Will the 60s generation ever shut up?
One of my pet theories is that for every year you’re in graduate school, you age just 1/2 year emotionally. I was in harness for about 10 years. While my birth year would put me at the very end of the baby boom, this significant emotional retardation makes my “true” generational cohort something more like Generation X, and I have my fair share of friends who are Generation Y. The so-called Millennials are a bit outside my ken, but I digress.
As I read articles like this one about Hillary Clinton in 1968, I wonder: Will the 60s people ever shut up and stop consuming all of the oxygen in the room? This alone is a good reason to be for Obama: To get past the constriction of all of those people who came of age between 1960 and 1973 (Fredric Jameson once remarked that the 1960s really ended in 1972 or 1973).
I don’t think we should underestimate what it means that Obama was 18 in 1979. Among other things, it means that the dominant political battle on campus was divestment from South Africa. It is a little-heralded fact that in the 1960s, many university and college administrations were actually on the side of the students, despite what you’ve read about famous episodes at Columbia and Berkeley. But divestment was different: Students and administrations were diametrically opposed, and that generation has always had a problematic relationship with corporate power (for that is what a university board with investment assets is: a corporation). I would wager that if you looked at alumni from that generation and their monetary support to their alma maters, you’d find that the level of “giving” is a lot lower than the 60s people and the mid/late 80s people; this is certainly true for my college. In any case, Obama spent some 3 years doing grass-roots community organizing, whereas Hillary Clinton merely wrote her senior thesis on Saul Alinsky (writing is just not the same as doing), and did some summer work providing legal work for the poor — I can’t see that there is much question as to which one had a longer and probably richer experience in counter-corporate activism.
Another difference between the 60s folk and the 80s folk is that in national politics, if you were 18 in 1979, the originary political factor was your attitude about Reagan. The 60s people saw Reagan through the lens of the 60s; for the 80s people, Reagan was wallpaper. In a sense, I suspect, that provides Obama with a certain amount of realism about what can be accomplished in North America in our era.
Those 60s people. There are at least two types of 60s people. People born between 1945 and 1955 who caught their defining moment in the late 60s or early 70s, and those who found their moment in the 70s and early 80s. You see, they “own” a lot more than their coming-of-age decade; they slop over into the later period. So a lot of cultural figures from the late 70s — the era of punk — weren’t born around 1960. On the contrary, they are in reality 60s people; they just missed out on the heyday, or were too stoned. Examples: Tom Verlaine, guitarist of Television (b. 1949), Debby Harry, vocalist of Blondie (b. 1945), Rick James, 70s funkster (b. 1948), and that’s just in pop music. I could go on and on . . .
Among the Democratic candidates for President in 2008: Dennis Kucinich, b. 1946. Joe Biden, b. 1942. Bill Richardson, b. 1947. Christopher Dodd, b. 1944. Edwards is the baby, b. 1953, so he was 18 in 1971. Maybe since he’s southern we can imagine that he’s a bit misplaced generationally, and less of a 60s person than the others. But I doubt it. Among the Republicans, McCain is a genuine outlier: He was born in 1936. Thompson, Giuliani, and Romney are sixties people. Interestingly, Brownback and Huckabee are younger (b. 1956 and 1955 respectively), but I would imagine that their political careers are defined by the 1960s through negation.
I’m tired of them. They need to hand over the microphone.
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I was born in 1964, the actual last year of the Baby Boom (and also spent a decade starting int he mid-1980s) in graduate school–actually 11 years–counting 1 post-graduate MA year in England and 2 post-PhD years with makeshift positions at Stanford waiting for the tenure track breakthrough. I heartily concur with your theory. In fact, some years it even seemed like one was actually regressing. In our Graudate RA training, we spent a lot of time talking about the infantilizing that happened to PhD candidates as opposed to the JD/MD/MBA jobtrack.
As to esquivalience, my fake definition: the bravery to admit to liking Esquivel’s Other Worlds Other Sounds.