Birthday Thoughts

[peristaltor]

Ever since I was young, I've felt that something was not quite right.

The older kids I knew, those in Jr. High and High School, had some great parties. They talked about staying up late, protesting this and that, and generally having a good time. I saw quite a bit of unflustered nudity growing up, smelled more than a fair share of funny cigarettes. I started to think that getting to be that age would be a lot of fun. All I had to do was get old enough to enjoy the party myself.

What I thought
awaited the patient.
Ah, but when I got old enough, the party seemed to be all but over. That "free love" I heard about went the way of the dodo first after herpes made Time magazine. Things got even worse a few years later AIDS gained prominence in our national conversation. Glomming on to these themes, the Moral Majority gained popularity, as did a general Christian revival. This all happened just as I learned in 1978 the word that I felt myself to be: "agnostic."

To summarize, there was no extended party left when I grew old enough to attend, and the people who should have been at the party with me started preaching instead. And those older kids, those hippies? Even they started getting sour with the party scene. After Vietnam ended for most of the US, they got morose as a lot. Either that, or they never stopped partying, in ways that gave the very term "party" a bad rap.

Also, I had lots of cars to look forward to when I got old enough to drive (the ultimate rite of passage at that time). Muscle cars appealed to me. Then the country went through the OPEC oil crisis. Oh, those muscle cars still prowled the streets; but my friends who managed to own and drive one were seldom seen, since they had to hold down low-wage jobs just to pay for the now quite expensive gas.

The nation's party ended just as I was getting old enough to attend. I was bitter, and not alone.

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In 1991, I read a review about a new book that for some reason struck a chord. Though desperately poor, I ordered a copy of Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture by Douglas Coupland from the silly chain bookstore where I worked at the time. This book sings to people my age. Here all along I thought I was a part of the Baby Boom generation even though I didn't quite understand those people even a few years older than myself. Yes, I was born at the tail end of that boom of babies; but our worldviews were strikingly different, and finally here was a book that, while it didn't explain why, at least understood that something was different.

The book follows people my age simply trying to find meaning in a meaningless world, where all the opportunities have been hoovered up by the "salted pony tailed" elders of the hippie generation. After the party, those hippies (as all could see) became the Yuppies, settling down, raising children and going to church services they once rejected as bor-ze-wah or some such misunderstood political faddish phrase. They were largely responsible, as Coupland observed, for "veal fattening pens" (offices separated by cubicles), offering jobs with so little prospect for advancement that people our age turned into the dreaded "boomerang children", offspring destined to return home to Mom and Dad just because they couldn't make it in the real world. Even the chapter titles spoke to me: "Our Parents Had More," "Dead at 30 Buried at 70," and "Monsters Exist."

That same year, two academics, William Strauss & Neil Howe, compiled another book (one I've mentioned previously; I intend to re-hash a lot of that post here to give this post some cohesion), this one presenting a theory of how different age groups (what they call "cohorts") interact through history. Once again, we see how folks my age pretty much got screwed.

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Strauss and Howe's Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069 puts forth the proposition that to truly understand past events, you must apply them to a cyclical pattern of generational behavior. In essence, every 20+ years society changes in fairly predictable ways that influence how the next generation will view the world around them.

The peer personality of a generation is essentially a caricature of its prototypical member. It is, in its sum of attributes, a distinctly personalized creation. A generation has collective attitudes about family life, sex roles, institutions, politics, religion, lifestyle, and the future. It can be safe or reckless, calm or aggressive, self-absorbed or outer-driven, generous or selfish, spiritual or secular, interested in culture or interested in politics. In short, it can think, feel, or do anything an individual might think, feel, or do. Between any two generations, as between any two neighbors, such personalities can mesh, clash, be attracted to or repelled by one another.

As a social category, a generation probably offers a safer basis for personality generalization than such other social categories as sex, race, region, or age.

(William Strauss & Neil Howe, Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069, William Morrow & Company, 1991, p. 63.)

The authors then put forth a notion that at first appears bizarre: that the four generational cohort types are essentially cyclical, repeating patterns that roll over every 85-90 years or so (because events in history play a big part of defining generations, the theory does not depend upon absolute dates, but rather posits that people on either side of the big events are shaped by that event and the people around them). As they put it, "There are two types of social moments: SECULAR CRISES, when society focuses on reordering the outer world of institutions and public behavior; and SPIRITUAL AWAKENINGS, when society focuses on changing the inner world of values and private behavior. (Strauss & Howe, ibid, p. 71.)

A secular crisis is generally (but not limited to) a big war. Go back in history and one indeed finds quite a few major conflicts that are separated by 85 years:

Exactly eighty-five years passed between the first Confederate shot on Fort Sumter and Pearl Harbor Day. Back up the story, and note that eight-five years also passed between Fort Sumter and the Declaration of Independence. (Or, as President Lincoln Noted, "Four score and seven years" separated the first Fourth of July from the Battle of Gettysburg.) Back up still further, and note that another eighty-seven years passed between the Anglo-American "Glorious Revolution" of 1689 and Independence Day. Preceding the Glorious Revolution by a slightly longer period—ninety-nine years—was the epochal victory of the English navy over the Spanish Armada.

(Strauss & Howe, ibid, p. 88, emphasis here changed from italic to bold due to LJ's continued silliness in insisting blocked quotes should be universally italicized.)

Within that 85 or so years are four age cohorts passing their lives with each other, cohorts that share quite a bit with the people their age. Strauss and Howe label these cohorts thusly:

• Idealist
  
• Reactive
  
• Civic
  
• Adaptive

The Boomers? Born between 1943 and 1960 (according to S&H), they are of the first type, the Idealists. They were spoiled rotten by their parents (the Civic generation), so tend to be self-centered. Civic generations in general tend to built society as strong as they can for their children; the children then grow up with a sense of entitlement that other generations generally lack. Idealist spirituality tends to be dogmatic and absolute, focusing on personal insights and experiences. And they like attention. Combine these attributes with the fact that the Boomer is a large generation and we can start to understand the impact they've had on our society:

From VJ-Day forward, whatever age bracket Boomers have occupied has been the cultural and spiritual focal point for American society as a whole. Through their childhood, America was child-obsessed; in their youth, youth-obsessed; in their "yuppie" phase, yuppie-obsessed.

(Strauss & Howe, ibid, p. 301.)

Elements of society reflect the opinion society holds about its children, especially in the arts. Take the popular television shows of the twenty-year era starting in the 1950s. Kids were smart, kids were cute, kids were Beaver Cleaver and Dennis the Menace.

This started to shift toward the end of the 60s.

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Strauss & Howe published their book Generations before Coupland's book was released, so they missed out on adopting Generation X as the identifier for my generation. Instead, they coined the more awkward phrase "13er"; mine is the 13th generation their book identifies, and 13 is also an unlucky number.

Don't believe me about the lack of luck? Let's look at popular entertainment. From beach parties in the 1950s, we go to the blockbusters of the late '60s that take a dimmer view of children. Some portray them as outright evil—Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, Exorcist II, Damien, Omen, Omen II, Omen III, It's Alive!, It Lives Again, Demon Seed and (one of my faves) the terrifying kid in The Other. Then there are the weird, less-than-perfect kid movies like Paper Moon, Taxi Driver, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, and The Bad News Bears. This tends to be the trend for about 20 years.

In the 1980s, there is another shift, one back to cute kid movies like Raising Arizona, Three Men and a Baby, Baby Boom, Look Who's Talking, Parenthood, etc.

Who occupied the early-childhood age bracket when these films were being made and viewed? Boomers during the smart-kid movie era of the 1950s; 13ers during the witch-kid movie era of the 1970s; and Millenials during the precious-baby movie era in the mid-1980s. This was no coincidence. The 13er childhood years, roughly from the mid-1960s through the early 1980s, defined an era of unremitting hostility toward children. One of every four rental apartments banned children, a 50 percent increase over the Boomer child era. The homicide rate against children under age four more than doubled. Adults of fertile age doubled their rate of surgical sterilization. The number of legal abortions per year rose tenfold. Birth-control technology became a hot topic—as did the cost and bother or raising a child, seldom an issue when Boomers were small. Net tax rates for childless households remained steady, while rates for families with children rose sharply. The child poverty rate grew, while the poverty rate for those in midlife and elderhood fell. Tax revolts cut school funding substantially in California and other states, which made public-school teachers suffer seven consecutive years of reduced purchasing power. The proportion of G-rated films fell from 41 to 13 percent, and Walt Disney Studios laid off cartoonists. The nation financed a growing share of its consumption by piling up federal debt and other unfunded liabilities whose greatest burdens, adults realized, would someday fall on small children. Then, during the 1980s, many of these trends began stabilizing—and, in some cases, turning around.

The English language has no single word to describe what happened to the child's world in America through the Consciousness Revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s. The Germans do. They call it Kinderfeindlichkeit—a society-wide hostility toward children.

(Strauss & Howe, ibid, pp. 97-98, again with the emboldened italics, I underlined.)

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I underlined the bit about the tax revolts affects on education to point out that I suffered it. Not only were my parents public school teachers and therefore affected by the "seven consecutive years of reduced purchasing power," our district was so strapped for cash after losing school construction levies for a record number of years that it put its students in school year round. Essentially, the student population below the high school level was broken up into four "tracks"; at any given moment, one of those tracks was on break. Between 6th grade and high school I didn't get a "summer break," but rather sat through classes in schools where air conditioning was never installed.

That started to change in 1981; bond levies started to pass, and the old school houses I suffered were demolished for new. That didn't happen, though, until my generation graduated, once kids again were cool to have, to raise, to consider not killing. And I include that last deliberately: "The 13th is the most aborted generation in American history. . . . Through the birthyears of the last-wave 13ers, would-be mothers aborted one fetus in three." (Strauss & Howe, ibid, p. 324.)

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That Kinderfeindlichkeit had a profound impact on my generational cohort, as the authors of Generations note. To understand what happened, one must first describe what the authors call a "generational diagonal."

Make a graph. On the horizontal axis plot years. On the vertical axis, ages in years. So as you read across the years, the ages of the people alive in those years rises and their place on the graph can therefore be plotted at a 45° angle. Got that?

Now consider this: "For seventeen straight years, from 1964 through 1980, the average SAT score declined. In 1976, the federal Wirtz Commission attributed roughly half the fall to the growing share of all high school seniors who chose to take the test and the rest to such vague period effects as permissiveness and less homework." (Strauss & Howe, ibid, p. 52.) I remember the froth and blather over these falling test scores, oh, I do. What the Wirtz people didn't realize was the cyclical effect in play here.

But in 1988, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) looked again at the SAT numbers and compared them with the standardized test scores of younger students. CBO researchers discovered a very close diagonal match—at all grades—between scores and birth cohorts. In other words, the SAT trend could have been predicted, in each year, by looking at the lower-grade test scores in earlier years for each cohort. Even as the Wirzt Commission agonized in 1976 over the SAT decline, 12-year-olds were already scoring higher than their next-elders—which (had anyone been looking) could have foretold an SAT reversal five years in the future. Test scores in the third grade showed improvement by the early 1970s; in the sixth grade by the mid-1970s; and in junior high school by the late 1970s. Once these same kids (the 1964 and 1965 cohorts) reached twelfth grade in the early 1980s, SAT scores did indeed begin rising again.

(Strauss & Howe, ibid, p. 324, I changed italics to bold again, and underlined my emphasis.)

And here let me remind readers what day it is. Today I turn 50, meaning I am right smack in the middle of those loser 1961 and 1965 cohorts. Strauss and Howe ask, "[are] these aptitude scores linked to any other important cohort shifts?" Oh, are they.

Let's hunt down the "generational diagonal" among a handful of age-bracketed indicators for violent crime, substance abuse, and drunk driving. These indicators, of course, always show a marked lifecycle pattern—rising sharply through adolescence, peaking in the early twenties, and falling at higher ages. If we tabulate these rates by age, however, we can control for the age effect and focus on how the rate changes, year by year, at any given age.


I clickeed a pic from the book.

In Figure 2-1, we summarize data on average grade-school test scores (from ages 8 to 17); per capita consumption of alcohol (17- and 18-year-old students only); per capita arrest rates for arson, robbery, and assault (from ages 15 to 24); and per capita arrest rates for drunk driving (from ages 18 to 24). . . . For each age, we mark the calendar year at which the indicator reached its negative extreme (the lowest test score or the highest rate of crime or substance abuse) since such statistics have been compiled. . . .

The portrait that emerges of the 1961-1964 cohort-group is vivid and unflattering. Over the postwar period, at each age through 24, this group has generated all of America's highest rates for three violent crimes. Very likely (though detailed age-bracketed data remain unavailable), it has also generated record rates for many other social pathologies, including suicide. . . .

By 1991, the men and women born from 1961 through 1964 have reached their late twenties. They are no longer taking aptitude tests and have left their high-crime and high-drinking ages behind them. We would be naive, however, to assume that the collective personality of these individuals will simply disappear as they grow older.

(Strauss & Howe, ibid, pp. 52-53, their bold, my underlining.)

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Yes, that would be a naive assumption. We are still here, we Gen Xers, still a bit bitter at the raw hand dealt us. I mean, c'mon. Who wouldn't be? Strauss and Howe have a good data points to support this all through the book. A taste:

• The early 1980s marked a decisive turnaround in public attitudes toward public schools: the beginning of "quality education" as a political issue; the first year most parents approved of the performance of their local school districts; and the first of seven straight years in which teacher salaries increased faster than inflation—after seven straight years of real salary decline.
  
  
• The poverty rate for children under six peaked in 1983 (at 24.6 percent) and thereafter has gradually declined. The U.S. divorce rate peaked in 1981; the homicide rate against children age 1–4 peaked in 1982.
  
  
• Since 1983, an increasing share of children below the poverty line have been made eligible for Medicaid assistance. In 1990, despite pressure to reduce federal spending, Congress expanded Medicaid to cover all poor children under age 18 by the year 2001—starting with everyone born after September 30, 1983, upon reaching 6 years of age. (No 13er need apply.)

(Strauss & Howe, ibid, p. 342.)

I found this analogy compelling:

Imagine coming to a beach at the very end of a long summer of big crowds and wild goings-on. The beach bunch is sunburned, the sand shopworn, hot, and full of debris—no place for walking barefoot. You step on a bottle, and some cop cites you for littering. That's how 13ers feel, following the Boom. . . . [F]irst-wave 13ers have had to cope and survive in whatever territory the Boom has left behind, at each phase of life. Their early access to self-expression and independence stripped them of much of the pleasure of discovery and rebellion—leaving them, in Bret Easton Ellis' words, "looking up from the asphalt and being blinded by the sun." By the time Ellis' peers came of age, the symbolic meanings—of sex, drugs, student rights, whatever—had all faded. What they found, instead, were the harsh realities of social pathology. One by one, 13ers have slowed or reversed these trends—the SAT decline, the youth crime, the substance abuse, the early sex—but 13ers have felt the full brunt of them and have borne the ensuing adult criticism.

(Strauss & Howe, ibid, pp. 320-321, and how the hell could I not underline?!?.)

To summarize the underlining, we do the hard work, but get all the shit for thanks.

Boomers out there should know about this divide between us, between our generational cohorts. They should not get defensive when people point out that they got the goodies and left crumbs; they should just accept it simply because it is true. The Summer of Love was not magic, just spiteful indulgence. Woodstock was not the emblem of Boomer-ness; if it is remembered, perhaps we should emphasize that seven of the performers featured there died of drug overdoses, most very shortly thereafter.

I'm probably going out tonight to celebrate, but quietly with a good steak dinner instead of a party. To loudly celebrate and demand attention for very special myself? That seems too . . . Boomer.