Le Sequoit

Ils ont changé ma chanson Ma

Look what they've done to my song, Ma
Look what they've done to my song
Well they tied it up in a plastic bag
And turned it upside down
Look what they've done to my song

Safka

The Milwaukee Journal's lead article today is The Millenials, an attempt to lump everyone into one generation or another and assign some types of global cultural attributes to these generations that magically appear and disappear according to upon which side of some as yet undefined set of timeline points one's birth lands.

A principal source for this article was Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation, by Neil Howe and William Strauss. These guys have taken this process to absurd lengths, coming up with this bit of glorious over-simplification:

Generation	Birthyears	Famous man	Famous woman
Puritan	1588-1617	John Winthrop	Anne Hutchinson
Cavalier	1618-1647	Nathaniel Bacon	Mary Dyer
Glorious	1648-1673	Cotton Mather	Hannah Dustin
Enlightenment	1674-1700	Peter Zenger	Mary Musgrove
Awakening	1701-1723	Benjamin Franklin	Eliza Pinckney
Liberty	1724-1741	George Washington	Mercy Warren
Republican	1742-1766	Thomas Jefferson	Abigail Adams
Compromise	1767-1791	Andrew Jackson	Dolley Madison
Transcendental	1792-1821	Abraham Lincoln	Susan B. Anthony
Gilded	1822-1842	Ulysses Grant	Louisa May Alcott
Progressive	1842-1859	Woodrow Wilson	Mary Cassatt
Missionary	1860-1882	Franklin Roosevelt	Emma Goldman
Lost	1883-1900	Dwight Eisenhower	Dorothy Parker
G.I.	1901-1924	John Kennedy	Clare Boothe Luce
Silent	1925-1942	Colin Powell	Gloria Steinem
Boomer	1943-1960	Steven Spielberg	Oprah Winfrey
Gen-X	1961-1981	Michael Jordan	Jodie Foster
Millennials	1982-2002?	Frankie Muniz	Mandy Moore

The bold-face denotes "heroic generations".

So just how have we "self-indulgent" boomers done at raising our children? The article portrays us as overbearing, hovering, controlling parents who tend to over-talk everything. Kissinger quotes a Thomas Mintz, author of Huck's Raft;

...It's as if the baby boomers set out to create a generation of "Mini-me's", children who will not only complete them but improve on their own record.

Whoa, what were we thinking!

By the end of the article the impression is that we have a generation in opposition to the "meism" of their parents spending much more time communicating with their parents; a generation bent on achievement encouraged by a generation of dropouts; a generation of "conformists" reared by a generation of "radicals"!

Well, I've said it before and I'll say it again:

Sunday June 05, 2005

To The Editor (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

I find Meg Kissinger’s article, “The Millenials”, to be the latest disturbing example of a trend of revisionist historians labeling the “boomer generation” as “nihilistic”, “excessive”, “meist”, etc.

There are, of course, no generational boundaries, and the enthusiasm to lump classes of folk into some presentation friendly format necessitates such oversights as referring to the Sixties supposed “tune in, turn on, drop out” culture as influencing the pool of 1975’s eighteen year olds.

Nobody took Tim Leary very seriously in 1970, let alone by 1975, nor was our world accurately portrayed by Laugh In; Bob and Carol, Ted and Alice or all the other faux-hippie nonsense.

As to we being the “me first” generation and they out to “make a better world”, it is they who stand idly by while the less fortunate of their peers are enticed into service and dispatched to be picked off one by one in a foreign war of domestic political design.

(me)

posted by sequoit @ 4:54 PM