Well, I've given the baby boom (i.e., The Most Narcissistic Generation) a fair amount of grief over the years for the pop culture hegemony they inflicted on those of us who came after them. The Grateful Dead, phony nostalgia for a 60's that never existed, one insufferable Vietnam War movie after another, keeping most post-Skynyrd rock and roll off the airwaves until 1991--well, their pop cultural crimes are legion.
But I have two things to thank them for.
The first is that their participation in the disaster that was the Vietnam War kept me and my age cohort out of the jungles of Central America in the 80's. Reagan would have loved nothing better than to send a bunch of young men down there to overthrow the Sandinistas or prop up some evil puppet dictatorship. But of course he couldn't do that because baby boomers were putting out maudlin, self-indulgent Vietnam War movies every 20 minutes, thus reminding America that maybe sending a bunch of young men into a jungle to fight against an idea was pretty crappy foreign policy. Thus did we break the "1 war per generation" cycle that the US seemed to be in up till then. (Now, of course, we're in another ill-conceived war, at least partly because my generation isn't making a lot of anti-war movies. And, as the song goes, the big wheel keep on turnin.)
The second, and far more trivial point is that as the boomers took over the movie industry, their self-infatuation and nostalgic yearning for their lost youth gave rise to the golden age of teen movies. We just watched The Karate Kid, which is really top-notch, and there were, of course, all the John Hughes movies, which are problematic but occasionally great, Better Off Dead and One Crazy Summer, which are both fantastic, and many, many more.
(Aside--I was going to write about how Vince Van Patten was such a great bad guy in all those teen movies, but it turns out not only was he not the bad guy in the Karate Kid, he actually wasn't the bad guy in any teen movie. How could I remember so wrong? Anyway, heartfelt thanks to the sneering blond rich boys in all the 80's teen movies did a fantastic job.)
So, anyway, thanks to those wacky baby boomers who kept me out of the jungle and gave us the greatest teen movies ever during the time when I happened to be a teen.
