Great article about the Boomers in the Huffington Post today. As someone who’s been living right next to where Woodstock happened all summer I gotta say, hippies still suck.
Great article about the Boomers in the Huffington Post today. As someone who’s been living right next to where Woodstock happened (it was in Bethel, not Woodstock) all summer I gotta say, hippies still suck.
From here:
“Never in the history of this country has there been a generation that’s cast a longer shadow without really having done anything to earn it than the children of the 60s — specifically the so-called Woodstock Generation. For the most part, they’re thoroughly undeserving of the immortality they’ve pretentiously bequeathed to themselves. But for God’s sake, don’t ever say this to the True Believers in the Boomer-Woodstock nostalgia aesthetic; he or she will immediately begin lecturing you on the seemingly self-perpetuating legacy of the 60s protest movement, the brilliance of Abbie Hoffman, and the philosophical importance of shitting outdoors in the mud while Canned Heat plays Going Up the Country somewhere at the other end of the farm.”
It’s almost better than the best one ever. Paul Begala’s “The Worst Generation.”
From here:
“And don’t give me this crap about Boomer music. The Beatles were all born before the end of the war. So was Janis. So while the Boomers can claim they had the good taste to listen to gifted pre-Boomers, when it came their turn to make music, the truest expression of their generation, what did they give us?
Disco.
The generation that came before the Boomers gave them Dylan. The Boomers gave us KC and the Sunshine Band. Thanks a lot.”
I actually met one of these Woodstock Boomer turds the other day. He had a lot to say about himself and his mother and himself. Here’s how our conversation went.
Boomer: People know me around here. I’m the guy who picks up the garbage.
Me: You have garbage on your property? What is it, hunters leaving coffe cups and shit?
Yeah! That’s not all. The other day I caught someone trying to dump an old washing machine in the lake.
That’s insane.
Tell me about it. I said, “Hey, you. No way!” If my mother was there she would have flipped.
Why not just bury garbage like that? Or just drop it in the center of the lake.
Are you kidding me?
Well, as long as it’s not a fridge. As long as there’s no Freon or toxic chemicals, what’s the matter with burying or sinking a bunch of steel and plastic?
Well it wouldn’t break down.
So?
It would be there forever.
Yes. And? Rocks don’t break down and we seem to be doing OK with them in the soil.
(He gets up and leaves because, like all boomers, he has no fucking clue what he’s talking about).
Then lo and behold, I see he wrote an article about Woodstock’s b-day in the local newspaper. It’s called “Janis Joplin Changed my Life: Much to My Mother’s Chagrin.” Perfect.
From here:
“As we stuck out our thumbs on SR 414 and caught the first of three rides, we were blissfully unaware that my mother had turned on the television shortly after our departure, to begin a marathon session of screaming, worrying and near-fainting, with some hyperventilating thrown in for good measure. She had seen what was unfolding at Yasgurs farm; we had not.”
Oy vey.
The Boomers invented a culture of making something out of nothing. Marketing used to be simple announcements: “Come try our new cola.” Then the idea was introduced of making a product a lifestyle. The boomers took this notion and covered the entire American economy with it. They created the whole notion of needing a bunch of useless shit and going into debt to get it. They converted real estate from something everybody could afford to a system where you’d be lucky to get your house paid off before you die. They invented the mid-life crisis, divorce, and the whole notion of “Self.” They were the first generation ever to put themselves before their kids.
Nowhere is this shittiness more prominent than in education. They invented New Math where you can’t be wrong and allowed colleges to dilute their standards so low, it’s now possible to take a course called “How to be Gay.”
As with marketing and real estate, they took this shitty version of education and moved the decimal place over to the right so now it costs almost a quarter of a million dollars to get a totally useless degree. What I want to know is: How can this possibly go on? How can a young person today spend 40-60k a year getting a degree in “Race, War, and Race War” when they know for a fact they will be saddled with that debt forever? Why would any non-rich person choose NYU over a community college in this day and age? Huh? Please tell me the Boomer scam is coming to a close.
Hey what’s the hassle maaannn????
You’re harshin’ my highhhhh
please tell me there is a way to stop it and still draw in some kind of meaningful income.
nope. college is more expensive than ever, i know a ton of people in their mid 20s who work in “media” (meaning advertising) who think “creative” is the prius commercial where the background is made of people. i would give you more examples of why the kids these days blahblahblah but i have to go update my facebook status to “tuesday sucks” and watch more unboxing videos.
(_)_):::::::::D ~ ~ ~
^^^^Man that’s far out.
this is so true
You are going to need that degree in “Race, War, and Race War” when the race wars start.
That, or an automatic rifle and a crate of ammunition.
i really like disco music
since jim goad revealed that gavin had a habit of commenting on his own posts via a prolific army of sock puppets, we haven’t heard much from the commenter known as Loomis, who used to holler “amen brother!” whenever gavin posted something. wonder what happened to Loomis.
amen brutha!
I honestly can’t tell the dif between Yasgur’s farm and the Crass farm.
No, this needs to be reiterated. Outside of your own mortality there is no time limit on how long you can resent your elders. Fuck these people and there utopian blinders. Sorry if I dropped the ball on our legacy, Dad. Good article in this same vein here:
http://www.grooveeffect.com/culture/080209-more-hipster-backlash-and-why.php
i, too, really like disco music
Aren’t Ramones Boomers?
Shit…. Iggy Pop was born in 1947…
who first exposed boomers and hippies?
not every boomer is/was a hippie. and i think it’s unfair and of you to shit on people who were just trying to find a better, more meaningful way to live in society. idealism and peace are so fucking lame right????!!
Right. On.
I think it’s totally fair to shit on Boomers. Anyone with half a brain knows this isn’t a blanket statement, that no one is saying that everyone born between this date and that, SUCKS. Yes the Ramones and Iggy were boomers, but they hated their stupid generation and wished for disco to grow balls just so they could kick them black and blue. And yeah, idealism and peace are fucking lame when you seek them out with a tunneled vision, having no idea what the fuck you’re talking about, and then go on to greedily rape people of their hard-earned dollars when they dare to want a roof over their head.
Fuck off and die, boomers.
just forwarded that to my mother, who loved it
I love it when Gavin hates on the boomers….glad to know I’m not alone!
George W., Tenet, and Cheney were all boomers. I doubt they were at Woodstock. John Mack (Goldman Sachs) was a boomer. Doubt he was into the Beatles.
My Uncle is a soulless Real Estate Investor. He doesn’t know a thing about any rock and roll whatsoever.
All these problems are a result of capitalism, our generation is going to get shit on even worse then theirs. And no one’s going to do anything about it.
dude that was pretty cold.
No doubt – the self mythologizing of the boomers is ridiculous as are the constant reminders about the importance of Woodstock. It is equally ridiculous to blame us boomers for every problem under the sun. Perhaps you would be happier if you had been born before the boomers had existed, but I doubt it.
I am left wondering what your generation feels it has contributed to this planet and how you are fucking it up any less than we did. You sound like Will Smith blaming his parents for “just not understanding,” which is especially odd for someone nearing forty.
One day your son and daughter will be telling you to shut the fuck up about your punk rock glory days, and bumming out about what your generation has left them, and they will be no less reductive then you are being now.
Wow! John Lennon was like five or six years older than the Boomers. Generation Gap!
Crass is totally gay enough to have played at woodstock.
The Beatles sucked and so do boomers. Do you really think that “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” had any influence on anything besides New Kids On the Block? Besides, they allegedly got “cool” when they started taking boomer drugs and listening to boomer music. It was the other way around from what you propose.
Y’know what im gonna do is just get over it.
Yeah i got conned into a useless degree and a mountain of debt because i was young and naive and my parents were naive baby boomers who werent paying attention enough to notice the suits had taken over the educational institutions and turned them into scams, traps and middle-class-kid-fuckers.
Yep that The Worst Generation article is one of the best things written by my generation, and yknow what, thats pretty fucked up too.
If this was five years ago I would forward that to everyone in my address book, (like I did five years ago) but Ive got in-laws now. I dont want to be fucking mean to those people. I LIKE those people, theyre some of the only people that are actually NICE to me.
So yeah fuck Woodstock and all that (stop the press what a radical concept) but I dont like being mean to old people. Shit im even trying to stop being mean to people on the internet.
I needed this information when I was a teenager to beat down my parents with… but now??
They’re OLD.
I LOVE those people.
I’ll be lucky if I get to spend a few years with them over the next ten years before they actually shrivel up and die, because i’ll be too busy scraping any money i can get together to try and do the roof thing with the table underneath it with the food on it.
If you were proposing a new investigative movement of identifying and exposing the individuals at the centre of corporate and institutional decision making, for those decisions that we can all agree had massive destructive influences on our communities internationally, and holding them personally responsible for their actions, publicly naming and shaming shareholders and c.e.o’s – with them aim of making them do community service or something, then count me in but im not smart enough to organise that.
In China they’ve been doing this thing on the internet called The Human Search Engine to make people kill themselves etc, lets get some of that shit happening on bad greedy people (and their kids) who got away with all our money
“My life will never be the same,” I responded. “I didn’t get to meet Janis, but I am different now, Mom. I’m a hippie”
“Oh that’s just great” my mother whimpered, as she headed back into the cottage, shaking her head. “That’s just great.”
BUUUULLLLSHIIIITTTTTTT
i’m with gavin. the boomers ruined the planet. they had all the fun and then shut off the possiblility of anybody else ever again operating freely in the western world. because of them, the only options we have are cynicism or suicide.
the last time i heard this much bullshit, it came out of the mouth of an old hippie. boomers ruined the planet? you and your kind whining is what’s ruining the fucking planet. get some historical perspective, assholes.
i wish i did an article on this and dedicated it to my dad. you should see how bent out of shape he gets when woodstock gets mentioned around him.
bullshit. the boomers were far from being conceived or born when evil old fucks carved up the ottoman empire, post WWI, just to give one example. and were the boomers responsible for furthur destabilizing the middle east w/ the creation of israel in 1948? that shitstorm has done more to retard the progress of humanity than anything those smelly hippies have ever done. and the boomers invented the notion of self? the self is a jungian archetype. carl jung was born in 1875. give it a rest, you fucking crank! stick to bagging on people’s fashion sense. if you think this generation is any less self-serving than the boomers, you’ve got your head up your ass.
hehe you said retard
@kuntz –
So now it’s all Israel’s fault instead of the Boomers? Yes, Israel has done some fucked up things – so have numerous other countries, corporations and organizations. How is blaming Israel for all of today’s problems in the middle east, any more of a multi-dimensional approach to the current world situation than this blog’s trolling rant against boomers?
Do you really believe that if Israel had never been created, the mideast would have become stable? When was this region ever stable other than the periods in history during which it was dominated by one empire or another? Colonialism sucks – but once colonialists leave, it only allows indigenous people to continue killing each other in their never ending tribal conflicts. The history of the world is generally the history of one group of people fucking and subjugating another. Why does Israel get your sole blame?
(_)_):::::::::D ~ ~ ~
it was a clear starlight night
on a train bound for memphis
in the time of revelations
i pray for my salvation
i got seven stars in my right hand
just before god blows the horn
this is a declaration
of my independence
from the use of violence
to solve the whole world’s problems
cuz i know that ain’t what jesus wants
so i’m laying down my gun
but don’t ever threaten me
because i wouldn’t even hesitate
to pick my gun back up again
put in your face my nickel plate
make you slowly back away
with your hands raised to the sky (hallelujah)
if you want my two cents
jesus was a communist
he gave away everything
and asked us all to do the same
hallow be his father’s name
long live eternal love
long live eternal love
well, they’re all going to die soon.
pretty deep stuff
Couldn’t agree more, but the paragraph below is all bollocks:
“The Boomers invented a culture of making something out of nothing. Marketing used to be simple announcements: “Come try our new cola.” Then the idea was introduced of making a product a lifestyle. The boomers took this notion and covered the entire American economy with it. They created the whole notion of needing a bunch of useless shit and going into debt to get it. They converted real estate from something everybody could afford to a system where you’d be lucky to get your house paid off before you die. They invented the mid-life crisis, divorce, and the whole notion of “Self.” They were the first generation ever to put themselves before their kids.”
The concept of advertising as suggesting a lifestyle that you don’t really want or need was pioneered by Edward Bernays from the 1920s onwards. And in this Bernays was drawing almost entirely on the work of Freud and Gustave Le Bon. The roots of the 20th century obsession with the self are firmly in the beginnings of the last century. The boomers were just stupid enough to go along with it and take it to pathetic extremes.
Check out the amazing BBC documentary “The Century of Self” by Adam Curtis for more on this.
My boomer Dad told me about Edward Bernays, who is actually Freud’s nephew. You can know about it all. If you’re powerless it doesn’t matter.
And they’re not going to die soon. They’re going to be around 20-30 years. In positions of power no less. Fuck.
I just took a dump so big that it piled up to my ass and tried to crawl back in.
@ mark.
i love how you can’t even mention the word israel without some bleeding heart flipping out. i did not say anything “was israel’s fault.” i specifically said, JUST TO GIVE ONE EXAMPLE, and i specifically chose events that happened in that region and that time because they were happening post WWI and immediatly post WWII (you know, when the boomers were being shit out?) and they were being perpetrated by the parents and grandparents of the boomers, not them. get it? get over it.
Mark you jew-loving white supremacist. Palestine had been behaving itself since the fucking Crusades, when the ancestors of your innocent ‘colonialists’ decided to interject themselves
We get it Boomers – you were once young too!
@ Kuntz – point well taken.
@ Gil – Palestine has been under the control of one empire or another since before the crusades: some of these empires were white, some of them not-white. That is not a good thing, it is just to say that solely blaming the Jews (or the Europeans/Americans) for the Middle East’s woes, is to ignore the pre- 1948 history of that region My point is not that the colonialists were innocent or that colonialism is a moral policy. My point is that simplifying the worlds problems to “it’s the boomers or whites or jews or muslims fault” is unfair, does nothing to help us understand complex world issues, and does nothing to help find solutions. Europeans and whites did not invent warfare, slavery, classism or the subjugation of others. I am not trying to excuse the abhorrent behavior of European or American colonialists (or Israel). I am just saying that these abhorrent behaviors seem to be (sadly) something that people of all races creeds and cultures have practiced throughout mankind’s history. Singling out one group of people as the source of all the worlds woes is actually one of the causes of the worlds woes – not the solution.
I wuv hippies! I whanna be down, this shit is bananaz!
yep, we’re ALL … kuntz! except the eskimos.
Is Vegan Jules for real? He has to be a put on. Nobody has their head that far up their ass.
No I’m real. What does that mean that my head is really far up my ass? Am I like really introverted or self-righteous or conceited or something?
P.S. Thank for “The Century of Self” thing. Fucking great.
Haha, what a loser!