Baby Boom by P. J. O'Rourke

Author:P. J. O'Rourke
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic Inc.
Published: 2013-10-28T04:00:00+00:00

We’d already lost our sense of humor about our parents. If we’d had one. Anything a parent said or did we took personally. (I don’t think our children have made this mistake. The lesson in the Baby Boom’s lifelong fascination with personhood, personality, and persons is that people shouldn’t be taken personally.)

Our parents were generally pathetic. When they were specifically pathetic the pain was intense. Dr. Klein told Ana, Tim Minsky, and me, “I like that Beatles group. Some of the songs those young men sing show that they have genuine musical talent.”

“I think they’re cute!” said Mrs. Klein.

There was nothing of the remote about our parents. Meaning remote as a noun. They couldn’t push our buttons from a distance. They had to come right up and try to switch to the channel we were on. They should have stuck with remote as an adjective.

We would have detested the twenty-first century’s remote-control connectivity—cell phones, texting, twitter. Parents everywhere, like God? (A god that couldn’t tell George from Ringo.) The horror is unimaginable to the mid-1960s teenage mind. Parents with a Facebook page. Like a newspaper page but never thrown away. Parents “posting” things, as in a poster, as in a billboard, as in a billboard on a busy street where we were cruising. With things about us on it. With things about our parents. And last summer’s snapshots. When I still had a crew cut and my sisters were teasing their hair.

Then we, the Baby Boom, invented electronic personal communication devices. We, of all people. TV that watches you. It’s as if we read Nineteen Eighty-Four, and said, “Good idea!”

We didn’t need connectivity. We were where all the other kids were, cruising West End Avenue, at the drive-in burger restaurant, watching submarine races by the pond in Pondside Park.

The Internet is a universally shared thought process. We had one already. On the first day of senior year Leo Luhan—with that deliberate flaunting of convention for which the Baby Boom is known—would come to school wearing penny loafers, white Levi’s, a madras long-sleeved shirt. And black socks. The rest of us had come to school the same day wearing penny loafers, white Levi’s, madras long-sleeved shirts. And black socks.

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