Boomer Related Blogs to Read

In our continuing series of blogs to read –it is worth checking out Brian Appleyards’. As well as being Sunday Times' cultural critic he is a prolific author and radio and TV personality--a sort of new generation Clive James. His blog Appleyard’s Thought Experiments: The Blog is as its name implies a highly intellectual affair but nonetheless highly readable and well organized. For those who don’t regularly read his Sunday Times columns they are collected here in the form of selected articles.

He notes in his excellent piece Reassessing the 1970s that it is only now that decade best remembered for bad Abba records and flared jeans is being remembered as a precursor for our current age because a “second wave” of boomers are coming of age. As he writes:

. In part, this is a matter of simple chronology. The first wave of baby-boomers, who came of age in the 1960s, have had their say, and now it’s time for the second wave – who, in Haslam’s terms, “arrived too late” – to have theirs.

One can dispute the way he connects the “supreme” 1970s movie Chinatown with the recently released There Will Be Blood (“both involve dark forces, a sinister tycoon, a precious resource – water or oil – and a bleak, violent, hopeless conclusion), or his conclusion that the BBC series Life on Mars was the “best British television series of recent years” , but be fascinated by his deeper reflections on the era. These reflections were fueled by his conversations with Bruce Schulman, professor of history at Boston University, who informs him that “the shape of contemporary America was born in the crucible of the 1970s”. In his book The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics, he speaks of “the long 1970s”, lasting from 1968 to 1984. From 1968, he argues in his book the postwar settlement began to crumble. In politics, the leftish consensus, known as Butskellism in Britain, was proving incapable of adapting to the demands of affluence. The hyper-individualism that was the flip side of 1960s idealism was undermining the communality of the old consensus. The power of the liberal, consensual northeastern American intellectuals was undermined by the new assertiveness of the southern “sunbelt”.” The shocks of terrorism in the form of Black September, the IRA and the kidnapping of Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army led to a culture that was far more individualistic and less community centered –a mood that fed the art of the period as he shows in the work of David Hockney as well as the movies of the time “Scorsese’s films Mean Streets and Taxi Driver showed an individualistic, Hobbesian war of all against all as the systems and laws of the old consensus collapsed. Coppola’s Apocalypse Now threatened the defeat of a demoralised West.”

Good provocative wide ranging ideas that we like on this blog—that will hopefully lead to equally interesting discussions.