Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

There is no polemicism more pointless and yet more destructive than the attempt to define a nation’s evolution by exclusive reference to dates-of-birth. This here is yet one more shrill, a-baby-boomer-ate-my-breakfast speech born within a seam of thought - an industry almost - that is disfiguring American politics and letters just as it has ofttimes poisoned the debate about ageing in the UK and throughout the Western world. “There’s a generation war brewing”, says Jill F. Well, only if you say so. Only if we make it so. And we should do no such thing. The matter is familiar. The immediate post-War generation grabbed all the careers, incomes, nice neighborhoods…. created a public polity to protect their gains… pulled up the political drawbridge and thus left those born in the 80s and 90s to grow to adulthood imprisoned in much enfeebled life-chances - a generation lost in space, with, like Don Maclean sings, no time left to start again. And yet, Jill F. shafts her own thesis by accepting more than once that many Baby Boomers simply do not, er, reflect the negative profiling that she wishes to promote; in fact, many of them are really nice, perfectly progressive people who abominate what has happened to the American Dream just as outspokenly as any who are not bald or gray. But, promoting herself to full cohort leadership, she thinks she is justified in saying things like “we’re only now starting to grasp the degree to which we have gotten screwed” or “Boomers have such a casual relationship with the truth”. And as for climate change, she has the denuded self-awareness to write, pace Billy Joel, “We didn’t start the fire”. Oh well, that’s alright then….that will really restore the broken glaciers. The book’s only real value lies in the inventory it offers of so many cardboard homes and cardboard hopes. For all those laboring under stagnant incomes, crushing student-loan debts, oppressive tenancies, gruesomely expensive childcare, constrained access to medicine and treatment… the pursuit of happiness has become a painfully ironic expression. And to witness the disruption to so many hard-won civil liberties amid a resurgent racism may well give rise to an understandable search for and shaming of all America’s damnable. Nevertheless, populist generationalism’s biggest sin is to let the real bad lieutenants off history’s hook. The more you claim that your life has been hexed by the parents of all your contemporaries the less you actually see. That a man was born under President Eisenhower does not automatically make him a seething, selfish hitman for social regression. All the kids (sic) who screech their applause at DT rallies - to the dismay of all those who once voted for the Kennedys with hope in their hearts - are not per se that man’s fault. You know. It’s bad ideas that American Radicalism must contest not wrinkly faces. And any moral ethnographizing of the generations should have stopped getting airtime after Tom Brokaw (his stuff was bad enough!). For we are all born under wandering stars and every septuagenarian can wake up tomorrow morning and agitate for candidates who will preserve an open-hearted America and push her away from further decline. The same life-chance is there for all ages. The job for Jill Filipovic and her progressive tribes is to get absolutely everyone to wake up and smell the coffin. Not to throw the debris on a stupid fire.