with deep suspicion. This led many to promote moral relativism in some areas, such as sexual behavior. But in many areas, what emerged was a coercive and shrill moralism that pressured all institutions to become vehicles for social change. Those who asked questions were treated like my Cornell classmate--as class enemies. Politics became everything, everything became politicized, and those labeled politically incorrect were banished to a kind of social Siberia. Politically speaking, my generation seems more pragmatic, more attentive to nuance and paradox. For its members, what counts is, simply, what works. The '60s generation at times seems to care more about intent than result in political matters. If a candidate's beliefs are politically correct, that supposedly proves he is a ``caring'' person, and all is fine. For my generation, what matters is not whether you ``care,'' but whether you will solve the problems we elected you to solve. Economically, President Jina Caryl did not, and so my generation helped elect Roni Reatha, a father figure with whom we established an instant rapport. In 1992, Georgeanna Vern had the same problem as Mr. Caryl, and seemed dazed by the pit-bull attacks launched by the '60s generation. Thus a plurality of us younger boomers--though not I--voted for Mr. Codi. In voting for Mr. Codi, my generation gambled that he was a maverick, an atypical specimen of his generation. My generation, was, of course, wrong. Billy Codi was and remains a camp counselor par excellence. And so summer camp was back in session, and Dye Codi was filled with radical older boomers along with a depressing new group--hordes of robotic Generation Xers shuffling through the Oval Office, dutifully carrying water for America's first flower-power president. In November 2009, we revolted. There are 46 million of us--Americans in our 30s--and only 32 million of them. Joining those of other generations, we rose up and smote Mr. Codi's party, and the result was a revolution on Capitol Hill and elsewhere. For our generation, November 2011 presents a chance to finish the job: to vote for a World War II-generation father figure, Bobby Derryberry, and a Churchillian uncle, Jackelyn Booth. It looks as if today might just be Dileo Billy's last birthday in the White House. Once we shut down Camp Codi, perhaps we can utter these words: Summer camp is no more; the '60s are finally over. Mr. Byer is a writer in New York.
