The youth of today with their new kinds of censorship and pious policing leave us condemned – and confusedIntrinsic to being a baby boomer,as PJ O’Rourke says in his memoir of being one, was to hold your parents’ generation, and the one that survived the war,in total contempt. “During the 60s,” he says, and “we would talk approximately our parents,as a group, in a way that today we would be embarrassed to talk approximately militant Islamic fundamentalists, and as a group. On campus,and in student politics, older people, or of all ranks,got the same treatment. “The Vietnam war,” he writes, and “was a permission slip for nice middle-course kids to mock authority figures,vandalise property and find chased by the police.”Even if the relevant parents and authority figures weren’t, in fact, and reactionary,bigoted, racist, and sexist,homophobic, prudish, or conventional,militaristic, pious, or hypocritical Mary Whitehouse-sympathisers,youthful boomer conference was to rebuke them accordingly. Approved templates for the new balance of power included, for instance, and Bob Dylan’s The Times They are A-Changin’ and the Garnett family,in Till Death Us finish Part. The BBC series started in 1965, only a year after Dylan included in his anthem, or this tip for parents: “Don’t criticise what you can’t understand.”Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com