Boom To Bust - A Revolution

The character Harvey Dent in the Dark Knight noted, "You either die a hero, or live long enough to become the villain."

That line succinctly sums up American culture right now.  The 60s liberals have lived long enough to become the villains.

Like everything else in the Boomers' lives, they thought they were going to change the world forever.  Like everything in life, nothing lasts forever.

All the rock and folk stars are retired or dead.  The music has lost all meaning to anyone but the geezers who were alive then.  Woodstock is all but forgotten.  The Summer of Love is a myth.  And all the peaceniks then are war hawks now.

Hell, the only major political figure still alive from back then is the evil bastard Henry Kissinger, who is the villain that lived long enough to see himself become the hero.

The world has come full circle and the Boomers of the 60s are now the establishment, and the new generation of counter-culture are the conservatives that the Boomers fought so hard to get rid of.  Even Johnny Rotten (of Sex Pistols fame) recently came out in favor of Brexit and Trump.  A lot of folks got double-take whiplash when they saw that story.

Everything old is new again.  Funny how things work out that way.

The Weather Underground long ago surfaced and Bill Ayers is ghost-writing autobiographies these days.  Fidel Castro is dead and no one remembers Mao's Little Red Book, even in China.  Free love gave way to long-lasting STDs after spawning the Disco Era - which mercifully died a long time ago.

About the only lasting change the Boomers have achieved is the on-going decriminalization of marijuana, which has yet to spread outside a few States and the Netherlands.  It only took 50 years to get that far.

Yes, Boomer life has been reduced to old folks' homes and shuffleboard contests on cruise ships - basically the life they rejected en masse all those years ago.

The Beatles have become elevator music - a quaint throw-back to an earlier age - much like Frank Sinatra and Big Band had become in the 70s.

Woodstock was overrun with Band-Aid, Farm-Aid, Live-Aid, Lollapalooza and all the other mass events that tried to recreate a fluke of time and place.

Bob Dylan retired to his ranch, so rich he can't write decent songs any more.  It required a certain amount of personal suffering to achieve the status he once had, and he hasn't suffered in a long time.

I rememver when Boomers thought they were important and had something to offer society.  The problem is, they tried to ram it down everyone's throat, and folks don't like that.  They also hadn't planned on the same thing happening to them.  It never occurred to them that anyone would revolt against the revolution.  In rejecting everything that came before them, they also threw out the history books that tell the tale of many similar events happening throughout history.

If we can learn anything from the Boomers, it's not enough to be young, dumb and full of cum - and have demographics on your side.  They committed the First Rule of History - what comes around goes around.  It's all circles.

Many US presidents have tried to lay claim to John F. Kennedy's legacy, but hoodathunk Donald J. Trump would actually claim it.  Like it or not, he is presiding over the counter-counter-revolution.  All the angst and violence spawned by his election are the last gasp of a dying phenomenon called the Baby Boom.  Like the 60s, the Teens will likely create on industry that will last a decade or more, even if Trump (like Kennedy) doesn't make it through his first term.

The irony seems lost on the American culture.  The same hatred and revulsion the War Generation felt towards the Boomers' radicalization is what the Boomers feel now towards the changing times.

Oh, that's right...The Times they Are A'Changin' was a Bob Dylan anthem for the Boomers, who must now listen to it again and realize that they are on the other side.  Remember?

Come gather around people

Wherever you roam

And admit that the waters

Around you have grown

And accept it that soon

You'll be drenched to the bone

And if your breath to you is worth saving

Then you better start swimming or you'll sink like a stone

For the times they are a-changing

It's tough to realize that you've deluded yourself your whole life.  The Boomers actually thought they were changing things, except they forgot to keep fighting.  Instead, they joined the rat race and tried to make a little money.    They thought they could sit back on their laurels and everyone would recall the Boomers with fondness and leave their legacy intact like a socio-political shrine.  Guess what?

Reality.

California Dreamin' has become California Screamin', and the voices are weak and shrill now.  The train jumped the track about 30 years ago with the first Iraq invasion - supported and backed by the same folks who brought us the "anti-war" movement - a movement that only lasted until the Boomers were heading up the Military-Industrial Complex that they so reviled all thos years ago.

Now the Boomers aren't protesting war, they are prosecuting it.  They aren't trying to bring down the Establishment, they ARE the Establishment.  They are no longer the revolutionaries, they are the entrenched interests trying to protect their nest eggs.

The irony of history is a delicious dish.  It is fun to watch those who fought the Cycles of Time be finally crushed by them. If there is a lesson here for all generations, it is that all change will change again.  Only things that are dead cease to change.  No matter how radical you think you are, you will eventually be the Establishment.

Que sera.

The Boomers Fizzle

In pondering the world as it is and the direction of things, it occurred to me that Trump's election represents the ultimate failure of the Baby Boomers, since it is unlikely that the political pendulum will swing back as far to the Liberal agenda before that generation fades away.

For those unfamiliar with who and what the Baby Boomers are, they are a large demographic bubble from roughly 1946 to 1964, where there was a marked increase in birth rates following World War 2.  While the Baby Boom occurred worldwide, the term Baby Boomer refers specifically to the generation in the US.  Not only was the generation marked by numbers, but due to post-war economic boom in the US, these people grew up with an unprecedented level of wealth and affluence, and as a group, rejected much of the cultural heritage they had received.

The Baby Boomers were responsible for the explosion of the music industry, relaxation of sexual mores and a general sense of wanting to force the world to accept their sensibilities.  They eventually developed a pervasive sense of entitlement that has informed most of American cultural development in the past 50 years.

To put it clearly and succinctly, the Boomers are a bunch of spoiled brats that never had a consistent rudder in the ocean of Time.  To top things off, their grandchildren are the current Millennials who have recently shown themselves to be devoid of the ability to accept reality with any grace and dignity.

The Boomers were largely responsible for New York and California becoming the cultural centers of the US, if culture it can be called.  The decades' long dominance of liberalism in the media  and arts have largely been centered around those two states, and in the recent national election, they represent almost the last remaining strong-holds of the Boomer Agenda.

As the generation withers and dies, it is watching its life-long efforts fade with it.  Beginning with Trump and filtering down to dog catchers, the Conservative Wave nearly drowned the country and left the vast majority of state and national political bodies in the hands of the so-called Conservative party - the Republicans.  It is rather sad to see such a huge demographic group live long enough to see their legacy completely rejected and the beginning of the dismantling of the Boomer Agenda with the likely appointment of conservative justices to the Supreme Court, which will last well into the next decade if not longer.

The Boomer Agenda started will enough.  The basic idea was to just leave people alone and let them pursue happiness in whatever form they choose, so long as that pursuit did not damage others - in other words fairly libertarian.  Over the decades, though, it became more and more militant, with Liberal ideals literally being shoved down people's throats, with things such as gay marriage and gender-neutral bathrooms.  Rather than leaving such things up to the States, where those decisions rightly belonged, the Liberals forced the entire country to accept their sensibilities under the guise of being "diverse" and "inclusive, obviously forgetting that diversity and inclusiveness meant accepting people who didn't want those things on an equal footing.

This is a hallmark of the Boomer generation.  It wasn't enough that they believed certain things, they had to ram it into every conversation and public forum, so convinced were they that their agenda was correct.  In other words, they were the classic spoiled children that could never be placated.  Every step in their direction brought even louder coercion to take two more steps, usually at the point of a gun and/or risk of imprisonment - e.g. using governmental powers.

Now that senility, old age and death have narrowed their ranks a good bit, the backlash has begun.  The Generation Xers, Boomer kids, are in power now, and like all children, are rebelling against their parents.  Behind them are the Millennials, who like all grandchildren, tend to swing back to the grandparents' ideals - due in large part to the artificial bilateral spectrum.  The Millennials, however, are suffering from the policies of their grandparents.  They are unable to form coherent arguments, are crippled by uncontrolled emotions and have an unshakable belief that they are entitled to get their way.

There is plenty of blame to go around, from social manipulation through the legal system, to absentee parenting on the part of both Boomers and GenXers.  This fouled up situation is echoed by and strengthened by China's Lost Generation, which is another entire article that presents a very similar problem caused by Maoist social manipulation.  In both cases, a lack of formal, traditional education coupled with social laxity and a break with long-held tradition has resulted in barely controlled chaos that will echo for years to come.

Now aging and increasingly demanding once again, the Boomers are reaping what they sowed.  They are finding themselves isolated and disposed of, as their celebrated youth wanes away.  The short-sightedness of the Me Generation is haunting their old age.  Their lack of real vision and use of coersion to get their way has now suddenly reversed as their children move to undo everything their parents did.  Sound familiar, Boomers?

Unfortunately, their grandchildren, the Millennials, will come into power in about a decade or so, and a completely rudderless generation, products of their grandparents' meddling and uneducated attempts to "reform" culture and society, will once again resurface.  The only hope is if GenXers are able to repair the education system in time to instill some sense into their grandchildren, who will inherit the mess the Millennials are sure to make.

The Great Cycle comes around full of echoes of days gone by.  Hope for a return to sanity seems slim, at best, because the Boomers have done such a fine job of destroying all connections to the past in their headlong rush to create a Utopian future that will never come.

The Boomers are also the first generation to dismiss responsibility en masse for their actions.  This one decision is now the Bogeyman they face in their waning years.  Having cast away their past, they are now cast away by the future.  There is a certain justice in this.

Echoes And Hypocricy

The Watergate Hotel

I have yet to read anyone pointing out the Time Echo of the WikiLeaks email scandal.  Like a Mandelbrot fractal, the iterations proceed from the smallest scale to the largest.  It's a real joy to watch how time is truly circular and history is always folding back on itself.

Just to refresh our memories, let's see what Wikipedia has to say about Watergate:

"Watergate was a major political scandal that occurred in the United States in the 1970s, following a break-in at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C. and President Richard Nixon's administration's attempted cover-up of its involvement. When the conspiracy was discovered and investigated by the U.S. Congress, the Nixon administration's resistance to its probes led to a constitutional crisis.[1]"

Perhaps you are starting to see the echoes?  Exactly 44 years after the infamous break-in, the Watergate Hotel reopened in June 2016.  This time, instead of five "Plumbers" breaking into the Democratic National Committee's offices, some mysterious "Hackers" broke into the DNC's email server.  Instead of humiliating the Republican party and the administration, the email have backfired on the Democratic party and the administration.  In 1972, Hillary Rodham (not yet Clinton) was a junior attorney working on the Impeachment Inquiry Panel investigating Richard Nixon.  Now she is the focus of scandals as she runs for president.

To me, though, what's most deliciously hilarious about this whole affair is that it has shown in stark relief the hypocrisy of the Democratic party and the utter emptiness of the liberal establishment.

The Democratic party is the political wing of US liberalism, which claims to be all-inclusive and sensitive and diverse and champion of minorities.  Instead, the DNC email release shows the party elite to be cynical, biased, racist, anti-Jew and utterly without conscience.

It's as if the Democrats have taken careful aim and shot themselves in every foot they can find.  Oh, the irony!

In an earlier post, I explored the echoes of the election in 1968, and now it seems that the 1972 election is also ringing in our ears.  We have literally come back to the future.

The part that entertains me the most is the cynicism of the party elite.  They claim to champion minorities, but have selected two white deep insiders who know nothing of real life.  They claim to champion rights and liberties, yet have erected a huge fence around the convention to prevent the voices of the disaffected from being heard.  The party that claims to disavow hate speech wrote email denigrating Bernie Sanders' Jewish heritage and wanting to weaponize it.  The party that claims to want safety and security has a nominee whose actions led to numerous deaths in Benghazi and whose private email server exposed untold national secrets to prying eyes.  The party that espouses Political Correctness and anti-racism can't stop using racial slurs.

And I'm just hitting the highlights here.

If Hillary were to be elected (a big if - see my article here), then the Time Echo Theory says that she would likely be impeached and forced to resign within a couple of years after taking office.  That assumes that health problems didn't force her out of office first, of course.

It's almost as if the elite have resigned themselves to a Trump presidency, but are granting Hillary the first female nomination as a consolation prize for being such a good lackey all these years.

If this were fiction, no one would believe it.  The whole thing is a massive farce being played with an absolutely straight face.  Certainly, everyone in the public eye is looking quite serious about the whole thing, but surely somewhere someone is laughing their fool head off at this tragi-comedy.

It is some of the best free entertainment around, and as an added bonus, there is something strange, even sinister, lurking just under the surface.

The most interesting part of it, at least to me, is the Time Echoes.  If I were to draw this out ad infinitum, I could even draw parallels between fracking and Tea Pot Dome, Cold War II, or the New Space Race.

You know, now that I think about it, it's almost as if the Baby Boomers are - consciously or unconsciously - trying to recreate their lost youth for one last hurrah before they start checking out.  And Hillary, Bernie and Trump are certainly in that group.

You'll forgive me if I take a moment to buckle up.  The year ahead looks to be a bumpy ride.

Boomers Fall Down Go Boom

The 60s...all we needed was love.  Everything that had come before was wrong and we were going to set it right.  We revolted against the old order: the manners, the consumerism, the individualism.  Our parents had soiled the Earth with their greed, and it was up to us to set things right.

Our music was subversive.  We met in dark underground caverns to listen to the poet/warriors.  We found power in our numbers and fought against war.  We used drugs to expand our minds and explore new frontiers of Self.  We tried to tear down the System from the outside in.

We had a better way.  We would share the Earth and live in peace, and everyone would be happy because there would be no want.  We knew better than all of human history how to set things right, so we needed no rules.  We couldn't trust anyone over 30 because they WERE the problem.  We had our Weathermen to tell us which way the wind was blowing.



The 70s...we became mainstream and thought it was pretty cool.  Our music became money factories.  Our caverns became discos.  Our mod style became leisure suits and free love became free sex.

We tarted up a bit with our cultural leaders wearing make-up and costumes.  Glam and glitz replaced poor and grit, and we got lost in the power of our collective consumption.  Drugs were no longer mind-expanding but recreational.  We had stopped a war and to congratulate ourselves, we became intensely self-centered, admiring ourselves with a narcissistic orgy.



The 80s...we were passing 30 and starting families of our own, but we were still enamored of our selves.  We didn't want the responsibilities of adulthood, but we couldn't figure out a way around them.

Instead, we decided that we could fight the System better from inside.  We threw ourselves into corporate take-overs and high finance.  We used our numbers to lobby for deregulation so that we could amass the wealth we thought we needed to change the world.  We became the captains of industry we despised just years before, but it was OK because we had our ideals and goals.

But we got lost in the hype.  We liked the wealth and the power, and instead of stopping wars, we started them.  Small at first: Haiti, Panama.  We were drunk on the power we had taken control of and used it for our own advantages.

We realized that the drugs we once used to expand our minds, then used to enhance our pleasure, were now a commodity.  And if they were illegal, they brought in a lot more money.  So we created a war on drugs, and while we were at it, a war on poverty and a war on anything else we could find.  The anti-war generation had become the biggest war-mongers in history.

But it was OK, because we were who we were and we were special.  If we acted the same or worse than our parents, then it was all for a good cause.  We needed to do these things in order to fix the System we had once reviled.  And if we made a little money long the way, all the better.

Of course, while we were in , rather than this convulsion of greed and avarice, we forgot that we had spawned another generation.



By the 90s...our kids were coming into their own, and they weren't so optimistic.  They gave up.  They looked at what we had done and concluded that there was no hope to change anything.  Instead, they withdrew into a virtual world, one far more consuming and addictive than any of the drugs we played with.  They didn't care what the future held because we had already consumed it, and the futures of their children, while we were at it.

In our orgy of self-regard and congratulations, we had done far worse damage to the world than any of the generations before us.  We had become a plague of locusts on the face of the planet that we had once proclaimed so important.  Oh sure, we cleaned up the rivers, but we fouled the DNA.  We stopped littering, but started pumping noxious chemicals into ourselves.

We spawned an industry of youth in which we competed directly with our children for the same attention, rather than maturing gracefully and leaving our childhood behind.  We were the most spoiled generation in history and the world has suffered from it.  Dr. Spock had raised us and an army of psychologists and social workers had cajoled us, and we thought the sun shone out our tail ends.

Our ecology movements became big business.  Greenpeace, WWF and global warming were now sticks with which to beat money out of people, not to achieve anything, but to assuage our consciences that we were still living up to our ideals.  And anyone who disagreed became a target of war by the anti-war generation.

And now Dweezle and Moonbeam have kids and that generation has not only given up, they are rightfully pissed off.  They will pay dearly for our narcissism and insincerity.  They will bear the burden of our complete lack of integrity and intense self-admiration.

They are rightfully pissed because we spent their inheritance, corrupted their society, and trashed their Earth.  There are no frontiers for them that we haven't already trampled and befouled.  We had the party and they have to clean up for the rest of their lives.

Even now, as we stand in the ruins of our greed, losing our McMansions and sucking up medical resources to fight our sagging faces, we still have the gall to demand that the world owes us something more.  We want more taxes, more resources, more of everyone else's productivity to protect us from ourselves.  We are the privileged and the pampered.  We are the best and brightest.  Our self-esteem has become a ravenous beast devouring the world to feed it.

Is it any wonder our children are expanding euthanasia.  They want us gone before we pull down the last vestiges of civilization with our idealism.

They Rage Against the Machine, and we are the Machine.