Beyond the Boom: New Voices on American Life, Culture, and Politics. - book reviews

National Review, Oct 15, 1990 by Priscilla L. Buckley

THEY MEET once a month in a brownstone on the East Side of selves the Vile Body. They are second generation baby-boomers, which is to say members of the baby-boom generation bom too late to have been drafted for service in Vietnam. They are well educated and articulate writers, editors, critics, economists, and journalists based largely in New York and Washington. One spent the better part of a year covering the war in Afghanistan. One of the men will be covering Europe 92 from Brussels, for the Wall Street Journal. Out of the Vile Body's discussions of the world they inherited from the older baby-boomers has come this book of 15 sassy, iconoclastic, critical, thoughtful, funny, passionate, and occasionally up-yours essays. Editor Terry Teachout Promises we will find "no stale Sixties romanticism, no wan Seventies disillusion, no tedious Eighties whining" here; in that he's right. Whether we will find out what the Nineties are going to be like," only the Nineties will tell. But if the Vile Body is listened to, the Nineties will not be fuzzy-minded or utopian.

These Boomers 11 are tough on their predecessors, the Woodstock generation. "They were the ones who lost their nerve in Vietnam and were never heard from again," writes Teachout, except in a single field where their achievement has been destructive: they have degraded the American academy. Lisa Schiffren ("A Whiff of Grapeshot"), who saw bullets fly in Afghanistan, believes traditional notions of duty, discipline, valor, honor, respect, and glory were devalued in the Sixties and Seventies. Her disillusionment goes deep. She sees our victory in the cold war, for instance, not as a triumph of America's (and of Ronald Reagan's) resolution, but as a triumph of materialism, the attractiveness "of our stockpiles of VCRs and soft toilet paper," which created "a worldwide desire to emulate our ways rather than the Soviets'." This she laments: "We have won the cold war without regaining the virtues a nation needs to win a hot one." Iraq could test that judgment.

Andrew Ferguson ("Everything You Know Is Wrong") and Bruce Bawer ("What Ever Happened to Doris Day?") discuss the revisionist cult of the Sixties and Seventies in which an entire generation was taught: To Question Authority.

Ferguson has a merry time with the revisionist in-movies and in-books of the period: Dustin Hoffman's Little Big Man, Gore Vidal's Burr, Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States. "Following Dustin Hoffman, PhD," Ferguson concludes, "scholars in symposia assembled lustily to prove to one another that the Wild West was a manifestation of racism, sexism, and wanton disregard for fragile ecological balances . . . There were no wagon trains! Calamity Jane read Sappho! Nobody played poker! The coffee tasted great!"

When Bruce Bawer was growing up, Doris Day, "perky and well-bred and wholesome," personified the movies. "Then, all at once ... everything was different. . . . Elizabeth Taylor was getting a lot of attention for braying dirty words in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" The Graduate laughed at the whole idea of being a responsible grownup. Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy and Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider were characters the baby-boomers could identify with. A generation was being invited to "Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out!" Yet, Bawer points out, "they were all doing exactly the same thing: goofing off, abusing controlled substances, wandering aimlessly across America." He blasts film critic Pauline Kael of The New Yorker for making what should have been serious criticism "genuinely grotesque." "Kael freed a million upwardly mobile baby-boomers from the oppressive notion that they had to know anything about real culture to be intellectually respectable."

Richard Vigilante ("The War against the Yuppies") attacks the popular magazines of the era for playing to the Yuppie myth, "the myth of a generation so deeply philistine as to have neither tastes nor principles of its own, and thus eager to have all culture reduced to fashion." He contrasts this attitude with The New Yorker, whose "great strength ... in its classic period was its firm belief in the equality of the people who read the magazine and those who wrote it."

Roger Kimball ("Requiem for the Critical Temper") is appalled by what passes for literary criticism today, and looks back nostalgically to the giants of the recent past: Trilling, Eliot, Brooks. George Sim Johnston ("Break Glass in Case of Emergency") explores the baby-boomers' search for spirituality and makes the point that the vernacular culture and the easy mores in America today make the kind of silent contemplation necessary to spiritual development all but impossible. Susan Vigilante ("The Drunks Shall Inherit the Earth") suggests that AA's 12-step program may be the only link the generation has to spirituality-and other basic realities.

Other essays not to be missed: Richard Brookhiser ("The Great BabyBoom Bust") uses his precise cultural calipers to measure the boomers' political impact on America; Walter Olson ("The Split-Level Generation") tells what happened to the generation gap "since The Greening of America began to oxidize at the edges." David Brooks's "Portrait of a Washington Policy Wonk" is a smashing putdown of Beltway politicians at work, play, and political dinner. And last, but certainly not least (Tom Wolfe singled it out for special praise in his introduction to the book), is Maggie Gallagher's "House Lust (and Other Social Perversions of the Baby-Boom Era)." "We of the baby-boom generation are Yuppies," writes Miss Gallagher. "We commit gentrification . . ." and takes it on from there in a bittersweet discussion of why she and so many of her generation fear they will never achieve the standard of living the had in junior high school.