The Sins of the Boomer

Aren't we at the seventh generation yet?

How did anyone have sex in the ‘60s. Maybe it was the acid?

“We thought we’d changed the world for the better.”

Thus goes a common lament among friends and family from the Baby Boomer generation, those who protested against the traditions of what went before them, those who stood against useless war and the -isms of their time (and ours), those whose orange-and-mustard flower prints haunt us still. And now they’re staring pop-eyed at our national lurch into authoritarianism and a populace-wide congenital stupidity as they, themselves, slide, ungracefully, ungraciously, towards the grave.

The young people high on acid slipping flowers into the barrels of rifles and cooing about free love (today’s polyamorists their inbred descendants) believed in their own fantasy of the human heart, that we will overcome once and for all whatever darkness lies within through determination and commitment to nonviolence, a peacenik’s dream not unlike the Christian figment of lion and lamb lying together in soft, watercolored hues.

Of course, the Boomers haven’t cornered the market on delusion, but given that many of them won’t yield power or place, whether that be Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer or NYC mayoral-hopeful Andrew Cuomo or a president, ours now along with the former addled head of the “free world;” given that today one of them will stand upon a platform to survey the historical might of the American military and reassert the nation’s erectile stability; given that we find ourselves in this morass partly at the hands of a leadership that hails from the Baby Boomer generation, one has to wonder, “What the hell happened to these people?”

Two possibilities:

1. They sold out during the 1980s to money and power and yuppie idealism. My own father who got his degree in philosophy, protested Vietnam, and began teaching history, soon ended up working for once-upon-a-time-Nazi-oven-makers Siemens and doing lines of blow in the dining room which still had a hole in the floor for a button to step on when the hostesses of decades-past wanted to call the help (no one should have to sit in front of a dirty plate).

2. Read Joan Didion’s essay Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Boomers talk about their youthful years of non-hierarchical freedom with the halcyon tones of the speaker in Longfellow’s poem Mezzo Cammin, who looks back at the town below the heights where he stands, a town buffed of all its scratches and stains into an idealistic vision of the past, but Didion’s observation (and disarmingly simple prose) blows away the hash smoke to reveal runaways, rapists, and brains wrung-clean of moral clarity. And these are the people still running Congress.

   

   The mighty Joan Didion.

A psychiatrist in San Francisco tells Joan in 1967, “[This is] a social movement, quintessentially romantic, the kind that recurs in times of real social crisis. The themes are always the same. A return to innocence. The invocation of an earlier authority and control. The mysteries of the blood. An itch for the transcendental, for purification. Right there you’ve got the ways that romanticism historically ends up in trouble, lends itself to authoritarianism.”

Or in short: You’re so far left you’re right.

The progressives protesting vaccines. The MAGA moms embracing organic food. Gleeful liberals leaping on the tired, but seemingly indestructible, wain of antisemitism. The conservatives positioned as champions of American Jewry. The lefties’ cannibalistic savagery towards their own whenever someone doesn’t espouse all the zealotry of their populist leaders. The righties’ happy (and disingenuous, not to mention eventually perfidious) embrace of lost Black sheep, Latino sheep, Gay sheep into the fold.

And so we find ourselves on a rainy Saturday awaiting a military parade to honor the birthday of our tin-pot tyrant, given his seat by a not-so-shocking heft of voters ensnared in their own romanticism, the flavor of which has notes similar to the flower power draught of the ‘60s.

Oh, oops. Was this not an image from D.C., June 14, 2025?

If you’re new around here you’d be forgiven for wondering what all this has to do with the Divine Feminine, a figure often portrayed in a diaphanous robe and a crown of flowers.

Sound familiar? Sounds kind of a like a hippy girl, doesn’t it? Some gal who believed in burning her bra and having sex wherever she wanted it and founding a commune with a macrobiotic kitchen, but the same gal never thought for a minute that the Divine Feminine is also the forest fire that burns animals to death and the disease that wipes out millions and the person whose views are abhorrent to her own.

An entire generation did the same, and now, they confront change and the passage of decades and the mutation of moral fads, and to paraphrase our dear Shakespeare:

“And thus the whirligig of time brings in [Her] revenges.”