What Did the Baby Boomers Ever Do For Us? by Francis Beckett

Author:Francis Beckett [Francis Beckett]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781849542708
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2011-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

His explanation is mass insanity – he calls it the 1968 disease:

In that year, several strands of folly came together in the happy, free, wealthy West. We had our little festival of manufactured wrath in London. French students had a far greater one in Paris. Though most of us had little idea of what we wanted, we succeeded almost completely in overthrowing the society we had grown up in, with the miserable results we now see.

Was there something in the air of that year that made us all susceptible, like the mysterious shiver that goes through the landscape in early spring? Or was it the result of the great baby bulge that had come after the Second World War ended in 1945? Were there just too many adolescents, hormones churning, concentrated on the European landmass all at once? …

This organised selfishness was the main reason behind the May 1968 riots in Paris. Selfishness needs to attack things that demand self-sacrifice – family, marriage, duty, patriotism and faith. And above all, it needs weakness and confusion among those in charge, if it is to succeed as it did then, and still does.

Leafing through the newspapers of four decades ago, I was reminded sharply of how authority seemed to have lost its nerve, and people to have lost any sense of belonging. Perhaps it was the accumulated shame and defeat of Suez, seeping into every institution. Perhaps it was the Profumo affair, after which our politicians and judges all seemed funny and deflated …

I remember beginning to notice, around about the time I was twelve, in 1963 and 1964, that authority had begun to lose the will to live. It was easier to get away with things – bad manners, sloppy schoolwork, lateness, laziness, breaking and above all bending the rules. I learned quickly to exploit every weakness.

That great destroyer, Lenin, advised his fellow apostles of chaos: ‘Probe with the bayonet: if you meet steel, stop. If you meet mush, then push.’ And more and more, it was mush we met. The year before my first riot, in 1967, I remember still being at school when Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were arrested in the famous West Wittering drug bust … The very idea of Jagger, Richards and Marianne Faithfull, clad only in a rug, roosting subversively in this cosy place was revolutionary in itself. Was nothing sacred? Jagger was not just a rock star, but a herald of cultural revolt.

He had recently declared, moronically: ‘Teenagers are not screaming over pop music any more, they’re screaming for much deeper reasons. We are only serving as a means of giving them an outlet. Teenagers the world over are weary of being pushed around … they want to be free and have the right of expression, of thinking and living without any petty restrictions.’ Richards, even more of a Blairite before his time, had said: ‘We are not old men. We are not concerned with petty morals.’ Now both were in the dock, and

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