"Income Inequality: The Kids Are in Charge," part 4

In the previous posts I have spoken of “my generation,”  identifying this cohort as the kids who first went to school in 1950, give or take a year or two. To only a very small extent does this generation coincide with the Boomers (1946–1964). No one born in 1964 has enjoyed the opportunities — both for success and for failure — of those of us in the earlier demographic. Imagine a Bill Clinton, born not in 1946 but in 1964, raised by a single mother in a small town in Arkansas, proceeding to Georgetown University, Yale, a Rhodes scholarship, and finally to the presidency — no way. Bill Clinton went to school in 1952, not in 1966, and his success in life was a result of growing up in the 1950s.

We had been well trained in the virtues that President Carter asked the nation to draw upon in 1979: hard work, discipline, and patriotism in a common cause.  So, how did we react at the time of economic uncertainty? In the venerable and time-tested American method for achieving victory?

It might have been a renewed Sputnik moment for the U.S.  By 1979, after all, probably the most important positions that we occupied were not as lawyers or doctors or even the traditional wealth-producing sectors of the economy. By 1979 we were entrenched in fields that exercised enormous influence over public opinion: the universities, the media, including advertising, and entertainment. Expertise in these fields did not require exceptional competence in mathematics or science or even advanced business acumen. Their “product” was not the devices and goods produced in the economic sectors that made everyday American life increasingly convenient and pleasurable or that increased our longevity and our automobile performance, outcomes that “progressed” the economy. With our fine feeling for fashion and an ability to anticipate trends, my generation served as handmaidens to such industries, for instance, in advertising, entertainment, and public relations. A sign that we controlled the media was the amount of attention the media devoted to us: young urban professionals with a luxurious standard of living, the so-called Yuppies.

What we did not sell to the public in 1979 was confidence about America or about America’s future. Just the opposite.

President Carter had appealed in his speech to our common history, asserting that we were “heirs of great generations,” who had fought challenges greater than those we faced in 1979.

My generation was having none of that. If a decade earlier, the U.S. had put a man on the moon, the best and brightest were now bathing in a kind of after-the-fall-of-Rome skepticism. Carter’s ponderous presentation probably reminded us too much of our fathers, for instance, of Richard Nixon, who was definitely the face of fathers of the 1950s and whom we had dispatched with the Watergate hearings.

A sign of our contempt for our parents' values, for adult standards, could be seen in 1979 in the book review pages of publications like The New York Times. Skepticism, indeed even cynicism, pervaded the reviews. “Criticism” was a word in vogue, and it consisted of critiquing the writings of past authors, especially male ones, “deconstructing” them, which meant exposing the submerged ideology of power, racism, misogyny, repression, and so on that was hidden below the overt text of a novel. The unreadable philosophical skepticism underlying this criticism affirmed the superiority of the reviewer over the author and, indeed, over everyone else.

The Sixties generation had by 1979 transformed the rejection of our parents’ values into an ideology. The rejection had been professionalized and codified into a rejection of "patriarchy," of all fathers, including the Founding Fathers. Numerous books were churned out that, despite obscure language and nonsensical titles, supported what every adolescent feels to be the case about the world: that people with power can be unfair and mean. While adolescents invent things when presented with evidence of their failures, forty-five-year-olds with Ph.D.s were relativizing the evidence of reality itself. "Cost-benefit ratios"? Those were simply patriarchal constructs; ditto, traditional notions of hard work and success. At a moment of continuing economic crisis, when eighteen- to twenty-year-olds needed more than ever to equip themselves to succeed in an increasingly competitive work place, they were learning that everything that had made the U.S. successful was bogus.


To be continued.