Of me I sing. 4 things you really wanted to know about the Baby Boomers…. but were too polite to ask!

by Dr. Jeffrey Lant

Peggy Lee sang an insinuating song in Disney’s “Lady and
the tramp” that pretty much summarizes how we Baby
Boomers feel about ourselves  — and those who are
not ourselves. (Released in June, 1955, the film was one
of the first that cashed in on my always media driven generation.)

“We are Siamese if you please.
We are Siamese if you don’t please.”

Face it, we (and I must include myself, riding
hard towards 65) are the Most Important Generation
in the History of the World. Of this there is not nor
will there ever be a whiff of disagreement, capiche?

Today, as we  massively approach 65 (at the
rate of 8000 per day), one truth about the Baby
Boomers remains consistent: everything we touch
is transformed forever and stamped with our irresistible
brand.

That’s why you must know about us… and why we don’t
need to know nearly as much about — you! Let us begin…

Baby Boomers are smarter than you are.

We are the first generation that transformed collegiate
instruction from the preserve of the well-to-do and privileged
into a de rigueur Rite of Passage, mandatory for anyone with
pretensions to professional standing and deference. As a result, higher 
education is now ineffably part of the American Experience, something
that we mortar boarded Boomers have now bequeathed to future generations.

They should be grateful.

Without us , they would have found it more difficult to party hardy at 
Alma Mater, at inexhaustible 18. You owe us…. and we shall surely collect from you…
as we draw our senior serenity from your Social Security fund.

Thanks.

We are not organization people.

If the prototype of our parents’ famously regimented generation was
“The man in the gray flannel suit” by  Sloan Wilson (published 1955), 
we want it to be clear: we own no flannel, gray or otherwise… and
wouldn’t be caught dead wearing this mantel of corporate thraldom.

Jimmy Buffet and margarita soaked parrot heads are more our style; 
we have set the pace for casual apparel, worldwide travel and insipid
ditties like Buffet’s, the anthem of a generation that wishes to get
wasted more often with better company.

Let me be very, very clear: we hate regimentation. We don’t take
orders well. We cannot abide and will not do the mundane, prosaic
tasks that keep organizations ticking along. Whereas my mother
worked hard (for free) doing things like writing and printing (with a hard-to-
jiggle gelatin press) “The Percolator” newsletter for Puffer School,
Downers Grove, Illinois, my generation has No Time for such lowly
(much needed) tasks. We have Better Things To Do. 

As a result, organizations of every kind, in these Boomer dominated
times, are hard hit by a degree of indifference, apathy, disdain that would
have horrified community-spirited mum and her “he’s a good provider”
hubby, your dad.

We do have better sex, and oftener.

Okay, you’re wondering, whether ye be of pre- or post-Boomer vintage,
you’re wondering, I say, whether all the scuttlebutt and (sometimes)
scurrilous tales of lubricity and  pagan Woodstock love-in-the-mud stories
could possibly be true.

They are.

And even more so.

We discovered, early on, that we liked our bodies tremendously…
and that others, gay and straight, liked them, too. It was all “if it
feels good, do it.” And it still is. The fact that our parents Strongly Disapproved
of such glorious,  indiscriminate minglings made it inevitable that we should
have and enjoy them the more.

After all, for the first time in human history, we, the bona fide possessors,  
owned our bodies, not the state, the church, or even our “forsaking all 
others” spouse. “Till death do us part,” indeed; quaint, antediluvian
idea that.

Divorces skyrocketed, so did couples counseling… but  sex gave us something
other  than Scrabble to pass away a few hours, as pleasantly (and freely) as
possible. We took to it with avidity, enthusiasm, and (too often) boredom and
bruised feelings. Perfection, in anything, is difficult to find… but we keep the
search going.

So there.

We aim to live forever, and remain forever young.

Now to the crux of the matter, the focus of fervid Boomer interest
and actions. Since we as a generation either already own or will own
shortly own (at the demise of our careful Great Depression touched parents),
every single thing on earth worth having… we are now engaged in the
hot pursuit of eternal youth, being the first generation to secure
forever for itself.

Oh, yes, make no mistake about it. Having gathered the lot, we
want to keep it “forever and ever, hallelujah.”

This means obsessive focus on the foods we ingest (and avoid), 
the pounds we put on(or take off), gym bodies and sweat inducing
exercises. It’s all part of our massive assault on Eternity; for let’s be clear:
whatever we have wanted, we have secured. With only this, the biggest,
the Big Prize to go.

We regard eternity not as a miracle, but as a problem, greater perhaps
than any other problem we have assayed and solved… but still nothing
that we can’t handle in the hard-headed, inexorable fashion we have
made our own and which has affronted, aggravated, and threatened
other, lesser folk. We care nothing for that. After all the stakes are
enormous this time. So far, we have challenged and rebuilt ideas,
cultures, even an entire civilization, now we want more, the whole
enchilada.

Now, indeed, is our past our prologue, for we are determined not
to go gentle into that good night. (Dylan Thomas, 1951) Absolutely
not.

We know what we want.

We are at work on its achievement.

And in due course, if not sooner, we shall seize Eternity and
savour it. This is our destiny., and yours. Truly it’s better than
any science fiction book ever written.

In all previous generations, for every person in them, eternity
was unimaginable, stuff for philosophers and theologians.
Now, each us of us, in the most pivotal of generations, can
not merely dream, but (soon?) own this, too. After all, millions of us are now
at work on thousands of pathways to eternity. One of us Boomers
will find the way, you betcha. With consequences to fall out later…
when we, massively, have gone on to Something Else.

New Orleans’ Sidney Bechet house demolished; Baltimore’s Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum slated to be closed Such is our heritage destroyed… one uncomprehending authority after another.

by Dr. Jeffrey Lant

This is a story about stupidity, shortsightedness, carelessness, neglect and the ongoing destruction of our culture, one brick at a time.

Today’s examples are taken from the cities of New Orleans, Louisiana and Baltimore, Maryland… but the sad thing is, without breaking a sweat, one could easily see them replicated in all America’s great cities…and throughout the countryside, too.

Ask officials in these locations if they value historic preservation and without dropping a stitch they’ll tell you how important it is and how much, how very much, they appreciate, nay venerate the special history of their special place.

Then having mouthed such hollow shibboleths… they go back to their true vocation… saving a penny here and there by ravishing the patrimony which should have been their fierce honor to protect, save, preserve, maintain, and to pass on to the next generation in better shape than they found it.

Sidney Bechet

Sidney Bechet (pronounced BAH-shay, 1897-1959) was the very quintessence of the signature sound New Orleans has made its own. Saxiphonist, clarinetist, composer, Bechet delivered the champagne of jazz.

His was a distinctive beat with wide vibrato, insistent, proud, irresistible… every note the note of a master. He delivered it with grace, style, just a touch of arrogance but always, always with surety and confidence. The people in the Quarter knew a good thing when they heard it and they demanded Bechet… who preceded cornetist and trumpeter (and friend) Louis Armstrong into the recording studio by several months. In such a way, carried on a wave of music, Bechet sent the essence of la Novelle Orleans worldwide.

It was sultry, languid, it was the sound of love’s longing, and the wrong man (or woman) loved deeply, disastrously, without hope or escape. And if Bechet and his lively rhythm decided you would get up and dance… you did, and riotously so, for he was the man, laissez les bon temps roulez.

It was Bechet… who was discovered at age 6, when he lived with his wealthy Creole family in the 7th Ward.

Now that house and what was left of its contents are a heap of dust and rubble, gone forever, another testament, if one were needed, to the folly of empowering vandals to preserve that which they cannot understand and will not protect.

The folks in slow-moving New Orleans are mad-keen now to rebuild after Hurricane Katrina. And as they engage in this herculean task, they have made herculean errors, including the complete demolition of Bechet’s home. The city sanctioned marauders pulled up to the home of this jazz great and, without a word, set about their destructive task. “They pulled up and went about tearing it down. The roof had fallen down, but it could have been fixed,” reported neighbor and appalled onlooker Charles Spencer.

And so New Orleans, giving lip service to the value of its history and its irreplaceable artifacts, has with this attack impoverished itself, a situation calling for a saxophone’s lament Bechet knew so well how to deliver and move us. Where can his shade call home now…?

Edgar Allan Poe

If the family home of Sidney Bechet is now gone forever, the family residence of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), the master of cerebral terror and the macabre, is still extant, just.

Located in the worst of Baltimore’s many distressed neighborhoods, this small row house on North Amity Street once housed the family Poe, dysfunctional, inbred, dipsomaniacal, incestuous. Here, on top of each other, lived Poe’s aunt Maria (Poe) Clemm, youngest sister of Poe’s father David and, too, Maria’s ailing mother Elizabeth Cairnes; Maria’s son Henry, her daughter Virginia (soon to be Poe’s 13-year-old child wife), and for a short time, but only for a short time, his older brother William Henry… about to die, pickled with alcohol.

Poe had just been dismissed from West Point (1831) and needed the ministrations of his family which, in time approved fashion, fought fiercely for its tenuous gentility. Here an unprecedented, unexampled American master was about to be born.

Just where Poe wrote in this warren can only be imagined… but write he did; those with the need to write will always find a way. And, so, here on North Amity Street, where he resided from 1832-1835, Poe’s genius began to find its way, lurid, unsettling, threatening, terrible. Perhaps the best work he wrote there is the “MS Found In a Bottle” (1833)

In it is the genius of Poe struggling against the tendency of young writers to overwrite, too many words, the prose carried by too lush adjectives, not nouns and verbs. I’ll quote from the beginning, so you can see for yourself:

“Of my country and of my family I have little to say. Ill usage and length of years have driven me from the one, and estranged me from the other. Hereditary wealth afforded me an education of no common order, and a contemplative turn of mind enabled me to methodize the stores which early study very diligently garnered up.” Such effusions are good to see; the better to learn how genius shapes itself.

Now the City of Baltimore, priding itself that this American original lived amongst them, wishes to save itself the bother of preserving the reality, comfortable in its lip service alone to the great man.

Though it costs the municipality a paltry $80,000 or so each year, most for the modest salary of its one-person staff, curator Jeff Jerome, this same municipality has announced its munificence stops forever by mid-2012. Then the axe will fall, on the curator Jerome, who has kept the faith alone… and on Poe, too.

This result, though likely, is not inevitable. The city fathers, though unlikely, could with stroke of pen write another conclusion, at least a stay of execution. The great genius of Poe is worth this, and more. What’s more, he’s already written le mot juste: “By what miracle I escaped destruction, it is impossible to say.” That is his manuscript found in a bottle, and we need to heed it.

And if they do nothing, these pettifogging clerks and picayune economizers, then what? Then shall this place, too, be gone forever, to live again never more.

Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum 203 North Amity Street, Baltimore, MD 21233-2501 (410) 396-7932.