A new , relatively little known , baby boom is underway - in terms of babies produced per family of baby-makers , one that is far far bigger than the better known and older Baby Boom.
By the conventional measure of 'Baby Boomer' impact, this then should be big news.
But the conventional explanation for the importance of the post WWII Baby Boom is wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
It was not our sheer massive size that made Noir's Children, (those of us born between 1940 and 1956) so important in historical terms.
But size does matter for today's baby boom, despite it being smaller in absolute size than the post war boom.
Confused ?
Showing posts with label baby boom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label baby boom. Show all posts
Thursday, December 18, 2014
Monday, September 23, 2013
post Modern age ushered in by baby's whimper, not Bomb's bang
Two 'Booms' occurred in 1945 : which was more important ?
It was the year 1945, all historians seem to agree , that ushered out the Modern age and ushered in the post Modern age : and ushered it in with some sort of a bang.
But what sort of bang : was it the secretive Manhattan Project's Atom Bomb big Boom !!! ?
Or was it the smallest Manhattan Project's inclusive vision of penicillin priced and available for all , a vision that encouraged women all over the world to see a brighter future ahead and gave them reason to want to get pregnant ?
Was it then the penicillin-and-good-health fueled Baby Boom that really ushered in our current age ?
Was an old age ushered out by a newborn baby's contented whimper ?
That's sort of my take : yes, revulsion against yesterday's exclusionary values that gave us Auschwitz.
But also gratitude for today's inclusionary values that gave us 'cheap and abundant penicillin for all' , with its promise of a healthy childhood ahead for most newborn children.....
Thursday, May 2, 2013
Modernity dies in an Adorno Moment : 1939-1945
Between April 30th 1939 (when the New York's World Fair opened) and the November 20th 1945 (when the Nuremberg Trials opened) a lot of water (together with a lot of blood and brains) flowed under one of Modern civilization's few remaining un-bombed bridges : call it WWII.
If to the bemused Theodor Adorno, New York's fair was Modernity's bizarre apogee , he also saw Nuremberg's trials as Modernity's appalling nadir.
But I doubt that even Adorno and his co-conspirator Max Horkheimer had really expected Modernity to soar , burn and crash just that quickly.
Yet it clearly happened. Few people doubt that our new Age of post-Modernity can not be precisely dated to very late in the year of 1945.
Just as very few people deny that the opening of New York's World Fair of 1939 captured the absolute peak of Modernist optimism and hubris.
Now WWI also resulted in dramatic change all around the world.
But I would argue that while the surface of Modernity in 1919 was readily and intensely cracked all over, the deep superstructure actually held stronger than ever.
People often see WWI's dramatic results as the results of long standing tensions, buried below the surface, suddenly precipitating in a crisis situation.
Perhaps : tensions buried under the surface, but not that deeply buried.
By contrast, the surface of immediately post WWII Modernity didn't crack at all but actually burnished all the brighter ("Better Science won the War"), but deep down inside , the moral core of Modernity had lost its appeal to the young.
Modernist elders simply didn't seen their own self-inflicted wounds and so did nothing to reduce its shock upon their young.
As a result, the assault on their children's and grandchildren's moral certitudes was all the more stunning due to their elders' failure to genuinely reflect upon the meaning of the events of 1945.
But demographically, the rot had truly set in and it was now only a matter of time ------ and of baby booms ---- and of funerals....
If to the bemused Theodor Adorno, New York's fair was Modernity's bizarre apogee , he also saw Nuremberg's trials as Modernity's appalling nadir.
But I doubt that even Adorno and his co-conspirator Max Horkheimer had really expected Modernity to soar , burn and crash just that quickly.
Yet it clearly happened. Few people doubt that our new Age of post-Modernity can not be precisely dated to very late in the year of 1945.
Just as very few people deny that the opening of New York's World Fair of 1939 captured the absolute peak of Modernist optimism and hubris.
Now WWI also resulted in dramatic change all around the world.
But I would argue that while the surface of Modernity in 1919 was readily and intensely cracked all over, the deep superstructure actually held stronger than ever.
People often see WWI's dramatic results as the results of long standing tensions, buried below the surface, suddenly precipitating in a crisis situation.
Perhaps : tensions buried under the surface, but not that deeply buried.
By contrast, the surface of immediately post WWII Modernity didn't crack at all but actually burnished all the brighter ("Better Science won the War"), but deep down inside , the moral core of Modernity had lost its appeal to the young.
Modernist elders simply didn't seen their own self-inflicted wounds and so did nothing to reduce its shock upon their young.
As a result, the assault on their children's and grandchildren's moral certitudes was all the more stunning due to their elders' failure to genuinely reflect upon the meaning of the events of 1945.
But demographically, the rot had truly set in and it was now only a matter of time ------ and of baby booms ---- and of funerals....
Friday, December 28, 2012
Penicillin : from Modern to ante-Modern in six bloody years
The biggest battle of WWII was NOT Stalingrad ( physically huge but intellectually a mere bun fight between History's worst dictators) but rather the battle over wartime penicillin : who makes it and who receives it.
For WWII definitely had a 'war within a war' aspect to it .
The billions of individuals who made up the modern global civilization of 1939 had six long - bloody - years to re-evaluate whether the core values of their culture were really worth dying for, or were they only good for starting aggressive wars - but not the sort of values for ending aggressive wars and securing permanent peace.
The New York World's Fair of 1939 promised a total world of man-made-ness but in the case of penicillin, man-made-ness ended in abject failure and it was Mother Nature that brought us this wonder drug when Man proved to be 'not up for the job'.
The world of 1939 eugenically exalted the Big and the Mighty and denigrated the weak and the small : penicillin (once it was a perfectly pure crystal shining brighter than a thousand suns) would be distributed on strictly Darwinian lines.
It would not be made in such quantities that would require the Allies to make one less bomber or battleship : so it would have to be rationed and so would go only to the eugenically 1A people .
(Be they fighting in foreign combat lines or winning the war behind some important desk in London or Washington.)
But by 1945, those same bombers were being pulled off their jobs of riding shotgun over the NRA nation and converted into butterflies to deliver life-saving grams of Nature-made penicillin to the dying all over the world : regardless of age, color, gender and economic status.
1945 was indeed the year that baby "Baby Boomers" started entering a very new , ante-Modern world......
For WWII definitely had a 'war within a war' aspect to it .
The billions of individuals who made up the modern global civilization of 1939 had six long - bloody - years to re-evaluate whether the core values of their culture were really worth dying for, or were they only good for starting aggressive wars - but not the sort of values for ending aggressive wars and securing permanent peace.
The New York World's Fair of 1939 promised a total world of man-made-ness but in the case of penicillin, man-made-ness ended in abject failure and it was Mother Nature that brought us this wonder drug when Man proved to be 'not up for the job'.
The world of 1939 eugenically exalted the Big and the Mighty and denigrated the weak and the small : penicillin (once it was a perfectly pure crystal shining brighter than a thousand suns) would be distributed on strictly Darwinian lines.
It would not be made in such quantities that would require the Allies to make one less bomber or battleship : so it would have to be rationed and so would go only to the eugenically 1A people .
(Be they fighting in foreign combat lines or winning the war behind some important desk in London or Washington.)
But by 1945, those same bombers were being pulled off their jobs of riding shotgun over the NRA nation and converted into butterflies to deliver life-saving grams of Nature-made penicillin to the dying all over the world : regardless of age, color, gender and economic status.
1945 was indeed the year that baby "Baby Boomers" started entering a very new , ante-Modern world......
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