Generation Jones

 

This week, I was starting my day like I usually do, reading The Bleat, the blog of James Lileks of The Minneapolis Star-Tribune. By the way, you really should too.

Me and Lileks share a couple of things. First, he enjoys the pop culture of the past and present. He has one child (a girl, while I have a boy). He was born on August 9th, a year before I was born.

Other than that, not much. He was born and raised in Fargo, North Dakota.  He has worked in "the media" all his adult life. He can also write like the dickens.

This week, he revealed that we have something else in common: we both are members of Generation Jones, a subgroup of the famous Baby Boomers you've heard so much about.  It is the generation born from 1955 to 1964.

Lileks says, "I learned today that I am not a Boomer. Never felt like one, but I figured I was doomed to be lumped in with them. It always seemed a rather large demographic, gathering up people with disparate culture references. The Summer of Love, the anti-war movement, the folkie movement when they were earnest tweens, black-and-white TV, and so on."

He notes that we (fellow members of Generation Jones) have been expected to romanticize Boomer nostalgia. Woodstock. JFK.  The New York Jets winning Super Bowl III.  You know the drill. 

Instead, he says we "were blissfully unaware through the 60s, which meant we had our anchors in overculture, not counterculture. We woke up in the craptacular 70s. We had money - well, some - and freedom in the 80s, which had their own set of anxieties the Boomers in the media saw through their lens."

Isn't that a great description of the years from 1970 to 1979? "The Craptacular '70s"? It was a time we watched super duper naked women on the movie screens but insisted on electing a Sunday School teacher as President of The United States because he said he would never lie to us. Of course, he never said anything about a recession, gas shortages, or Iranian hostages, but we got all three by the decade's end. 

I think the biggest difference between Generation Jones and The Baby Boomers is that Generation Jones is more pragmatic than the Boomers or the generations that followed: X, Millennial, and Z.  Generation Jones saw the landmines the Boomers stepped on and tried to avoid them. 

We would never ever go to San Francisco with flowers in our hair. We would go with mousse.

We saw what "free love" did.  It caused divorces and unhappiness with a lot of diseases only some of which penicillin could cure. 

We saw that having long hair might turn off an employer, so we cut our hair to make us look like big boys when we went to the office.  Of course, the Generation Jones Ladies had their hair piled on top of their heads and wore dresses that had shoulder pads like a linebacker.

Another thing, all of Generation Jones never knew what life was like before TV.   And we consumed TV like we did our instant snacks.

We talk about the good old days of television like "Gilligan's Island,"  which was about seven people on "a three-hour tour" (sing along with me) that was shipwrecked on a desert island.   They had enough wood to build huts on the island, but not enough to fix the dang boat.

We've even invented a parlor game:  Ginger or Mary Anne?  For the record, I'm Team Mary Anne all the way.

However, everything Generation Jones touched did not turn into gold.  We had a brief flirtation with something called "Disco," which was primarily a genre about dancing the night away. 

You either loved Disco, or you hated Disco.  I'm pretty much in the hated Disco column. In my old age, I will admit that "Stayin' Alive" is a good song as is "I Will Survive."  I refuse to count "September" by Earth, Wind, And Fire as a disco song because it is way too good.

There's an article about Generation Jones which says Bob Dylan was the generational poet of The Boomers and Bruce Springsteen was the generational poet of Generation Jones.  

Now before all of my fellow Generation Jones members get up in arms:  I like Bruce Springsteen,  he is an incredible performer, and tramps like us, baby, we were born to run.

However, I was a junior at Wheeler High School   (School motto:  Aren't You Glad You Don't Go To Sprayberry") when Springsteen was on the cover of Newsweek and Time (in the same week), and it didn't register a blip on the Wildcat scale of important things. (Number One:  Whose house got rolled last week?)

But other than that, this article rings true to me, and if you were born between 1955 and 1964, it will ring true to you too. https://medium.com/atta-girl/why-people-born-1955-1964-arent-baby-boomers-6afdebc5c3ba
 

By the way, why did the Howells carry all that money with them?