When the Boomers die…

This is about the here and now not the 1960s.

Talk about selling out en masse. The Boomers chased dollars at first from 1980s to help the country then just to screw thy neighbor. Not all but a majority bought into greed. Greed backfired for the vast majority of them and for the nation.

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Yes, just so. The entire ‘generation’ thing is interesting and for those who take it to heart, it looks a bit like believing in your horoscope: there is an answer for anything you want to believe (expectancy, confirmation, implicit biases?).

Another part of it involves the span of years in these groupings. Take Boomers, for example, who were born from 1946-1964. Does someone born in 1946 really have life and generational experience similar to one born in 1964? Does the former have more in common with those born in the 1940s v. the latter, who may have more in common with those born in the 1960s? Seems like that may be possible.

Pete

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Nope. That was the Greatest Generation. Bill Clinton was the first Boomer president.

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Sociopaths??

In my defense, I consider myself a high functioning sociopath.

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After the 1970’s The boosting of “shareholder value” & cost cutting/job off-shoring began to take hold within corporations. The silent generation then the baby boomers filled the JC ranks. Also during the 1990’s the defense industry hired the majority of retired generals & admirals so they could lobby their former colleagues. Money in politics became more pervasive and corporate control of congress more obvious. I would say the apex of that trend, that Eisenhower warned us about*, was from the Keating affair onward to a continuing high plateau of corruption within our nation. So the silent generation & baby boomer generation. Of course not everyone of those generations are greedy psychopaths. But high functioning psychopaths do seems to reach the ranks of power.

*the military-industrial complex has evolved to the military-industrial-congressional complex

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You nailed it spinning. The hatred of those fought in the Civil War continued until the death of that generation. They ran the smoke filled back room of politics. Boss Tweed being the prime example. That generation also oversaw the genocide of the American indigenous people. And were the prime movers in the Robber Baron era.

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Oh, more than that happened in the 80s. In 87, the FCC abolished the “fairness doctrine”, which had stood since 1949. Broadcasters were free to propagate any sort of fake and divisive nonsense they wanted to. Didn’t matter how slanted. Didn’t matter if what they said was true, or not.

wrt corruption in government, remember “Abscam”? The FBI rolled up a US Senator, 6 members of the House, the mayor of Camden, NJ, and three members of the Philadelphia city council, for taking bribes, in 1981. Citizens of the United States cheered. That sort of op has not been repeated since.

Then there is “Citizens United”, which officially declared bribery of public officials legal, as “protected free speech”.

Then the SCOTUS declared partisan gerrymandering legal as far as the Federal government is concerned.

There is a case before the SCOTUS this term on the question of whether state legislatures are the final authority on running elections and declaring the winner, not the state laws, not the state Constitution, not the state Supreme Court.

And there you have forty years of the decent from The United States, to Shiny-land, infested with corrupt media, corrupt government, corrupt business practices, and rampant violence.

Steve

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I am talking about the majority positions as they stand today. From that time forward to today with aging our generation has en masse said paying people honestly too expensive, paying for climate change abatement too expensive, paying for college tuition even though most of ours was paid for when going to state schools too expensive and the next generation sucks…those words and others about the next generations. We are full of it en masse.

Who cares how pure we were. That en masse is gone and has been gone for a long time now. It is why tax me? Never our country needs the money. It is I can make money when the company outsources. It is who cares if they get laid off they were lazy. Without a clue who the individual workers were. It is why are they complaining about my attitudes towards other folks? Totally obnoxious attitudes. “En Masse”, otherwise everyone of them is a friend at the bar.

goofy: You’d be wrong about that

Fact Check:
Chuck Berry is widely credited with creating Rock’n’Roll in the ~mid 1950s. The earliest boomers were about 10 and not making any records or singing on the radio. Elvis was born in 1935 if you want one of the others earliest rock’n’rollers. (see list below)

Boomers do get credit for buying lots of records in the 1960s.

Mike

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If you haven’t read it already, I recommend Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guys Guide to the Constitution by Elie Mystal. If you are an audiobook listener, Mystal reads the book himself and the passion of his words comes through in his narration.

I absolutely give credit to Chuck Berry (Fats Domino, Bill Haley, Buddy Cricket, et. Al) for the birth of the genre, but I also note that following their short burst of creation the whole class almost went dead, being dominated by the likes of Connie Francis, Annette Funicello, Paul Anka, and similar. The only ones carrying the flag forward were the Phil Spector girl groups and a couple of Motown artists.

(To me Elvis was a crooner with hips. Caught the popular zeitgeist, I’ll say, but not really an inventor to my way of thinking.)

Boomers took over, writing the music themselves rather than waiting on the Brill Building to provide, producing themselves, and controlling a far larger part of the artistic process than at any time before in history. It’s the difference between a paint-by-numbers kit and Van Gogh painting his own visions. (Yes, music is an art form. It’s poetry with melody. “Eleanor Rigby” is a substantial philosophical statement, and it rhymes!)

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Elvis’ biggest contribution to music was being white while sounding black.

Poetry? Dylan wrote great poetry while stealing (er, I mean “borrowing”) from many others. And no, he didn’t play the finger-picking guitar on Don’t Think Twice.

George Harrison started writing songs because he thought if Paul and John (a couple of guys he hung out with) could write great songs, he could, too. Turns out he was correct.

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Hi. I’m still around.

Making a rare contribution to the group, since music is the subject. I just read a new biography about Chuck Berry last month.

Briefly, my opinion is that Chuck Berry is an outstanding lyricist that stands far above all of the rock and roll stars previously mentioned. The keen observations, the precise words and the syncopation they demand, plus his impeccable diction, it’s all there. He’s one of the greatest songwriters of the 20th century. Does anybody here really think that Oscar Hammerstein or Ira Gershwin have anything on Chuck Berry? I’d argue Berry is the best for evoking a clear, interesting picture of American life. He’s a titan.

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I do, not to mention Johnny Mercer – Moon River, One for My Baby (And One More For The Road), Autumn Leaves…

DB2

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Excellent songs. I like Johnny Mercer. “Ac-cent-Tchu-ate the Positive” is another biggie. “That Old Black Magic”, too.

For lesser-known Chuck Berry songs, I’d cite “Nadine (Is It You?)”, “Brown Eyed Handsome Man” and “School Day (Ring! Ring! Goes the Bell)” as excellent. Another dozen or so pop standards to choose from.

Doja Cat…Vegas…read Hound Dog…crazy creative.

Doja Cat is so loose in her approach to creativity she dominates them. Ariana Grande is on the road, see what she produces after she stops raking in the dough.

Give me Latina Hip Hop

That was one of her latest hits.

AI lists the more popular melodies in the past on the Billboard charts. It is a type of sampling. But Doja Cat is the most successful as the artist actually doing this.

This was her break through hit. Brought her to my attention. It is a taste of the early 70s musically.

If I may quote Goofyhoofy: NONSENSE.

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That is up there with go blank yourself when there is a disagreement. Meanwhile $31 tr in debt, a planet overheating, and a ton of other problems our generation en masse would like to cut corners one more time just to be cheap. Looking at the house. An entirely screwed up plan to cut SS and other programs for the Millennials and all the coming generations. It will save us money in the nursing home even if it forces the national debt up to $51 tr and we revert again to outsourcing…of course NONSENSE…but we gots ME ME ME as we exit the nursing homes…and they say you cant take it with you…

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My rant aside because that does not prove my point.

You are about to prove my point.

I am going to ask you a question. You can answer it and we can all believe you are right that the baby boomers en masse are great guys. Or we can get total crickets and you saying nonsense made zero sense.

Since this is a discussion I have a question, when the baby boomers know things are wrong what en masse do we do about it? For example poverty, education, the general welfare, the climate change problems, getting off fossil fuels, nuclear weapons, guns, drugs, global armed conflicts, etc…what is our generation of boomers doing for the world right now? Not ten or twenty years ago or forty years go…right now? I am talking how the majority of us born before 1964 are sending people to congress to get things done? Not which party this is not meant as politics. Just how are we contributing to the general welfare?

I am expecting crickets. You’d floor me with a mention of how the majority of us want to solve one problem. Back up your answer with a pole of boomers who want the problem solved that reflects a or any majority in the house currently.

I never said or implied that.

This whole concept of naming generations and then attributing certain characteristics to those groups is lazy thinking.

Since this is a discussion I have a question, when the baby boomers know things are wrong what en masse do we do about it? For example poverty, education, the general welfare, the climate change problems, getting off fossil fuels, nuclear weapons, guns, drugs, global armed conflicts, etc…what is our generation of boomers doing for the world right now?

The idea that this is is all on a certain generation?

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