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Who Knew I Was a Prophet?
Yours truly, April 21st, 2005:
The fortieth anniversary of the Summer Of Love is only two years away.Dear god, what a wretched, wretched thought. Given the fondness of my parents’ generation for endless bouts of egregious, excessive, entirely undeserved orgies of middle aged self-congratulation, this could get ugly.
If you don’t believe me, just think back to 1994-95. Ye gods, what a double-whammy that was: the 30th anniversary of the Beatles’ arrival on these shores, coupled with the 25th anniversary of Woodstock. And then, less than a year later, the retrospective news specials on “Baby Boomers Turn 50: What Does It All Mean?” Every time you turned on the tube, endless replays of grainy, black and footage; endless tv roundtables featuring old bald bearded guys in ponytails and granny glasses blathering on and on ad nauseum about the historical and sociopolitical “significance” of Flower Power.
We had to smile and nod politely when they waxed excruciating about their long-gone youth; we had to feign sympathy when they turned the national stage into a forum for wading through their self-pitying emotional molasses. Sure, we could’ve told them “Nobody fucking cares, Gramps,” but really, what good would it have done? They’d just have kept right on talking and talking and talking. They always do.
As of June 20th of this year, that horrible anniversary is officially upon us. And, almost like clockwork, Jeffrey links to this fantastic rant on the squalid depths of useless self-parody to which many of my fellow travelers on the American Left have sunk:
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