We Didn’t Start The Fire…But…

07 Sunday Dec 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, music, New York City, Politics, Pop Culture, race, University of Pittsburgh, Youth

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"We Didn't Start The Fire" (1989), #BlackLivesMatter, #ICantBreathe, Abdication, Anti-Racism, Baby Boom Generation, Baby Boomers, Billy Joel, Colorblind Racism, Denial, Derrick Rose, Die-Ins, Irresponsibility, Jesus, Pontius Pilate, Protests, Racism, Social Justice, Structural Racism, Systemic Racism, Verizon Center, Whiteness

Billy Joel, “We Didn’t Start The Fire” (video screen shot), 1989. (http://denverlibrary.org/).

As the rest of this sentence goes, “we poured gasoline and kerosene all over it.” And by “we,” I mean everyone who has been or remains in denial of the role poverty, greed and systemic racism plays in our lives. Every. Single. Moment. Every. Single. Day.

As an eclectic music lover, as a historian and as an educator, there are few songs I hate more than Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire.” Well, maybe Biz Markie’s “Just A Friend” (1990) or anything by Chicago after Peter Cetera quit the group in ’85. The song was released in the fall of ’89, during my junior year at Pitt, when I’d become a history major. Every time I heard the song, I wanted to strangle Joel with it. This is the same man who wrote “Just The Way You Are” (1977) and “New York State of Mind” (1976), right? First, he wasn’t even singing in most of the song. “Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn’s got a winning team?” Wow, I bet the coked-up songwriters for Thompson Twins wasn’t booked that weekend Joel wrote these lyrics, no?

State of Denial (2006) front cover, by Bob Woodward, December 6, 2014. (http://amazon.com).

There’s one big beef I have with the song more than any other, one that’s relevant even a quarter century later. The issue of denying responsibility. Yeah, those poor White Baby Boomers, how terrible it must’ve been for so much to happen in your lives, with so little that you could do about it, too! It’s true, though. Whether it was “JFK” being “blown away,” or the “Russians in Afghanistan,” the song is about fucked-up shit that happened between the late-1940s and when the Baby Boomers approached middle-age by the end of the 80s.

The problem was and remains the reality that they’ve been putting fuel on this fire that’s allegedly been “always burning since the world was turning.” I mean, who voted for Nixon in ’72 or Reagan in ’80 or ’84? Who’s blindly supported every Israeli policy for as long as they’ve been able to vote, policies that have helped incite terrorism? Who’s been in constant denial of American violence and racism as a generation, despite contributing to it their whole lives? The very same generation whom Billy Joel and his idiotic lyrics represents, that’s who!

Die-in in front of Verizon Center, Washington, DC, December 5, 2014. (Samuel Corum, @corumphoto, via Twitter).

So now in 2014, with America and the world the way it is, with daily protests now over grand jury denials of indictments for police killing unarmed Blacks, with Gaza and Nigeria and Kenya and Ukraine, with wealth so heavily concentrated in so few hands, what do these “We Didn’t Start The Fire” types have to say now? “Trayvon, Michael Brown, Garner in a chokehold?” “Hawking, Gaza, twerking from Azalea?” As if we wee Americans can abdicate responsibility for their deaths, like Pontius Pilate did in effectively condemning Jesus to crucifixion, but washed his hands of his role in the process. Who’s been front and center in supporting a police state, in advocating policies that criminalize Black and Brown bodies for taking a breath, in turning the American Dream of a middle class into a get-rich-quick scheme? Hmm, let me think about this one…

Outside of the small minority of Whites who are truly upset about and are actively involved in protests against this latest round of American injustice, many Whites have expressed how enraged they are. About die-ins in front of the Verizon Center before a Washington Wizards game. About delays in getting to their destination because the Beltway or the Lincoln Tunnel or some other thoroughfare’s been blocked by protestors with “Black Lives Matter” and “I Can’t Breathe” signs. For this very-much-not-silent majority, these protests and the outrage and yearning for social justice they represent are major inconveniences.

Chicago Bulls guard Derrick Rose in pre-game warm-ups, dressed in his “I Can’t Breathe” protest shirt, United Center, Chicago, December 6, 2014. (http://chicagotribune.com).

Well, that’s too effing bad! You spend your life in denial, in assuming that anything racial isn’t your fault. You deserve inconvenience, you deserve to get smacked in the face with reality while drinking your beer at a basketball game, expecting Black players to stay in their entertainer role. You don’t want to think about the real world and your role in maintaining stereotypes and oppression in it? Oh well! Grow a pair! Not of balls, though. Grow a pair of lobes! Because none of us wide-awake, “Black Lives Matter” types are going anywhere.

The ’72 Dolphins and Baby-Boomer Narcissism

01 Saturday Nov 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth

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17-0, 1972 Dolphins, American Narcissism, Baby Boom Generation, Baby Boomers, Civil Rights Generation, Elitism, Gen Xers, Generation X, Generation Y, Hypocrisy, Miami Dolphins, Millennials, Narcissism, NFL, Perfect Season, Self-Aggrandizement

For as long as I’ve been alive, America has confronted me with its Baby-Boomer narcissism. This idea that the Boomers were the generation that forever changed the country and the world, the folks who’ve shaped our popular culture — and the response of younger generations to it — has been around for more than sixty years. The Beatles, Watergate, Vietnam, Led Zeppelin, The Rolling Stone, Roe v. Wade, “I Have A Dream” — Boomers have taken credit for it all. It sometimes makes me wanna puke.

Bill and Hillary Clinton (nee Rodham), circa 1971, Yale University, New Haven, CT. (Charles F. Palmer/HuffPost via http://clintonlibrary.gov/photogallery.html?galAlbum=28).

Along with the arrogance of this constant supposition of their centrality to the sort-of-historical is the obvious factual ignorance that comes with it. It’s as if the ’80s didn’t happen and Generation X wasn’t born and didn’t grow up. Or the ’90s were only about Baby Boomers having kids of their own. Or that Boomers somehow didn’t vote for the likes of Nixon, Reagan, Bush 41 and Bush 43 — seven times in all!

But nothing, absolutely nothing, has demonstrated Baby-Boomer narcissism more than that annual rite of fall that has been the ’72 Miami Dolphins celebrating when every NFL team has lost their first game of a given season. The remaining members of that team get together with the hopes that no other NFL team finishes the season with a perfect record. It’s a sad sight watching elderly men long out of professional football show their glee on TV and in pictures when every team has at least one loss on the season. Every. Single. Year.

Yet it so represents this nation of Baby Boomers that have ruled this roost for so many years. Before most Gen Xers were old enough to vote, much less protest, Baby Boomers had coined us “slackers” and “apathetic” about life and politics. Heck, Baby Boomers took away Gen Xers’ right to drink — but not to die in war — just as the first Gen Xers turned eighteen! And for the past ten years, Boomers have turned their critical eye to Millennials, looking for flaws in their politics, voting patterns and vapid obsession with pop culture. As if Millennials didn’t cut their self-absorbed eyeteeth on a steady diet of Baby-Boomer megalomania.

President Barack Obama honors the Super Bowl VII Champions and their 1972 perfect season, East Room, White House, August 20, 2013. (UPI/Kevin Dietsch).
Read more: http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2013/08/20/Obama-welcomes-72-Dolphins-to-the-White-House/UPI-27321377029133/#ixzz3HopWhqwX

So when Mercury Morris or Bob Griese or elder statesman Don Shula have gone on TV year after year after year to gloat about their perfect season, it doesn’t reflect pride in their 17-0 record. It’s a reflection of their desperation, a selfish attempt to hang on to a past that is irrelevant in today’s NFL. And yes, it’s their fault. Kind of like when civil rights Boomers who claim the blood and name of the movement, yet root for younger generations of social justice activists to not do so well as them. All while taking ginormous amounts of credit for every good thing that happened during their watch years and years ago.

Is there something to be done about this? Maybe. We could try to ignore these winners of yesteryear and the annual ESPN champagne cork-popping graphic in honor of the ’72 Dolphins team. Or, better still, we can say, “Enough!” Forty-two years is long enough to celebrate the so-called perfect season. Especially when it was on a fourteen-game schedule.

As for the rest of the elite Baby Boomers, you can continue to self-aggrandize, as if three million protesters and stoners could fully represent the other 76 million Americans born between 1945 and 1961. Just remember. Gen Xers and Millennials will be the near-final arbiters of your history. It will be one in which you were as responsible preemptive war as LBJ and Robert McNamara, as accountable for NSA and a virtual police state as Nixon was for Watergate, as culpable for climate change as Ford and GM. That’s as much your narcissistic legacy as the anti-war movement and free-love.

Billy Joel, “We Didn’t Start The Fire” (video screen shot), 1989. (http://denverlibrary.org/).

Generation Gap

03 Thursday Jun 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture

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"Greatest Generation", Baby Boom Generation, Band of Brothers, Culture, Generation X, Generation Y, Politics, Tom Brokaw

Off and on for three years, I’ve waled on the ’60s generation and its own obsession with its achievements. Not to mention its occasional turn to Generation Xers and those younger than us, as if to say, “Well, why aren’t you more like us?” For years I thought that this was the stuff of arrogance, a sense of superiority that the Baby Boom Generation felt toward us young folk. But I’ve come to the realization that it’s just the opposite, that the folks who marched with Dr. King and shut down Berkeley and Columbia were themselves attempting to fill shoes larger than Shaquille O’Neal’s size twenty-threes. And no, this isn’t about my generation.

For the umpteenth time, I watched most of the Band of Brothers series on Memorial Day (it was on Spike TV, of all places). If it’s possible for me to have a man-crush on anyone, it’s with Damien Lewis playing Col. Richard Winters, as well as the man himself. So moving, so inspirational, and so hard to live up to. Especially since another 16 million men and women served in the armed forces during the Second World War. Millions more worked hard in factories and on farms, in shipyards and railroad yards to supply these folks with food, equipment and ammunition to fight.

The generation of folks born between 1910 and 1930 are part of what Tom Brokaw and others have called the “Greatest Generation.” That’s going a bit too far, given that the generation born in the 1880s and 1890s helped make them this way. But given the times they grew up in — the Roaring ’20s, the Great Depression, and the Second World War — it’s hardly a stretch to say that as a generation, they rose far above their circumstances to achieve great things, to build and rebuild our country, to make the US as great as it would become after the war.

Sure, there are a variety of tensions in this assessment, racial segregation and discrimination not being the least of these tensions. In this case, then, you could argue that the generation of Blacks born between 1915 and 1930 were the “Greatest Generation.” They’re the ones who marched on Washington in ’63, who helped do the leg work for Brown v. Board of Education, who fought segregation and discrimination to fight valiantly in World War II, where leaders like Dr. King, Malcolm X, and so many others emerged. To act as though Whites from this generation weren’t themselves fighting against racial segregation, economic inequality, and gender discrimination is to deny the tensions that existed in the world in which Baby Boomers grew up in, the mythically placid ’50s and early ’60s.

So yes, the ’60s generation was one that was radicalized by civil rights, Vietnam, social unrest, politics (and eventually, a distrust for government), it was also one that, for all its denial, was following in the footsteps of the generation before. It would be nice if folks from this generation would put their narcissistic biases aside and give a fair and complete assessment of their own achievements and their own role in creating the narcissistic generations that have followed in their footsteps. But they’re probably not going to do that. Oh well.