My generation

For no doubt obscure psychological reasons, I read one of those the NYT sits down with the common clay of the west interviews . . . in this case, with fourteen baby boomers.

As I think I’ve noted before, the whole concept of the baby boom was always nothing more than an only marginally meaningful demographic observation, which is that the total fertility rate of American women rose above 3.0 for the nineteen birth cohort years between 1946 and 1964 (it’s now less than half of what it was in 1960 — 3.65 v. 1.63). Certainly for the youth and middle age of the people born during these years, the idea that they were all part of some sort of cultural or political group was largely if not completely false. For instance, the idea Donald Trump, who was 34 in 1980, had anything generationally in common with Kamala Harris, who turned 16 that year, was at that time pretty ridiculous.

One thing that struck me kind of funny while reading the Times’ interviews was that this idea does get somewhat less absurd with the passage of time, since obviously people in their mid-60s have much more in common with people in the late 70s (the technical demographic term for this broad category is “old as fuck”) than thirtysomethings have with high schoolers.

Anyway . . . one thing the interviews illustrated inadvertently was the salience of Robert Jay Lifton’s idea of “thought-terminating cliches.” One participant after another kept insisting that a big difference between the present and their childhoods was that the latter had been “a simpler time.” Not one of them, apparently, considered that it was simpler because they were children then, rather than having mortgages and homes and stiffness in their bones etc.

There was also quite a bit of the standard nonsense about how Kids These Days all want million dollar salaries and “three weeks of vacation a year,” as if the latter figure represented some sort of communist pseudo-utopia.

Thinking a bit further about generational realities and fictions, my friend Steve noted the following a few days ago, upon the occasion of their respective birthdays:

Bob Dylan just turned 85. Stevie Nicks just turned 78. You kind of think of them as belonging to completely different eras. Granted they’re both still going and have plenty of overlap, but you know, their peaks seem culturally a light year apart. For all the tedious Boomer nostalgia, the roughly 1963-1974 period can be said to be a time of faster zeitgeist change than just about any other. There’s no real quantifiable measure of that, but it sure seems true.

As a late boomer I concur wholeheartedly with this. Blood On the Tracks came out in 1975 when I was 15, and it was what I vaguely understood to be something of a comeback record by this really old guy who used to be big thing way back in “the Sixties,” which was an era I basically missed because I was watching Roadrunner cartoons. Fleetwood Mac (the album) came out the very same year, and was

(a) Awesome; and

(b) Very much Not the Sixties.

Today 51 years later (Jesus) I love both albums with a love mean and true, but Bob Dylan is still That Old Guy From the Sixties and Fleetwood Mac (the band) is from a completely different era (mine), psychologically and emotionally.

Let’s listen to this live version of Rhiannon from 1976, which in terms of Stevie Nicks’s performance in particular illustrates the mysterious quality the Andalusian gypsies call “duende,” an untranslatable term: