My Generation

I was thoroughly struck by the look on Bill Clinton’s face during Senator Clinton’s concession speech in Iowa. I kept trying to place that look on his face since it vaguely evoked an old old memory for me. I kept thinking -- now what exactly is Bill Clinton thinking/feeling at this moment other than "Well it looks like they'll be just one Clinton as President this go round." Suddenly it struck me -- it was that look -- the one my Tia had on her face when the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show. Now prior to their appearance there was a great deal of patronizing prattling idiocy that went on in an attempt to frame these "kids" from England.
Jack Parr, for example, tried to pillory them. I mean every teenager knew exactly what all of this meant.

On the other hand, folks like my aunt, a member of the so-called finest generation, was a bobby soxer who swooned over the likes of Frank Sinatra and the rest of the Rat Pack. She never participated in WWII -- but that night – her freakin stupid taste in smaltzy boring tunes like “Gonna Take a Sentimental Journey” were dead and buried. It would no longer be hip to listen to old farts like Frank Sinatra or the Chicana, Vikki Carr, who hid her Latin self from the American public. So right then and there my tia was instantly transformed into a square.

It was like a breath of fresh air watching/listening to the Beatles magically opening a new world for everyone -- a kind of Pandora’s Box was opened by Ed Sullivan. All we have today is a grainy black and white image of that moment. BTW, her husband, my departed uncle Alvino did give me the advice when I graduated from high school -- he told me to go into plastics!

The Beatle appearance was a pretty hilarious ruckus – mostly filled with Ed Sullivan who kept yelling at the women in the audience to quit screaming…..the music was not that amazing but it broke completely from the drek of Bobby Darrin singing “Mack the Knife” or those stupid “Your Hit Parade” songs – if you don’t remember that idiotic show’s purile offerings take a gander at this YouTube video. At any rate, the Beatles jolted America out of its sleepwalking navigance – after their appearance, everything shifted.

We’d no longer be a nation isolated from the rest of the world; instead that moment ushered in the possibilities of a linked and electronic world. I mean here were a bunch of Brits – singing R&B. For some of us they were not James Brown – but at that moment the smirky old foggies AKA the “Greatest Generation” suddenly realized that they’d lost everything. Their freaking world simply disappeared and all that they could do was fight a rear guard action to try and maintain that white boy’s wet dream in which folks of color, women, gays, etc. were oppressed and kept in their place; and of course most of that took place in school. I'm “Talking About My Generation” – we all hoped we’d die before we got old; something of course that Keith Moon managed. We were all looking for a way outta that older generation's moribund vision of life.

Obama like RFK reminds us one again that there is hope for this country.

At any rate folks like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H. Bush, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney et. al have spent their lives attempting to push that free and alive spirit back into the recesses of our common imagination. They wanted to restore a world in which father knew best, Rochester would continue to be Jack Benny’s servant and Puerto Ricans like Tony Martinez played a Latino Stepin Fetchit hired hand on the Real McCoys.

At any rate – Senator Clinton, who is a year younger than my wife, graduated from college in 1969. The slogan of our generation was “never trust anyone over 30” – well IMO it is time to simply resurrect that slogan. As for Senator Clinton – there’s that nice old Shirley Bassey tune to usher her out the door.