AGING AMERICA AND THE BOOMER WARS

Abstract

Boomsday, by Christopher Buckley. Twelve Books, New York, 2007, 336 pp., $24.99 (cloth). Encore: Finding Work that Matters in the Second Half of Life, by Marc Freedman. Public Affairs, New York, 2007, 224 pp., $24.95 (cloth), $14.95 (paper). The Long Baby Boom: An Optimistic Vision for a Graying Generation, by Jeff Goldsmith. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland, 2008, 232 pp., $24.95 (cloth). More than 15 years ago, Professor James Hunter wrote an influential book titled Culture Wars (1992), which evoked a polarized debate about the future of America. Hunter later had second thoughts about just how deep this divide might be (Hunter and Wolfe, 2006). But those of us who remember the Sixties recognize familiar polarizing issues all too well: Once it was “Acid, Abortion and Amnesty”; more recently it has been “God, Guns, and Gays.” Today we're seeing a new conflict of ideologies that I will call the “Boomer Wars.” On the one side are those who label Boomers as selfish and paint a gloomy picture of America as Boomers grow older. On the other side are those who see Boomers as idealistic agents for positive social change. Both sides in the Boomer Wars talk past each other, but they both make good copy for the media. The Boomer Wars often are ignored by academic gerontology, but this ignorance could be a mistake. Media imagery can have a big influence on culture and public policy. We need to take the Boomer Wars seriously in order to avoid over-simplified polarities and to appreciate the power that public discourse and media images can have in shaping our thinking about generational change in an aging society. In commanding media attention, those with a message of conflict or disaster usually have the upper hand. Media treatment of population aging follows this pattern. There is a recent history of those who are worried—very, very worried—about the oncoming Age Wave—“tsunami,” “train wreck,” and “iceberg” are metaphors commonly used to describe it. Pete Peterson, author of Gray Dawn (1999), has long been concerned about population aging, and his books are intended to make us fearful about the costs of an aging society. Peterson has never carried a special grudge against Boomers, but he has recently endowed a new billion dollar foundation in his name, intended to follow in the steps of Al Gore's “Inconvenient Truth” and make us worried about the future. The Peterson Foundation is headed by former U.S. Comptroller David Walker, famed for his “Fiscal Wake Up Tour.” A new film supported by the Foundation, I.O.U.S.A. has brought its message to the public in another way. We're soon likely to hear a lot more from people who James Schulz and Robert Binstock (2008) have called “doom sayers.” Some of this discourse seems bound to get entangled in the way we portray aging Boomers. In this review essay, I give an overview of those who forecast a grim future for aging Boomers along with those who see a sunnier prospect for things to come. It is this recurrent polarization of discourse that I describe as the Boomer Wars. Along with negative and positive constructions, I offer some alternative ways of thinking about Boomers: the age-period-cohort model of generational change along with a cohort segmentation approach based on class, gender, and ethnicity. Both of these alternatives are familiar to gerontologists but they rarely influence popular discourse or shape the social construction of how Boomers are portrayed. Finally, I will explore some pragmatic approaches to the aging of the Boomers, approaches inspired by markets and by public policy. The Generational Equity Debate of the 1980s made us familiar with an image of “Greedy Geezers,” and that image has never entirely gone away. As Boomers get old, the accusation of selfishness seems bound to be revived. For example, Steve Chapman, a columnist for the Chicago Tribune, is worried about what will happen when the Boomers reach Golden Pond, as Robert Butler memorably phrased it. In Chapman's view, it looks like Golden Pond will be polluted or dried up or otherwise unavailable. Chapman gives a grim forecast of things to come, published on Slate.com under the title of “Meet the Greedy Grandparents: Why America's Elderly Are So Spoiled.” After rounding up the usual suspects (Social Security, Medicare), he concludes that the Boomers will make things worse: “If politicians think the current geezers are greedy, they ain't seen nothin' yet.” If this outlook seems gloomy, maybe the best thing would be for Boomers to just get out of the way. In the immortal words of the Rolling Stones, “I hope I die before I get old.” On the web we can find a blog called “Boomer Deathwatch.” A quick glance at that site confirms the general idea: There are more Boomers, they're getting older, and they'll cost us too much, since they have too much political power. The celebrated “idealism” of the Boomer generation, it seems, is just a mask for greed and narcissism. The June 2000 issue of Time offered readers an article titled “Twilight of the Boomers,” denouncing, not surprisingly, greed and narcissism. Denunciation is followed by typical imagery of physical and mental decline long associated with old age. Ageism, it seems, is one prejudice that just doesn't seem to go away. Popular books pick up this theme. David Brooks, in Bobos in Paradise (2000), portrayed Boomers as aging Hippies who have “sold out” and become materialistic Yuppies. A similarly harsh indictment of Boomers appears in Joe Queenan's book Balsamic Dreams (2001), subtitled A Short but Self-Important History of the Baby Boomer Generation. The persistent indictment of “narcissism” and “selfishness” is given a psychospiritual slant by Ken Wilber in his novel Boomeritis (2003). Wilber, a proponent of transpersonal psychology, hopes that Boomers will rise to a higher level of consciousness. Unless they do, he fears it will just be politics as usual, and the outlook is not bright. The politics of aging Boomers moves front and center in Christopher Buckley's Boomsday (2007), a novel of political satire. Buckley portrays a world of the future where retiring Baby Boomers are bankrupting the country and have inspired a revolt by younger generations. In this future, world inflation is running at 30% a year, and the U.S. is at war with countries around the world. Boomers are collecting Social Security, but there is no money to pay for benefits promised. As a result, the “U30s”—that is, people under the age of 30—are rebelling against higher taxes. Onto this scene comes the heroine of the novel, a 29-year-old blogger named Cassandra Devine, pushing for a new law in favor of “Transitioning”—that is, suicide at age 75. Instead of a Woodstock reunion, in Buckley's world of the future, the best we can hope is that Dr. Kevorkian will be making house calls. This gloomy picture of aging Boomers is not limited to web sites or novelists. Leading sectors of the media seem to take it for granted. For example, liberal columnist Thomas Friedman, of the New York Times, refers to Boomers as “the greediest generation,” and his fellow columnist Nicholas Kristof follows the same line. On the conservative side of the same newspaper, columnist John Tierney calls the Boomers the “whiniest generation.” Much of the media critique of the Clintons during the 2008 Presidential race took for granted an image of Boomers as self-centered and hostile to younger generations. This indictment for selfishness sounds bad. But are the Boomers going to lie down and take it? Hopefully, they won't, argues marketing consultant Brent Green, author of Marketing to Leading Edge Baby Boomers (2006). Green writes: “It is in the generation's long-term interest to challenge marketers and media that perpetuate stereotypes, especially the special brand of Boomer ageism that links their self-absorbed, unpatriotic image from the Sixties with the traditional negative images of aging. This is an unprecedented double whammy. The price for ignoring this phenomenon may be greater than the Boomer Generation or society is willing to pay in the coming years.” Well, what does the opposing team have to offer in the Boomer Wars? To find the answer, look at one of the best books on the subject, Marc Freedman's Prime Time (2002), which carries the hopeful subtitle How Baby Boomers Will Revolutionize Retirement and Transform America. Freedman predicts that Boomers will not accept traditional ideas about retirement but instead will direct their energy toward social activism and community service. His book presents some of the best arguments for what has now become the fashionable idea of “civic engagement.” Theodore Roszak, in The Longevity Revolution (2001), paints a rosy picture of the decades ahead, “as Boomers become elders.” He links the Boomer cohort with idealistic aspirations of the Sixties, described so vividly in his own earlier classic, The Making of a Counterculture (1968). Roszak believes there could be a flowering of what he now hails as an “Elder Culture,” as aging Boomers blend self-actualization with altruism and social activism. Boomers, as they age into their 60s, Roszak hopes, will revive the ideals of the Sixties and recapture the idealism of their youth. Along similar lines, Leonard Steinhorn, The Greater Generation (2006), offers an unapologetic defense of the Boomers' legacy. Perhaps more than any other author, Steinhorn's political liberalism leads him to equate Boomers with positive social change, so he, too, is optimistic about aging Boomers. Steinhorn praises the Boomers as “the Greater Generation” because of their historical push for rights and tolerance, which he contrasts with the World War II Generation that came to prominence during the more conservative 1950s. This nostalgia of the Sixties does raise a problem. Not all the Boomers were protesting against the War in Vietnam. On the contrary, many of them were fighting in that war or were opposed to the protesters. If we believe the Baby Boom extended to 1964, then those born from, say, 1960 to 1964 were too young to be influenced by that War at all. Then again, did the Boomers even create “the Sixties?” Maybe not. After all, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King, Tom Hayden, Ralph Nader, and Jane Fonda were not Boomers at all, as market researcher David Wolfe points out. Wolfe adds that Boomers “may be justifiably called the most misunderstood generation in history.” Early on, Boomers were labeled by pundits with a list of traits that supposedly made them different from people in other generations, like the “Lost Generation” of the Jazz Age celebrated by F. Scott Fitzgerald and others. In his book Ageless Marketing (2003), Wolfe takes a dim view of our current enthusiasm for characterizing aging Boomers in distinctive ways, preferring instead to think in terms of life-span development instead of cohort. Part of the problem is that the Baby Boom Generation has been celebrated and analyzed for so long in so many ways. One of the first to do this was Langdon Jones in Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom (1980). More recently, historian Steven Gillon offered his own portrait in Boomer Nation: The Largest and Richest Generation Ever, and How It Changed America (2004). Celebration of Boomers as a distinct generation reaches a peak in The Boomer Century, 1946–2046: How America's Most Influential Generation Changed Everything (2007), by Richard Croker, with a foreword by the ubiquitous Ken Dychtwald, who himself hosted a TV special trumpeting the distinctiveness of Boomers past, present, and future. Along the same vein, we can mention J. Walker Smith and Ann Clurman's Generation Ageless (2007), a book that celebrates the alleged Boomer denial of aging as a good thing. Smith and Clurman claim that as Boomers move into later life, they'll “change everything” and “they're just getting started.” Who said denial is not just the name of a river in Egypt? What are we to make of this endless rumination about the Boomer generation? Let me give a name for it: “cohort-olatry,” or the unreasonable worship of distinctive features of a cohort. We have seen this vice recur repeatedly among both those who have a negative and those who have a positive view of Boomers. We should mention here what one might even identify as a General Theory of Cohort-olatry: namely, the book titled Generations, by Neil Howe and the late William Strauss (1992). Howe and Strauss claim to have found in cohorts the key to historical explanation, and so they subtitle their book as nothing less than The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069. Nostradamus, move over: Cohort experts are reading the tea leaves now. The opposing voices in the Boomer Wars make for entertaining reading, but at a certain point it becomes time for in thinking about aging Boomers. The most approach here is segmentation of the Boomer population into more to have been from the by as born to This segmentation is in the of and both to the same cohort do and they on More is to look at Boomers in terms of social class, gender, and ethnicity. A may not have that much in with a for all of them both as doesn't us a lot and to social of the power of and to class, and shape what in later more we need to the of and cohort as we think about any of people in historical This point should us to remember that the took very different in different countries of the world and a in by There are some books that the aging of Boomers and identify deep that into the polarization of the Boomer Wars. we may and and of the Baby Boomers published by the Foundation and former of has a book on Boomers that is and hopes or and The Baby Boomers Up (2006), gives to of and to that and of Boomers in with of the by the age-period-cohort problem. But by the best and most academic treatment of aging Boomers is recent Boomer and of the Graying a that is a of with by some of the best in Robert Binstock on on on on and many others. one and the political of aging Boomers with treatment of the public likely to in the to The second and of later life, treatment of less often as and images of age in media. This will be the for treatment of aging Boomers. this book was not to the author at these are We a review of this book in a later A of the is its treatment of the big what of world is likely to be there in the to when most of the Boomers old Some at on the seem The for the has published its own of and But even that future forecast the big of energy and change that are likely to be of when Boomers reach Golden by to issues of the example, a special issue of to this in be a hopeful for our future. It is not for to avoid at likely to with the aging of Boomers. To appreciate the of think about a very recent namely, the and the decline in the U.S. market that in to by the of the brought a decline in for the typical If were or retirement to aging Boomers in this historical it would be that a and more likely to any cohort The for of to more segmentation in our picture of Boomers, to class, gender, and and of the age-period-cohort problem. But there is the pragmatic What can we do in of the by aging I will here with pragmatic the and public policy. As to the aging Boomers a up to each market have not to them as a new the best of recent books on marketing to Boomers is into How to in the New Boomer (2007), by of The Boomer (2007), a Boomer to out what aging Boomers to gerontologists have by and to and marketing but that to change. Along with the we need to be thinking about the market for aging Boomers. David in the of an of a problem. His book is not on Boomers but on the of that will happen we find ways to Boomers' books now in that we're young to that we should not during our books offer on how to but the deep that this optimistic from One of the most of these is Marc Freedman's Encore: Finding Work that Matters in the Second Half of do books the power of or segmentation of Boomers to class, and it is to find a popular book on aging Boomers that even dim of the Jeff in The Long Baby Boom (2008) some of this in to Steinhorn and Roszak, the less on culture and more on and He predicts that aging Boomers will and avoid a on society. But he believes this positive to we that more and key that In view, a positive future for aging Boomers on now to make that future a But will be to in the years to come, as and Freedman hope they The picture is On the one the during the past has by years for a typical But those in the and of the and and are big One of the most appears in the and Retirement more than U.S. as they move age toward the first of Boomers to the born and were to that they to than born and and and Boomers were much less likely than their to describe their as or and were more likely to with as or were more likely to and and as and not what I said of the at the University of who the Richard of the on “If people are old age in it doesn't for society. One to this would be more at a for the most by along with In our current we pay for not for which should go with public to more for and to Boomers to in their later and have of their as as and have the of and a for his in his that more public can of positive aging. hopeful outlook for aging Boomers will not happen But a of we may not the will to the of population aging in the years to come. The key point is to look not years Woodstock and long past the time when Boomers should be for a Culture that has become a political The Boomers' not in the past but in the our Social Security, and on of future generations. We need but we should not be Boomers for as some to we have with Boomers have collecting Social and have become for is out of but Boomers are no more to be for that than for or the problem. because of their own Boomers could up as of just at the time when they will be most in The Boomers to Golden Pond will not be a to It will and that retirement is a thing of the But aging Boomers need more in to get and to have which they they and will a problem in the and Boomers are its and have to in on a life-span Instead of age or we should be aging Boomers the for the of the future. The same to Boomers' has been by of and by in the We should be aging Boomers for example, and U.S. we will need a of the of our society is to have a future. In aging Boomers need from the that have to and the of This and for the A would Social Security, the for most But Social will have to be to its long-term We have a model for how to do this of as we did in Social on a time of and we all need to be thinking in much more terms we are to that reach any Finally, we should not accept the Boomers' as of all for just and are to and But in both and are in the Boomers would from a instead of the we now have in will more conservative along with public liberal our public and more to Boomers, now in their would likely be very to but is The of is to the of the Boomer Wars We need to avoid the of and “selfishness” as as nostalgia for the One of the books in history is The (2002), which with the words not about about Boomers, like in the second of life, are to up new for generations. Boomers will grow up as they grow older, the in the words of John the of one said it than the we are all

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