By Rick McGinnis
Interim writer, Rick McGinnis, Amusements
The “OK Boomer” meme – a condescending, dismissive internet catchphrase that’s supposed to be generational kryptonite when employed by millennials against anyone over 55 – is not new. OK Boomer began, as far as we know, on either reddit or 4chan – the very nerdy, largely boomer-proof online bulletin boards that are lumped into the “dark web” by the uninformed, and went widespread on TikTok, the social media platform that might as well be age-restricted to under-25s.
It wasn’t until late 2019 when it entered media spaces like Twitter and Facebook, and when a 25-year-old Green Party MP in New Zealand used the phrase as a comeback while giving a speech complaining about the average age of MPs. That she used “OK Boomer” against a heckling MP who was actually a member of Generation X, the much smaller, less demographically powerful cohort that followed the Boomers, gives some hint at how the phrase is generally used against anyone on the senior side of millennials.
It goes without saying that the phrase exploded into use in the first months of lockdown, when everyone started looking for someone to blame for why we were still being forced to stay at home after the initial two weeks that were supposed to stifle the outbreak. In April of last year, Republican congressman Pete King (in his mid-70s at the time, and not returned to office in last fall’s elections) scolded “millennials on spring break to grow up…Stop swarming beaches and bars and spreading Coronavirus. Forget your selfishness. Show some responsibility like previous generations.”
In “Generational Warfare in a Pandemic,” New Republic writer J.C. Pan pointed out that the lockdowns had been a blow for millennials, most of whom had never really recovered from the Great Recession that began at the end of the 2000s. Over half of voters under 45 had lost their job or significant income thanks to the pandemic, while only 26 per cent of those over 45 had experienced the same loss of employment or income. “It was another reminder that, despite the universalist rhetoric being used in some circles to describe the pandemic,” wrote Pan, “it is a highly political and unevenly distributed crisis.”
It’s into this conflict that Helen Andrews has dropped her book, Boomers, a dissection of the lives and careers of six prominent members of that postwar generation. Inspired by Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, an attack on the generation that created the cultural and political conditions that made World War One so uniquely catastrophic, Andrews’ books is subtitled “The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster.”
For Andrews, the greatest sin committed by her eminent boomers is usually inconsistency or hypocrisy – a failure to live up to the roles and ideals they espoused. Apple founder Steve Jobs, who embodied the tech revolution until his death, and the rise of figures like arch-millennial Mark Zuckerberg, invoked the ire of comedian Jon Stewart in 2010 when Apple got police to raid the apartment of a tech writer who had (legally) posted photos of an unreleased iPhone. “Apple, you guys were the rebels, man, the underdogs,” Stewart complained in a Daily Show monologue. “Remember back in 1984 you had those awesome ads about overthrowing Big Brother? Look in the mirror, man!”
Apple’s situational ethics would set the tone for Silicon Valley’s tech entrepreneurs, like Google, whose “Don’t Be Evil” motto didn’t survive their decision to do business with the government of China. And in the end – the literal end – Jobs ended up resembling another tech CEO, from a much earlier generation. When IBM founder Thomas J. Watson was diagnosed with stomach cancer in the mid-‘50s, he refused medical treatment that might have saved his life, just as Jobs did when he was offered lifesaving surgery for pancreatic cancer in 2003.
Andrews speculates that Watson’s resistance to medical science might have had its roots in a “brush with health food faddism earlier in life.” Faced with a rapidly closing window for surgery, Jobs said that “I really didn’t want them to open up my body,” opting for chemotherapy and “treatments of his own devising involving extreme diets.”
“The situation was ironic,” Andrews writes. “The last person one would expect to be afraid of medical technology was the CEO of America’s biggest computer company.”
Boomers, according to Andrews, have a love of the transformational at the expense of the transactional – revolutionary change instead of incremental, the former much more satisfying to a generation given to instant gratification and a sense of their historical mission. This is a key to her criticism of eminent boomers like development economist Jeffery Sachs and the activist Rev. Al Sharpton.
There’s a tendency for conservatives to regard Sharpton as a buffoon, fixing in their heads the image of the obese, track-suited Sharpton of the ‘80s instead of the svelter, connected Sharpton of today. Andrews does not make that mistake.
Sharpton was a product of the social strife and trauma unleashed by the civil rights struggle and the murder of Martin Luther King, one of a group of younger men who inflated themselves to fill the vacuum left by King and his moral fixity. Initially living in the shadow of figures like the Rev. Jesse Jackson – a father figure to Sharpton, along with singer James Brown – he would end up succeeding where Jackson failed, ending up with a reliable platform on mainstream media and a virtually open invitation to the Obama White House.
That Sharpton has achieved his personal goals – let’s set aside anything he was able to achieve for African-Americans specifically; those are hard to credit – is undeniable, as is the fact that he has done it by employing the same graft and crude political extortion that has been part of machine politics in a democratic society for nearly two centuries.
Sharpton packaged himself as a transformation leader, harnessing the energy of a social revolution, but he relied on the transactional tools that would be recognizable to a Tammany ward-heeler. Boomers, Andrews writes, “tried to depoliticize racial issues as much as possible, by placing them in the hands of judges and bureaucrats, but at the same time they created a multiethnic America where the task of balancing group interests is more necessary than ever.”
“That does not mean that Al Sharpton is the kind of leader we need. But he does something that needs doing, which means that if we don’t come up with a better substitute, he is the kind of leader we will be stuck with.”
In her final chapter, Andrews observes that the millennials who apparently have so much pent-up rage against boomers resemble them in so many ways, right down to their apparent intent on making the same mistakes, with the likelihood of much worse results.
Despite their mythology, the protest movements of the late ‘60s were nowhere near as influential as we remember them. The antiwar movement lost much of its steam when a Republican president began withdrawal from Vietnam, and disappeared with the end of the draft. Their real social impact and power only took hold in the ‘80s, when they rediscovered consumer society and remade it wholly in their self-regarding image.
Millennials have inherited their love the transformational, and the riots of 2020 gave them a taste of the sense of power that boomers took so seriously in their late teens and early twenties. The only problem is that the social institutions and stability that was weathered in the aftermath of the Sixties are no longer as robust, if they exist at all.
Cheerleading rioting millennials from the sidelines, boomers have no idea of what they’re unleashing.
“They did not take their place in the chain of civilization,” Andrews writes. “And if the boomers think they can unmoor millennials from our past, immiserate our futures, tell us we’re rich because we can afford iPhones but not families, teach us that narcissism is the highest form of patriotism, and still have a nation resilient enough to bounce back to normal after the younger generation starts to riot in the streets, then the boomers will be wrong about us.”
