Okay. We get it.
"Hey man, remember the summer of 68? No. Oh that's too bad. It was good times man, good times..."
The Los Angeles Times reports:
"...As a member of Generation X, I should know -- I've been strong-armed into an appreciation of '60s and '70s pop culture my whole life. There are an estimated 76 million boomers (10,000 babies a day on average, born between 1946 and 1964), while we Xers (born between 1965 and 1982) number a paltry 48 million. So boomers set the tone for everyone. Their tastes, needs and values are considered America's default setting. They turn 60, and it warrants magazine covers. They get a cold, and the world sneezes with them.
So privileged is this group, they've been allowed to change generational labels the way they changed their (always "groundbreaking") clothing styles. They've been known, in whole or in part, as the Dr. Spock Generation, the Free Love Generation, the Generation That Changed America, the Me Generation, Hippies, Yuppies, Bobos and, to certain members of Gen X, "moronic aging hippie posers." Despite having grown out of the category years ago, they remain, thanks to a certain iconic TV show, etched in the popular imagination as forever "thirtysomething."
As we find ourselves now halfway through a year of seemingly endless commemorations of yet another thing that happened in 1968, it's hardly surprising that so few people are questioning the relevance of certain supposedly "historic" events. Granted, some are beyond dispute. In the first six months of 1968, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, and the North Vietnamese launched the Tet offensive, which is widely believed to have turned public opinion against the Vietnam War. In the second six months, demonstrations turned violent at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Richard Nixon was elected president and Apollo 8 orbited the moon.
So why does this stroll down memory lane feel more like a carjacking? Maybe because for every truly significant event of 1968, there are half a dozen not-necessarily-newsworthy happenings that we're goaded into remembering with just as much gusto. Amid the nods to King and Kennedy, we can expect this year to be replete with art house revivals of the films "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Yellow Submarine," innocuous if tiresome public radio features about Valerie Solanas' shooting of Andy Warhol, and, if there's a slow week in entertainment news, maybe even an E! special commemorating the marriage of Jackie Kennedy to Aristotle Onassis.
Even though I wasn't alive when any of this stuff happened, I sure feel like I was. Maybe that's because my generational cohorts and I have already endured five anniversaries of 1968 (one for each decade, plus the 25th thrown in for good measure) as well as four Woodstock revivals and countless Summer-of-Love-themed concerts. As though trapped at a reunion for a school we didn't attend, pre- and post-boomers can only nod in bored bewilderment while the no-longer-hippies get their retroactive groove on..."
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