Man. That hurts.

I wonder if 20 years from now it'll hurt that bad.

I hope not.

As a prime boomer, born in 1947, I have been saying for the past quarter century that a large part of my generation had a temper tantrum in the late sixties and they are still having it. I find it much easier to admit that I believed and said foolish things when I was fueled by testosterone and adrenaline than to continue saying them now. The point that some of my generation parlayed their counter cultural anti materialistic attitudes into big bucks is an interesting and valid point.

Sometimes, no, most of the time, it's not what you say but how (well) you say it. Take this:

He's been struck in an intellectual roach motel ("The ideas check in, but they don't check out!")

Brilliant.

Wish I knew who coined the phrase 'Aging Aquarians'. It's a 10 ring hit.

Has "Doonesbury" become our generation's "Nancy and Sluggo"?

I speak as a boomer too, though a little on the later side (1954).

See William Strauss and Neil Howe's fascinating book 'Generations' to trace the boomers' progress from orgiastic pleasure seeking in their youth to the current aggressively moralizing prudishness in late middle age.

The unifying theme has been a combination of narcissistic self-indulgence and self-righteousness at every stage along the way.

Unfortunately Strauss and Howe show how the lesson of previous generations in American history which experienced an 'awakening' in their youth is that as these people age they will learn essentially nothing, and are only going to become even more strident, more intolerant and in the end more a more reckless influence on policy both at home and abroad than they have been up to now.

As the whole tenor of the discussion above suggests, we have to get used to them because they aren't going to change until their megaphones are, to coin a phrase, 'prised from their cold, dead fingers'.

Nice to see another GENERATIONS fan.

But Strauss and Howe also say that a consensus begins to emerge at about this point in the cycle. I think what we're seeing with Trudeau et al is the ones whose ideas aren't making it into the consensus (which is, very roughly, "we have to do whatever it takes to make the world a safer place for following generations") and want to bust it up.

Thanks for the pointers to that Generations book.

Just put it in my shopping cart at Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0688119123/104-0422952-5176721

Vintage of '49, here. I've read several Strauss & Howe books, Prechter, Barzun, and some others. They all suggest that the next 20 years will be challenging indeed.

Some of us never got with the Boom program, and I've wondered for decades what drives the particular Boom cocktail of narcissism and naivete.

My best understanding to date is that most Boomers are still in adolescent rebellion against their fathers, now represented by the successful, the powerful, and the responsible. Many fathers (not mine) could never find an /authoritative/ middle ground between permissive and authoritarian, gyrating instead from pole to pole.

Authoritarian extreme, father feels guilty, tries to compensate with extreme permissiveness. Back and forth. Hey, Boomers, does that ring true?

Net result is a generation dedicated to the idea that love equals permissiveness -- which is a near-certain path to the social chaos we see all around us in the name of "justice for the oppressed." All enforced, of course, with the same authoritarianism they learnt from their fathers. Check out the local academic speech codes if you need an example.

Little wonder that such Boomer types gravitate to academia, government, and media where they don't have to succeed in order to have security, have never had to make a payroll, and have never had to live or die (literally or figuratively) as a consequence of their choices. And where they have the best opportunity to impose their views on others.

Boomers will hit their peak power in about '08, but we can already see their totalitarian inclinations as they sense their agenda slipping away from them.

They would be highly amusing if they weren't so damned dangerous and destructive.

I'm a later boomer '55, got all the crap from the older boomers. I'd say 1/3 of boomers are these moralistic, know it alls, like the Clintons or algore, but they get 90% of the press attention. I've been sick of this crap for 25 years, will it never end?

Generation X and the Milleniums don't buy all this anti-American crap from the encrusted, rusted and busted-butt boomers in the colleges. The kids are far more patriotic than the professors. They're far more connected to their grandparents than their self-indulgent, egotisical, selfish parents.

So, things are looking up.

I'm the same vintage as Jabba ('55) - too young for the "Summer of Love", too old to have just read about it.

I came of age in the mid '70s, the burnout of the '60s. Some people have called that time the real '60s, when a lot of what was talked about in the '60s was actually implemented.

IMHO, unlike other generations, the behavior, dress, and music of the boomers isn't going to age gracefully. It seems that so much of the zeitgeist of the '60s won't let these people grow up.

What are we going to do with all the elderly people with ratty gray ponytails spouting Carlos Castaneda and tettering to "Satisfaction"?

ps - JSAllison - if you start to see the same perfectly hemispherical rock in each frame, you'll know.

The "intellectual roach motel" is a cute idea, but it's actually backwards. Trudeau has actually been spewing out the same ideas, and _not_ letting any new ones in.

I'm not sure that lends itself to a clever analogy. A jammed xerox machine, stuck on "infinite repeat", that's been running for 25 years? Maybe if we stopped putting money in it...

I thought the more telling Dooensbury sequence was the series attacking Dean supporters as naive, idealistic airheads, followed shortly thereafter by a week of hilariously schoolgirlish swooning over Wesley Clark. When the only humor is unintentional, that's a very bad sign.

Having been born in 1971, I think of my cohort as "Children of the Information Age". We were the first who were able to own and use computers as children.

I suppose that's 'Generation X' land, but I find that label to be mostly empty. 1971 is also the actual start of the Information Age, it was the first year info. processing activities passed industrial as share of GDP.

Our coming of age was what, Pac Man? We still go to 80's nights in droves, dear god will I be listening to New Order when I'm 80?

Apparently Wesley Clark has just leapfrogged Howard Dean in the polls in California.

It's odd to see how the boomers are now at each stage flocking to support whichever candidate they and the rest of the public momentarily know the least about.

On the other hand maybe this is not odd at all. This desire to leap into the unknown, to 'escape' from reality, recalls very sharply the days when they would grab a hit of any drug on offer - the more exotic it sounded and the less they knew about its long term effects the more eagerly they grabbed for it.

Ahh you non-drug taking rightwingers have no sense of humour. I reckon Trudeau's neo-Vietnam spoof is right on the money. Sure, the Iraq situation is not "another Vietnam" but it sure as hell isn't going according to plan is it?