My generation
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 13: The Next Big Thing
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Creed O'Hanlon
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Everything was different when I was a kid. There was no such thing as a colour television or a personal computer, and the internet hadn't been invented. If you wanted music, there was the "wireless" or what my grandmother referred to as a gramophone and the rest of us called a record-player. Discs were vinyl – twenty-minute-a-side LPs and smaller, three-minute-a-side 45s – and musicians recorded them on two– or four-track reel-to-reel tape. The first portable transistor radio was sold in the USA just two months after I was born, but neither eight-track stereo nor videocassettes were even imagined yet. MTV was launched when I was in my twenties, not long before the first compact disc and the cellular mobile phone. "Touch-tone" phones with digital keyboards turned up in the USA in the early '60s. Until then, every phone used slow, rotary dialling. International voice communications were carried only on terrestrial cables, not relayed through satellites, and you still had to ask an operator to connect a call. Facsimile machines – we hadn't yet learnt to call them faxes – were the size of a coffee table, with a bit-rate that transmitted a single typewritten page in ten minutes. Even time was analogue. I was a teenager when the first digital watch, the Pulsar, with its bulky, faux-gold casing and red LED display, went on sale. There were no microwaves, no pocket calculators and no game consoles (arcade games were large and electro-mechanical, like pinball machines). Credit cards were for the rich – Diner's Club, Carte Blanche and American Express – and there were no bank cards, no automatic teller machines, and no point-of-sale processors. A bank's customer records were still kept in a file drawer. Your signature was your main form
of ID.
It's a sure sign that you are growing old when you start to talk about how things used to be. I'm a Baby Boomer, born almost at the mid-point of a generation whose first members were conceived just before the end of World War II. We came of age in the '60s, in time for a few of us to be drafted into the first large-scale deployment of Australian and American soldiers to Vietnam. We were the first generation to be raised in the suburbs, in the identikit, planned estates of low-rise apartments and brick-veneer houses that spread like a blight from the edges of Western cities during the economic boom of the '50s, and the first whose experience of the world was to be shaped not by direct experience, but by mass media. We were also the first to be immersed in a media-driven culture of consumerism. Ask a Boomer about their earliest childhood memory, and chances are they'll tell you about a TV show.
Now we're the first generation to reach old age within this new millennium – the oldest of us turn sixty this year – and, unlike our parents and grandparents, maybe unlike our own children, we're reluctant to let go of our youth. If anything, we reject ageing altogether, marketing to ourselves the idea that it's just a state of mind: with the right science and medicine (preferably synthesised within a viable consumer product), a healthy diet, regular exercise and a little hybrid spirituality, we might be able to live forever.
DON'T TRUST ANYONE OVER THIRTY. This was the unifying sentiment behind the barricades we built between previous generations and us during the '60s. It didn't just inspire the raucous anthems of post-Beatles rock groups like The Who – People try to put us d-down/ Just because we get around/ Things they do look awful c-c-cold/ I hope I die before I get old – it became the underpinning of a societal upheaval that, in many ways, was as subversive in its bid for power and ideological unity as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution conceived by Mao Zedong in China at about the same time. And yet, by the end of the '60s, before any of the Boomer generation had actually reached thirty, there were few among us who felt a part of it any more. We had learnt not to trust anybody, and there was a tacit resolve to extend the barricades so that we were insulated from not just the generations that preceded us, but the generations that would follow as well. Popular culture had become synonymous with youth – although it only really became known as youth culture with the launch of MTV, the source of a whole new vernacular for mass media and marketing – and we were determined not to let it be pried from our grasp, even when our youth was done.
Baby Boomers didn't invent youth culture. We weren't even the first to recognise the economic and social power that youth had begun to acquire, almost inadvertently, in the decade or so after World War II – how could we have been, we were infants, if we were born at all? The sudden demographic up-welling that spilled across the USA, Western Europe and Australasia to become a surging counter-current of new attitudes and ideas was unarguably a singularity of the '60s, but the source of it was actually a generation whose own youth was muted by the uncertainty and hardships of the Great Depression and World War II. Rock'n'roll, the twentieth century's great, twisted take on an ancient Bardic tradition, was the invention of the Silent Generation. From the hellfire performers who emerged from the God-fearing rural ghettoes of the former Confederacy states – among them, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison and Elvis Presley – to unsettle the consciousness and sexual mores of '50s America's too-tightly wrapped middle class, to the younger, working-class, urban Englishmen who hero-worshipped them and went on to form bands – The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds, The Animals and, in Australia, The Easybeats – that would eventually overshadow, if not outlast, even Elvis's unprecedented fame, none was a Baby Boomer.
The '50s was the first decade in modern history in which youth laid claim to a discrete identity of its own, and instigated a cultural, social, sexual, political and economic revolution that, half a century later, has yet to run its course. Never before had youth gained the upper hand in a developed society – let alone, as it has turned out, held on to it for over half a century. The allure of youth has haunted the middle-aged of every generation, but you only have to look at movies produced before the '50s to see that, in the popular imagination, youth used to be what today's Baby Boomer demographers might describe as "aspirationally older": Bacall chasing Bogart, not the other way around, until James Dean came along. They wanted more than just acceptance by an older generation: they wanted admission to what was presented as its more responsible, rational and coherently structured society – they couldn't wait to grow up.
Again, the tectonic cultural shifts that disrupted this had nothing to do with Baby Boomers. These began with the frustrated restiveness of the Silent Generation, and the times' nagging apprehension of an intensifying Cold War between the West and the then Soviet Union, with its sombre, ever-present nuclear threat of MAD, or mutually assured destruction. There were also fateful connections made, with what was to become a generational inclination to apophenia, between what were, on the surface, a series of apparently disparate events in the decade between 1950 and 1960 – among them, the American witch-hunts for communist sympathisers between 1950 and 1954, incited by the cynical, ambitious and corrupt Republican senator Joseph McCarthy, the emergence of an Afro-American civil rights movement, and the defiant Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, inspired by the refusal of a middle-aged black woman Rosa Parks to give up her seat on a segregated public bus in Alabama, USA, led by a young black minister (another member of the Silent Generation), Martin Luther King, the launch of the first living creature – a dog named Laika – into space in 1957 aboard the Russian Sputnik 4, or the foundation of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in England in 1958 (when the oldest Baby Boomers were just adolescents) by the elderly Bertrand Russell, Victor Gollancz and J.B. Priestley, and the middle-aged Michael Foot and E.P. Thompson. (This last event prompted the designer and artist Gerald Holton to create the peace symbol – a simple, upside-down trident based on the semaphore signals for the letters "N" and "D"; in a world cluttered by graphics and logos, it endures as one of the 20th century's most recognisable and best understood icons.
In North America, Western Europe and even Australia, the twenty– and thirty-somethings of the Silent Generation were increasingly ready to break with traditional social orders: in their eyes, the so-called Greatest Generation that went before them had done nothing but drag them through economic chaos and war (albeit in pursuit of the worthy ideal of creating a better world), then marginalise them in the aftermath. Nearly a decade of economic growth spurred by the postwar reconstruction of Europe and the demand it created for North America's industries – and Australia's natural resources – had given the Silent Generation economic independence, while prolonged peace and prosperity had encouraged it to invest in leisure, despite the slightly puritanical disapproval of older, more frugal generations. As the sixty-three-year-old British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan admonished his fellow Conservatives in a 1957 speech: "Most of our people have never had it so good."
Maybe we over-estimate the impact of a twenty-one-year-old Elvis in his first nationally broadcast TV appearance in 1956, but his hyper-sexual posture and sardonic disdain (mirroring James Dean's character, Jim Stark, in Nicholas Ray's now-classic film Rebel Without A Cause, released the year before) channelled perfectly the pent-up desire of the Silent Generation to get up into the face of its elders. Rock'n'roll, James Dean and the reckless swagger of Jack Kerouac's semi-fictional Dean Moriarty in the novel On The Road, which was published in 1957 and became an unexpected best-seller, were the iconic foundations of a very real cultural identity that would gather momentum over the next decade.
It was an identity that Baby Boomers would usurp and, with the unseemly disregard that was to become a generational trait, eventually "productise" and exploit – as they would so many others.
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.
from Annus Mirabilis by Philip Larkin