06-26-2019, 05:03 PM
It is arguable that the wrong Boomers -- the ones operating on principle, having innovative and creative solutions, and having the knack for drawing upon several millennia of culture and wisdom if not creating their own culture and wisdom -- are not in charge. If I well fit that description I would not be in charge. The Boom elite reminds me in a way of how I saw slave-owning planters portrayed themselves -- as benefactors to their slaves, indeed, the best thing that could ever happen to Africans. Those planters could never see themselves as the selfish brutes that Abolitionists saw them.
That self-praise, that of exploiters so delusional as to believe that they act in charity through their exaction of toil and their brutal methods of management, is exactly what one sees in elites facing downfall in revolution and war. Maybe Boomer elites are not so bad as those planters depicted in a memorable article from American Heritage Magazine, but the spirit is much the same.
The problem with the Boom Generation is that the worst so far have prevailed and compelled the rest of us not only to earn our sustenance but to cover for their greed and their sybaritic ways of life.
That self-praise, that of exploiters so delusional as to believe that they act in charity through their exaction of toil and their brutal methods of management, is exactly what one sees in elites facing downfall in revolution and war. Maybe Boomer elites are not so bad as those planters depicted in a memorable article from American Heritage Magazine, but the spirit is much the same.
The problem with the Boom Generation is that the worst so far have prevailed and compelled the rest of us not only to earn our sustenance but to cover for their greed and their sybaritic ways of life.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
