Tuesday, January 13, 2009

People, do you want your fucking dots connected or not?

“I just can’t envision myself, you know, with a big straw hat and Hawaiian shirt, sitting on some beach,” the president said, adding, “particularly since I quit drinking.”

If I had known I was still capable of being appalled by Bush, I would have skipped his press conference. As it was, I was still reeling from the gibberish of this CNN segment, which obviously had been recycled from inspired by this AP story, “In Obama, Many See an End to Boomer Era.”

The upshot was this: The Baby Boom era is over because soon-to-be President Barack Obama uses a BlackBerry. Or something.

CNN also wondered about the prospect of intergenerational warfare. Obama, who is technically a Baby Boomer, is spiritually more aligned with Cuspers or Generation Jonesers and, well, fuck Social Security and Medicare and all that.

It also was confidently declared that “boomers have never been known for a whole lot of self-sacrifice” and they “have not and will not ever leave, ever go quietly into the night.” Post inauguration, it seems, the ready-response euthanasia squads get the green light should the Boomers bitch too much about their squandered entitlements.

Then Bush was on the TeeVee giving a press conference, apparently just to ground his heels in the wreckage. God he was appalling. This little gem of a diatribe was in response to a question about America’s lost moral standing over torture and harsh interrogation techniques.
Do you remember what it was like right after September the 11th around here? In press conferences and opinion pieces and in stories -- that sometimes were news stories and sometimes opinion pieces -- people were saying, how come they didn't see it, how come they didn't connect the dots? Do you remember what the environment was like in Washington? I do. When people were hauled up in front of Congress and members of Congress were asking questions about, how come you didn't know this, that, or the other? And then we start putting policy in place -- legal policy in place to connect the dots, and all of a sudden people were saying, how come you're connecting the dots?
Sad to think that although more than 75 million Americans were born during the post-WWII baby boom, the Boomers have produced only two presidents. One was impeached and the other should have been.

What a waste.

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