The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon . . . and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.
—Henry David Thoreau
REAL LIFE
Adulthood, however, pursues the most evasive grown-up. I got a job. I consulted the want ads. There wasn’t anything under “incomprehensible poets” and no one was looking to hire bourgeois pig ranters. I got a job as a messenger. This was before the era of bicycle messengers, with their distinctive glamour. I took the bus. Occasionally I received a smile from a pretty receptionist until she realized what my occupation was.
I made $75 a week. Payday came every two weeks. I’d moved out of the Puddles office a couple of months before. I was looking forward to the $150 and so was my landlord. When I got my paycheck I found that I netted $82.27 after federal income tax, state income tax, city income tax, Social Security, union dues, and pension fund contribution.
I was a communist. I had protested for communism. I had demonstrated for communism. I had rioted for communism. Then I got a capitalist job and found out we had communism already.
I had long ago smashed up my motorcycle. While I was sprawled in the street, two cops in a patrol car stopped, called an ambulance, and hunched over me, trying to see how unconscious I’d been knocked. One cop asked, “Do you know your name? What year is it? Who’s the president of the United States?”
I said, “Johnson, Nixon, one of those sons of bitches.”
“Oh, he’s okay,” said the other cop.
Steverino Leary turned out to be a cop. Three protesters went on trial for smashing the windows in city hall and beaning a traffic policeman during a demonstration in favor of peace in Vietnam. Skinny Bob was covering—he was fond of using newspaper reporter words—the trial for Puddles. As evidence, the prosecutor presented the jury with several glossy photographs of the three protesters smashing the windows in city hall and beaning a traffic policeman.
Steverino had taken the photographs. Skinny Bob knew this because he and Hairy Bob and I had looked at the photographs Steverino took at the demonstration and had decided that several of them, involving smashing windows and beaning a traffic policeman, did not show peace protesters in their best light. We tore up the photos and flushed them down the toilet at the Puddles office, a prolonged process. The toilet always clogged.
Only one person could have developed a second set of those photographs. Meanwhile, this one person and Hairy Bob were on a road trip to a pop festival in Atlanta that was almost as successful (Richie Havens played) as Woodstock. Midway to Atlanta Steverino confessed to his best friend that he was a plainclothes Baltimore police officer, working undercover at the Puddles office.
Maybe my reaction would have been, “You call those ruffles plainclothes?”
Or maybe, “In that case, when you finally fished the automatic out of the cuff of your bell-bottoms, why didn’t you shoot some goddamn Balto-Cong?”
Or maybe not. I was still young.
Hairy Bob’s reaction was bitter disillusionment. He made Steverino stop the car. Hairy Bob got out and hitchhiked home.
Skinny Bob got back to the Puddles office about an hour after Hairy Bob did. Skinny Bob was in tumult about his scoop. Hairy Bob was in tears about his friend.
Hairy Bob blubbered, “Steverino is a cop!”
“Steverino is a cop!” Skinny Bob exclaimed.
It turned out okay. We’re a generation that doesn’t appreciate consequences. And we appreciated consequences even less after the Vietnam War, which had 47,415 of them in combat, not counting 153,303 wounded. At the end of the 1970s there was a catchphrase, “Don’t sweat the small stuff . . . And it’s all small stuff,” always spoken more in hope than expectation. (Richard Carlson, the Baby Boomer psychotherapist who turned the catchphrase into a best seller in 1997, died while on book tour, the consequence of a pulmonary embolism.)
Steverino really did consider Hairy Bob to be his best friend. When it came time for him to testify at the protesters’ trial he claimed he couldn’t identify them because “my view was blocked by the camera.” The protesters got off. The beaned traffic policeman recovered.
A year later Hairy Bob ran into Steverino at the Ebony Lounge. Hairy Bob refused Steverino’s offer to buy him a beer. Twice. I wasn’t there so I don’t know exactly how the conversation went. Steverino bought Hairy Bob a beer on the third try.
Hairy Bob said that Steverino wasn’t a bitterly disillusioned Vietnam vet. He joined the police force to avoid being drafted. They assigned him to go undercover because he owned bell-bottom pants. He was supposed to infiltrate Puddles and spy on dangerous radicals, but we weren’t ones, and he liked us, and we became his friends, and it was a great way to meet cute hippie girls. His wife did like to iron. And he had refused to testify against the peace protesters.
“Steverino is back in uniform,” Hairy Bob said, “riding in a patrol car.”
Which, now that year-round mugging by heroin addicts was replacing summer riots, the city could use some more of, as far as I was concerned.
“What about spying on the goddamned Balto-Cong?” I asked.
“Steverino said the only dangerous radical thing they ever did was take over the Puddles office.”
The political, cultural, and social phenomena of the sixties became a thin film spreading to everywhere in the 1970s, a shiny, multicolored iridescence that was beautiful to behold in a certain light. Like the slick from the Torrey Canyon oil spill. Call us a superficial and slippery generation if you will, but Pliny the Elder, Plutarch, the Venerable Bede, and Benjamin Franklin all make positive mention of “pouring oil on troubled waters.” Nonetheless some cleaning up was required.
Hairy Bob, heedless of my grandmother, became a Democrat. Others of us became otherwise. Some got the memo late. Real Name Larry’s motherfucking crazy motherfucker Weathermen went on bombing things—U.S. Capitol men’s room, Pentagon women’s room, various other rooms in government offices, police precincts, and corporate headquarters. Not many innocent lives were lost. Intentionally, it is claimed. Inexpertly, it is suspected.
I happened to be in, or at, one of the worst of the 1970s bombings, on December 29, 1975, at LaGuardia Airport. I don’t think the Weathermen did it. I don’t think anyone has ever figured out who did it, but it was somebody who thought he was such a big ideological left-winger, I’ll bet. Karen had returned to Ohio. I was flying to Cleveland to see her. For once she wasn’t right there when things were going to hell, if you don’t count what happened to Cleveland in the 1970s.
A bomb equivalent in size to twenty-five sticks of Uncle Mike’s hayfield dynamite went off on the arrivals level. Pieces of bodies were strewn across LaGuardia’s lower roadway. It is the opinion of the Baby Boom that no other generation has ever felt the horror of strewn pieces of bodies as acutely as the Baby Boom. I got letters from Joe Brody, when he was still in Vietnam, about leading his platoon into Vietnamese villages that had been bombed. He expressed the same opinion about the callous nature (“asshole shithead fuckwads” was the way he put it) of his senior officers.
I was upstairs on the departures level when the bomb went off. I was in the concourse bar and had just ordered a drink from the bartender, a guy about my age wearing a gunfighter mustache. There was an immense shock and crash. We didn’t know if was a bomb or if an airplane had crashed into the terminal, but some terrible event had taken place. We Baby Boomers are sensitive to these things. “Make that a double?” said the bartender.
If Steverino Leary got valuable information about the Weathermen out of Real Name Larry it didn’t do much to aid the authorities. You can’t make a joke out of terrorism, especially now that globalization has produced a larger, cheaper, more efficient international terrorizing supply chain. But I’m glad we’ve outsourced most of it. Wherever the motherfucking crazy motherfucker militant Islamic fundamentalists are, at least I’m not hiding them in the Puddles attic.
Weathermen leaders Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers never were captured. They had to turn themselves in, in 1980. Now they’re passing acquaintances of the president of the United States. Some say this is dim of the president. Some say this is hypocritical of Bernardine and Bill. But, in the far reaches of our hearts, we, with our deep Baby Boom dislike of the consequential, say, “Is this a great country or what?”
Skinny Bob, who did become a newspaper reporter, used the Freedom of Information Act to get a copy of the Baltimore Police Department file on Puddles.
When the police had raided the Puddles office seeking—and finding—small amounts of marijuana, the charges were soon dropped. According to the file, “Officer [redacted] recommends that drug possession arrests be nol pros to avoid jeopardization of undercover status of Officer [redacted] at premises at which drug possession search warrant had been issued upon.” Personal information in the files included such items as “Puddles staff member [redacted] states his opposition to prejudice, poverty, war, and injustice. In the opinion of undercover Police Officer [redacted], staff member [redacted]’s motivation is to annoy his parents.”
The Baby Boom starts to produce rather than consume American culture when we get to be in our late twenties—about the same age I was when I saw a sidelong reflection in the window of a storefront bay and, not realizing I was looking at myself, thought, “That guy is getting a little old for the embroidered work shirt, frayed jeans, and barbers-on-strike look.”
Speaking of twenties, let me apologize for what I said, fourteen chapters ago, about the twenties being a failed experiment at having a sixties. The sixties was a failed experiment at having a sixties. Think how things would be if they’d turned out the way, for a moment, they looked like they might—a February Sunday spent in Dirty Eddie’s unheated geodesic dome eating macrobiotic brown rice and drinking Mu tea while watching Hacky Sack Super Bowl VIII.
The Baby Boom’s influence, as opposed to existence, begins to matter in 1974. Younger Baby Boomers are mostly in high school and junior high. The very youngest are ten and thus approaching the mental age for which our generation is famous. Older Baby Boomers have finally cleared the bongs and empty Mallomar boxes out of the finished basement at my house. Bill Clinton is running for Congress, so there’s ample sexual tension, a key component of Baby Boom life. Stephen King (born 1947) publishes Carrie. Steven Spielberg (born 1946) makes his big-screen debut, The Sugarland Express, with its eerie prefiguring of the highway pursuit of O. J. Simpson (born 1947). And Spielberg is working on something that will demolish the intellectual pretensions of an entire art form—Jaws, the movie that destroyed cinema.
Demolishing pretensions is a hallmark of the Baby Boom. Note the lack of artistic pretensions, or art, in the 1974 recording of “Hey Joe” by Patti Smith (born 1946). This is supposedly the first example of punk rock. Uncoincidentally, the same year, “Rock the Boat” is the first example of disco to hit number 1 on the pop charts. National Lampoon’s circulation peaks. And what will become Saturday Night Live is being planned at 30 Rock. The irony pandemic has begun.
Some aspects of a Baby Boom world are not yet evident. Bill Gates is still cutting classes at Harvard. Steve Jobs is knocking around India looking for transcendental iPhone apps. But Pong machines are showing up in bars. The long night of electronic “Roamin’ in the Gloamin’” is beginning to fall.
And the Baby Boom’s politics are beginning to take form, of which there is none aside from Middle-class Resentment. Once being big ideological left-wingers blew up in our faces we were hopelessly split. One could consult the polling data on this subject. But a generation that is expert at lying to ourselves isn’t going to have trouble pulling George Gallup’s leg. The first thing that happened after the Twenty-sixth Amendment lowered the voting age to eighteen was a landslide victory by Richard Nixon.
Baby Boomers who are younger or female tend to vote for the Silly Party. Baby Boomers who are older or male tend to vote for the Stupid Party. Then there are the Independents, proud of the fact that they don’t know which is which. The Baby Boomer presidents that we’ve had so far—Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama—are spread as far across the political map as you can get without going to Pyongyang.
Sometime around 1974 I actually did read a little Karl Marx. Karl was a bit of a Baby Boomer before the fact—middle-class attorney’s son, sometimes sudent radical, unpublished novelist and poet, “underground” journalist, sponger on a crackpot rich buddy, and talking through his hat. Karl Marx was a very smart man. Das Kapital is a very bad hat.
Given all the liberties the Baby Boom has taken, we ought to be libertarian. We should be adhering to the “Clinton Rules.” That is to say, the rules the Clintons exemplified: Mind your own business, and keep your hands to yourself. Hillary, mind your own business. Bill, keep your hands to yourself.
But the libertarian creed of individual dignity, individual liberty, and individual responsibility comes with that responsibility kicker. And there’s the Atlas Shrugged doorstop, which got some Baby Boomers all excited and the rest of us wondering who hid the Strunk and White. Plus a wholehearted embrace of Ayn Rand’s philosophy of dimly lit enlightened self-interest can end up making somebody sound like a selfish, loony old bitch such as Ayn Rand. Better if we all just claim we’re “a social liberal and a fiscal conservative.” And never mind what the farm boy said when he saw the circus giraffe. There ain’t no such creature.
What we actually are is antinomian. It’s a theological doctrine. The Baby Boom is not a generation much given to studying theology. But we seem to have figured out this one. Antinomianism is the belief that faith (the Baby Boom has a lot of faith—in itself) and grace (the Baby Boom has been graced with a lot of good things) allow men (and, let us hasten to add, women) to be (according to Webster’s Third International) “freed not only from the Old Testament law of Moses and all forms of legalism but also from all law including the generally accepted standards of morality prevailing in any given culture.” That’s us in a nutshell.
For a term used by theologians, antinomian is unusually clear-cut: Latin anti- “against” Greek nomos “the law.” Antinomianism was carried to an extreme by the third-century gnostic Christian sect known as Ophites. (Gnostic is another good Baby Boom word, from the Greek “know-it-all.”) The Ophites revered Cain, the Sodomites, and the Genesis serpent and thought that the good guy in Exodus was the pharaoh. That’s us when we’re carrying things to extremes. We’re a generation that is often accused of carrying things to extremes. In fact we’re a generation that carries things as far as we want to, until we get tired of carrying them, then we drop them on the rest of you. But we’ve never dropped our antinomianism. “No Rules” is the motto of a popular Baby Boom steak house chain.
It may seem to be a contradiction that a generation opposed to personal restrictions of any kind has, since coming into political power, created a welter of legal and regulatory intrusions on private life. My kids have to wear hockey helmets to play puff billiards. But we’re a contradictory generation.
And it’s fun to make rules—for other people. Our spouses would kill us if they caught us with a Big Gulp, we gave up smoking, and we’re fifty-plus, so what do we care about 64-ounce Mountain Dews, lighting up within 10,000 feet of a building entrance, and not being able to buy a beer even though you’re old enough to vote, get married, fight in Afghanistan, and be executed by lethal injection? And too bad about people who have to take their shoes off at airports because they aren’t flying private.
Besides, it’s the job of politicians to pass laws. And the Baby Boom is very good at politics. We’ve vaulted the threshold. We’ve mastered the skill set. We have the enormous power of bullshit, using bullshit in the political science sense, as a technical term meaning “political science.”
Other generations say Baby Boom politics are polarized. Don’t they know their history? What’s happened to the American educational system? (I mean, other than that we took it over?) Now, 1861—that was polarized. MoveOn.Org? Tea Party? We have game on. We’ve got tremendous depth of bench. The point spread is zero. We came to play. We’re great at politics. Other generations are just jealous. We’re so good they can’t forgive us.
“I can’t forgive myself,” said Joe Brody. It was sometime in the late 1970s. I was at his house out in the woods in New Hampshire. It was late at night. Joe’s kids and wife were in bed. We’d had too much to drink. Joe said, “I can’t forgive myself for what I did in Vietnam.” And he began to cry.
And I thought, “Oh, Christ.”
It was only a few years since Lieutenant Calley, given life in prison for the My Lai massacre, had had his sentence commuted by Richard Nixon. I didn’t want to come off as less sensitive and understanding than Richard Nixon, but . . .
We needed more to drink. “Joe,” I said, “we’ve known each other for twenty years. Whatever happened, I understand.”
Joe said, “It was my second tour. I had this platoon, all draftees. I mean by then any idiot could figure out a way to dodge the draft.”
“I understand.”
“Every day when we’d go out on patrol we’d just go out. I’m so ashamed of what happened.”
“What happened?”
“We’d just go out.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I hid them. We’d go out on patrol, and as soon as we were far enough away I’d stick everybody behind a dike in some rice paddy, and we’d sit there smoking cigarettes and listening to Sly and the Family Stone on the ghetto blaster, and when we came back I’d lie about all the hooches we’d searched and bad guys we’d had firefights with. I’m a marine, damn it. I don’t know if I can ever forgive myself.”
If I’d been thinking quick, I would have said, “If Henry Kissinger can forgive himself for getting the Nobel Peace Prize, your ass is golden.”