November 6, 2008

Obama's election and baby boomers

To my many 20-something Facebook friends:

Yes, it's historic. I don't think you can overestimate what's happened in this election.

And I think there's more change here than you might have initially recognized.

In her 6 November New York Times editorial, Gail Collins, like many others, noted that this election ended the era of baby boomer presidents. The boomers - my generation, your parents' generation -- have had the presidency for sixteen years. Bill Clinton was the first boomer president; George Bush, the last.

We all have heard, and continue to hear, a lot about the boomers' numbers and, more importantly, enormous cultural presence. The eldest boomers, if you count 1946 as the generation's beginning, have turned 62 and are entering the social security system; the youngest, born in 1960, are approaching 50. As my 20-something children continually remind me, we boomers (I'm 54) have been running this country's economy, society, and culture in a flagrantly visible way for every decade of their conscious lives. Boomers define consumerism: we own houses; we buy antacids; we exercise maniacally. We're never going to die. 60 is the new 40, 50 the new 30. We've been the me-generation, the narcissists who define the term. We breathe the air of privilege, we expect to be marketed to, and we're in control.

Until now.

And let's face it: despite our numbers and marketability, boomers weren't in control of the White House for very long. Sixteen years, but only two faces. That's a bit of a surprise, considering the boomer population's size and seeming cultural centrality.

The boomers' parents? Well, that's another story.

When, in 1960, the presidential torch passed from Dwight Eisenhower to John F. Kennedy -- the youngest president ever elected (age 43), in an election to which Obama's has been compared -- an elderly and beloved general of World War II, born in 1890, passed the presidency to -- another World War II veteran, but of a different, younger generation. JFK was a handsome, heroic Navy lieutenant whose decorated exploits in the Pacific theater were chronicled in his book Profiles in Courage. My family went to see PT 109, a movie (1963) based on Kennedy's wartime experiences, even though my parents, who were almost exactly the same age as Kennedy, voted for Richard Nixon (also their contemporary).

How long did those World War II veterans - the Greatest Generation, in Tom Brokaw's term - hold onto the White House?

32 years.

That's right. John Kennedy to Lyndon Johnson to Richard Nixon to Gerald Ford to Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan to George Herbert Walker Bush. Every one of those presidents served in World War II, although Reagan served by making war movies (he was a captain in the Army reserve). The oldest? Lyndon Johnson, born in 1908. The youngest? George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter, both born in 1924. Sixteen years separate the oldest and the youngest of those seven - yes, seven - presidents. Fourteen years separate the oldest and youngest baby boomers.

Greatest generation's presidential run: over three decades. Baby boomers': half that.

Why only two boomer presidents? Maybe the Greatest Generation really was that. Maybe their reluctance to pass the torch slowed the process. Maybe narcissism - the boomer label -- isn't very good for leadership.

But I've a different, perhaps self-serving theory.

Ostensibly we baby-boomers, the much desired post-war children of those WW II vets, had everything handed to us. Suburbs boomed with lucky middle-class white baby boomer infants. We're the first to be home-photographed incessantly; some lucky number of us were even the subjects of home movies. From our teens through adulthood, we always seemed able to find jobs and get ahead -- at least if we were white. Lyndon Johnson's Great Society tried to lift everyone out of poverty, and his legislation's goals reflected American post-war optimism to its core. Unfortunately, the Great Society melted in the face of Vietnam, if it ever had a chance against entrenched racism and sexism. The Great Society's benefits ended up being limited to the white middle class.

When we were your age, what did we narcissistic white middle class boomers do? We rebelled, marched, screwed, smoked pot, had the times of our lives. Perhaps our having been pampered and spoiled let us act out with such carefree attitudes. And perhaps our having been pampered and spoiled encouraged upwardly-mobile adult white boomers to put off having children. I'm far from alone in my demographic for having birthed my first child when I was 30, and I've many, many friends with no children of their own.

In "The Baby Boycott " (Washington Monthly, June, 2001), Stephanie Mencimer writes that "Between 1976 and 1998, the number of women between the ages of 40 and 44 who were childless doubled. Now, 20 percent of baby boomer women are childless and likely to remain so, and demographers predict that as much as a quarter of American women born between 1956 and 1972 will never have children. The numbers go up with education and income levels; fully one-third of women in their late 30's with graduate degrees have no children. Meanwhile, the number of women with only one child has doubled since 1976, to 18 percent, and . . less than 10 percent [have four or more children], according to U.S. Census data." [http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1316/is_/ai_75434979]

My point is neither a celebration of, nor lament for, childlessness. Inarguably, the WW II-era parents of boomers gave us an extraordinary economic mobility. The hit TV series Mad Men dramatizes the economic and material successes of white middle-class 1950s moms and dads. But the show has also just started to explore the moms and dads who, ever so tentatively in the early 1960s, began to turn away from the strait-jacketed gendered parenting roles that had been foisted on them. You 20-somethings, the boomers' children who voted in droves in the 2008 presidential election, are the second-generation products of that privileged white middle-class expansion. But, even in the midst of such white middle-class family dynamics, you breathe a cultural air different from that of your parents and grandparents.

You 20-somethings are to a great extent wanted children. We boomers took the pill and had legal abortions. We gave birth to you, not as a social duty, although maybe it was narcissistically a desire to replicate ourselves. We chose to nurture fewer of you, and to do it in new ways. We changed the expectations of and stories about families. Your quietly-radical parents were working mothers who, much against the pundits' predictions, have turned out to be pretty darn good mommas. Dads shared parenting with moms to an unprecedented extent that both surprised -- and often disturbed -- your Greatest Generation grandparents. My kids as little ones would often call Dad Mom, and vice versa. And other liberatory changes took place in parenting, too: our families were no longer only dads and moms - there were stepdads, stepmoms, gay dads, gay moms. Some decry the changes; others of us can see we were onto something.

The boomers' children, because of their privilege, imbibed a freedom and diversity that played out in their homes and their schools. Although some might think it ironic, you 20-somethings are the first-generation products of parenting made expert through diversity. Our 1960s and '70s rebellions let us be more sympathetic to yours. And the sea-change in parent-child relationships has been noticed: twenty-somethings, unlike their boomer parents, often list their moms and dads - of many stripes - as their most admired adults. Your generation generally likes your parents a lot more than we boomers liked our Greatest Generation parents. And I can assure you the feeling in mutual.

If we've not actually put more into you than our parents put into us, we've certainly shifted the landscape of parenting. That's our legacy. The pundits may decry the rent fabric of American families, but I think the holes are really in our leadership capacities. We're less individualistic, more symbiotic than our predecessors. We narcissists are, when it comes to children and family, really a generation of "reciprocitists." We value group dynamics and applaud cooperation. We have proven ourselves pretty lame in the leadership department since the best we boomers could put out there for American president were Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Hillary's run for the presidency only further proves my point that we're about partnerships, not individual heroics. Let's face it, Bill and Hillary, despite all their dramas, raised a pretty fab 20-something.

Maybe, through a little calendrical slight of hand, we can claim Barack Obama as a boomer. But no. Let's accept that boomer expertise hasn't been in leadership. Instead, let's recognize that, despite the startling irony, the narcissistic boomers' children are the first-generation products of truly expert parenting. You twenty-somethings are better than okay. First off, you vote. And then you're smart, energized, less racist than previous generations, cooler in every respect, broadly creative and inventive, extraordinarily versatile and possessed of a remarkable mixture of optimistic hope and absolutely clear-eyed realism.

Like Barack Obama.

So the boomers haven't produced great leaders. Oh well. Perhaps it's enough to be the ostensible narcissists whose real role in the comedy of American life, despite all that's been said of us, is to have raised you. We've produced great children. And not just as parents: we've been the aunts, uncles, teachers, friends, gay, straight, radical supporters of your supposedly fragile self-esteem. Well, here's to you and your self-esteem, dear 20-somethings. There are less of you than there are of us, but quantity doesn't make quality. I'm glad the generational torch has been passed, and I do so hope we are entering a new era of American politics. I do expect, in my narcissistic way, to see it come to pass -- and I do expect, some day, to see my grandchildren, since 80 is the new 60.