willardrules's Full Review: Balsamic Dreams: A Short but Self-Important Histor...
"You may look bad, Bill, but we look just plain stupid."
--Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen bemoaning Bill Clinton's graceless exit from the presidency.
Without knowing anything else about him, Richard Cohen's apparent switcheroo from fawning to frowning over Liberal icon Clinton pegs him as the typical counter-culture Baby Boomer that Joe Queenan skewers so deftly in Balsamic Dreams.
Baby Boomers--those born between 1946 and 1960--may be as evenly divided about this very funny book as they are about the first Boomer president, whom Queenan dismisses as The Great American Phony. Progressives who are still enthralled with the guy may ask: How could you, Joe? Conservatives, who never were, will wonder: What took you so damn long?
Born in 1950, Queenan is himself a Boomer, and a bit of a progressive. So producing such a witty though seldom good-natured portrait of his own generation, many of whose attributes he shares and icons he admires, could not have come easily.
Balsamic Dreams is a collection of essays with two common themes: 1) Baby Boomers may have started out as valiant, idealistic youths, but over time became total sellouts, hypocrites, and cowards, and 2) From the very beginning, Boomers had one dominant characteristic: "They were annoying beyond belief."
"At the end of the day," laments Queenan, "the greatness expected of us never materialized, in part because we never stopped telling ourselves how great we were."
Group Snapshot
"To my way of thinking," Queenan asserts, "the term Baby Boomer describes a mind-set as much as it defines a demographic group." But, he briefly wonders, "in assigning general characteristics to Baby Boomers (epic self-absorption, staggering greed, a fiendish obsession with staying young, generally dreadful hair) am I not perhaps casting too wide a net?"
The answer, he concludes, is No!
While Queenan acknowledges "statistically relevant subsets--African-American Boomers, Hispanic Boomers, Boomers who voted for Nixon--he isn't losing any sleep over the distinction.
"Not every Boomer dropped acid or opposed the bombing of Cambodia and Hanoi," he concedes, "but every Baby Boomer is pathologically self-absorbed. Every Baby Boomer adamantly refuses to grow up"
Queenan decodes the book's title by further characterizing Boomers as a generation that once collectively vowed never to become as materialistic as their parents, yet who are now comfortable discussing their choice of basil for their pesto, being very particular about the type of balsamic vinegar to use in their cooking and which rice to use in making paella.
In short, says he, "they surrendered their utopian visions of peace, love and understanding and traded them in for balsamic dreams."
I Feel Your Pain
Queenan is at his best with wry riffs like "High Misdemeanors," a "list of essential habits, values, neuroses, prejudices, blind spots, fashion notes and idiosyncrasies that make Baby Boomers so thoroughly unbearable." Among these:
Prefab sarcasm. "As soon as someone starts telling a genuinely sad story, Boomers have to rev up rehearsed inanities like 'Thanks for sharing,' or 'I feel your pain' in the hope that it will make them appear raffish and witty and less of a schemiel than the person being ridiculed."
Insistence that everyone share the same emotions in the presence of communal misfortune. Though they like to think of themselves as marching to the beat of a different drummer, "Boomers are uncomfortable when anyone deviates from the unwritten law of unofficial sentimentality." Yet they "don't actually care what other people do as long as they say the right things."
Also noteworthy: "The Ten Days That Rocked the World," Queenan's account of the people and events that "irretrievably sent Baby Boomers hurtling down the wrong path." Among the infamous:
April 21, 1971: Carole King's Tapestry is released by Ode Records. "The astonishing popularity of this mawkish LP provided incontrovertible evidence that at heart the Boomers were at least as sappy and corny as their parents."
December 17, 1973: The Chilean wine boycott. Which "typified post-sixties Boomer activism: The ostentatious display of officially sanctioned emotions with absolutely no regard for their efficacy."
February 12, 1998: Democrats vociferously defend Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal even though they know what a creep he is. "From this point on voting Democratic no longer had any moral or philosophical underpinnings. It was merely fashion."
Boomer Funerals. Spare Me!
In another example of how Baby Boomers have "retooled this civilization," Queenan offers his view of the way his generation handles tragedy. It's not pretty.
"Having catastrophically mistaken Bill Murray's Saturday Night Live skit about a lounge lizard funeral emcee as a viable cultural template," Queenan suggests, "Baby Boomers have transformed the traditional funeral service into a ludicrous stage show: a slapdash mixture of performance art, stand-up comedy and karaoke, transforming what should be a serious ritual into National Mortuary Open-Mike Night."
Alternative History: The Way Things Might Have Been
In one of the book's cleverest chapters, "American History: The B-Sides," Queenan savages his generation's "reconfiguring and reupholstering history" to render it politically correct. The alternative history of the United States he has devised is told "as things might have turned out had Baby Boomer values flowered at an earlier point in our national adventure."
This includes, for instance, a socially conscious Columbus who, at coming upon the New World in 1492, realizes the "congenial aborigines" greeting him are living in an earthly Paradise. With no wish to disturb them, he turns around and sails back to Spain, "never breathing a word about his discovery."
By 1645, a permanent colony has been established in English America "by entrepreneurs who turn marijuana into a cash crop." This labor-intensive enterprise tempts them to import slaves from Africa to help with the harvest. Dissuaded on moral grounds by religious leaders, the planters "invite 400,000 Africans to come to work the fields, identifying them on immigration forms as 'nannies'"
And of the recent past? In "Good Lovin Gone Bad," Queenan continues his irreverent look at how history might have turned out had "the original values and attitudes associated with Baby Boomers taken root." This would include all men able to grow them, sporting ponytails, and earrings.
"What are you," he asks, "Long John Silver?"
One, Two Three, What Are We Fighting For?
No history of Queenan's generation (and mine) is complete without assessing Baby Boomers' roles in the Vietnam war. That conflict is an inevitable subtext running quietly in the background throughout Balsamic Dreams.
After all, the cultural rift Vietnam opened between Boomers who answered the call and those who avoided military service, or thought service dishonorable, has never completely closed. For every laid-back member of the Peace-and-Love wing of the Boomer generation--which Queenan clearly identifies with--there were those "statistically relevant subsets" who took their chances at getting shot up or blown out of the sky because they believed in their country, or couldn't get into college, or on a plane bound for Canada.
"Opposed to the conflict on moral grounds at the time," [Boomers] now fear that they missed out on a wonderful bonding experience by not doing their military service," posits Queenan. "Baby Boomers seek to atone for not going to Vietnam by making semi-annual pilgrimages to Gettysburg, usually with a child named Cole in tow. Then they come back and talk about man's inhumanity to man, the senselessness of it all, and how much fun it was to bond with Cole at the site of Pickett's Charge."
But this self-satisfied guilt trip doesn't cut it, even when played for laughs.
As Marine combat vet and former Navy Secretary, James Webb, sees it: "Having placed their bets, and bet their place in American history, on the supposedly benign intentions of the Vietnamese communists, their response to the Stalinist reality that befell Vietnam in 1975 was to push ever harder to discredit U.S. involvement in the war."
While Queenan agrees with Post columnist, Richard Cohen's revisionist take on Bill Clinton, he could have cranked it up another notch. For many of us, our generation has been overrun with hypocritical silk-stocking Marxists persistently pedaling an elitist--Socialist agenda seemingly designed to undermine our country. It's Clinton/Gore versus Bush; blue states versus red states; CNN versus The Fox News Channel!
Ridicule that!
Insight: The Sum of Many Glances
"Baby Boomers have misspent their valuable middle years by failing to lay the groundwork for old age," Queenan cautions, adding: "Middle-aged people in previous societies gradually recognized that the main objective of human life was not to be wealthy or wise or influential or even happy, but simply to get off the planet with as much of one's dignity intact as possible...Literature and films are bursting with heartfelt entreaties to fiftyish men to accept that their youth has faded and to stop making fools of themselves."
Still, money is not a bad thing (it beats the alternative).
Be advised: leave politics at the doorstep when speaking with members of the Me Generation.
You never know what you may find. It often ain't pretty.
In this humorous tribute to all those born in the United States between 1947 and 1961, film and pop culture critic Queenan argues that baby boomers ha...More at Alibris
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