I'm fifty-six and closing on fifty-seven with each passing day. I've already had two members of my generational cohort elected to the office of the President of the United States (what's that look of feigned surprise? 'I didn't get that memo! I'd have run if I'd thought someone was keeping track.' Spare me, please), William Jefferson Clinton and George Walker Bush. I'd suggest, in the interests of keeping the union united, we forgo any more attempts at the Oval Office Ring.
I thought about this because someone the other day spoke about who should perform at (one of) the Inaugural Balls for President Barack Obama. He speculated it would be Bruce Springsteen in much the same way as Fleetwood Mac had performed at Bill Clinton's. Having preached from the Gospel of Bruuuuuuuuce! from his days as Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom as well as Steel Mill (I wonder if The Ledge still exists on the New Brunswick campus of Rutgers University?) through my days among the heathens and Hottentots of Western Europe (listening to German members of the Blue Jean Army annihilate Born to Run on his first tour to the BRD in April and May of 1981. Nothing screams 'go away!' like 'Beyond the palace, hemi-powered drones scream down the boulevard...' rendered in an accent only Sgt Schultz could love, or understand), I just don't think so.
In a way, to steal a thought from one of his own tunes, it's the Price You Pay. Nothing personal, for him or for those of us of his generation. We're irrelevant to the process--which as part of the Baby Boom Generation, the post-World War II pig in a python (in terms of population impact), is kinda hard to take. Our time on center stage is past--it would have been anyway--how much longer should my (youngest) brother's generation (and that of his two older sisters) have to wait before we checked ourselves in at the Shady Rest?
Remember how we couldn't wait for our parents to move aside so we could finish remaking the world in our image and likeness? They'd created polio vaccine and the Marshall Plan and started us on our way to the moon and beyond. They left us to find our own way out of Vietnam and we found our way into disco, cocaine and the plague of Aids. I'd like to think someday that piece of the Berlin Wall I have in a plastic bag in my basement in Norwich, CT (Mark C, it was the VERY first thing I packed when I knew I was leaving Germany because I knew I'd never come back, at least in this life) will be part of my generation's legacy and not just those platform shoes and the side burns that went down to my thighs with moustaches that went to my ear lobes.
Perhaps I, and we, can use Percy Shelley as our map:
"I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled hp and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my works. Ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
-bill kenny
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