If we ever do encounter a 'spot of bother' (their words) over global warming, Rogue Boomers fervently expect the engineering equivalent of the tooth fairy or superman to waft over and quickly sort it out .
Their forebears used to worship scientists and science , so this is a bit of a change - because these Boomers don't like scientists, at least as they imagine them to be.
University profs mostly, sitting in ivory tower labs, forever dissing this or that sincere effort to 'grow' the economy.
What they do still like are engineers - at least they imagine them to be - actually often their imagined engineers are scientists - field or production scientists employed by private industry.
Pose any big crisis at these Rogue Boomers and just wait for it : yep, within a minute or two, they are sure to pull out the 'it just needs another Manhattan Project - this time for cancer - to solve it'.
Big Science - Big Money - Big Faith : throw enough at it and any problem will go away.
By contrast, my segment of that same Boomer generation, those of us I call the 'Noir's Children', just as confidently expect that 'anything that can go wrong, will go wrong'.
It is not as if we always grimly shut off the TV after viewing a downbeat Film Noir and go put our heads in the oven.
It is more that if a mysterious light ever glows overhead and a thousand soldiers arrive to seal off the site , we don't take it on faith when some guy in a suit arrives and says "I'm from the FBI in Washington - and I am here to help."
Ronald Reagan conservatives bought that line - the Rogue Boomers still buy that line - but we don't ...
Showing posts with label rogue boomers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rogue boomers. Show all posts
Sunday, December 21, 2014
Saturday, December 20, 2014
Elizabeth May - unlike Stephen Harper - is NOT a 'Rogue Boomer'
It is interesting to speculate why Elizabeth May, so similar in age to Stephen Harper, is so different in her attitude.
While Elizabeth is only 4 years older than Harper, I think she benefited from having an activist mom who introduced her children to adult issues at least a dozen years before many others first seriously think about them.
(Ie as young adults, after their upbringing in their formative years have hardened into dogma --- and when it is thus too late !)
I think I was a relatively ordinary child until I was ten, when a sudden change of circumstance separated me from a neighbourhood of kids playing outside and left me with only adult aged books and adult aged news magazines for boon companions.
Almost instantly, kids even a fair bit older than me seemed immature and boring and I much preferred to hang about with educated adults.
Ten - and an intellectual snob !
But as a result, my recollections of the Fifties (coincidentally my years before I was ten) is almost 100% childlike sunshine - while the early Sixties (my true formative years) are cast in the darkest direst most adult-like Noir.
I suspect that Harper had a perfectly ordinary childhood and that he never even suspected he'd just played tag and keep away during some of the most exciting years of the century - until he was in university.
Then regret-filled nostalgia kicked in - and he's been trying to relive the glory days of Fifties Big Fin Cars, Scientism and Golly Gee Modernity ever since...
While Elizabeth is only 4 years older than Harper, I think she benefited from having an activist mom who introduced her children to adult issues at least a dozen years before many others first seriously think about them.
(Ie as young adults, after their upbringing in their formative years have hardened into dogma --- and when it is thus too late !)
I think I was a relatively ordinary child until I was ten, when a sudden change of circumstance separated me from a neighbourhood of kids playing outside and left me with only adult aged books and adult aged news magazines for boon companions.
Almost instantly, kids even a fair bit older than me seemed immature and boring and I much preferred to hang about with educated adults.
Ten - and an intellectual snob !
But as a result, my recollections of the Fifties (coincidentally my years before I was ten) is almost 100% childlike sunshine - while the early Sixties (my true formative years) are cast in the darkest direst most adult-like Noir.
I suspect that Harper had a perfectly ordinary childhood and that he never even suspected he'd just played tag and keep away during some of the most exciting years of the century - until he was in university.
Then regret-filled nostalgia kicked in - and he's been trying to relive the glory days of Fifties Big Fin Cars, Scientism and Golly Gee Modernity ever since...
First Wave Boomers must help transition Second Wave Boomers into the new world
My history professor, Judith Fingard (born in 1943) , myself (born in 1951) and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper (born in 1959) are all considered to fit the definition of Baby Boomer by most authorities on that vexed subject.
But Fingard and myself actually knew Modernity at first hand, before easing ourselves into PostModernity - while Harper only read about Modernity in a book.
Even I, going through school eight years after Fingard , had plenty of teachers whose key formative years were during Edwardian times before the calamity of WWI - the age cohort that I consider the most ardently pro-Modernity of that entire era.
We both got Modernity's values both barrels in our schooling - and Modernity was still mostly in the driver's seat in the outside world, in areas like human rights and social values, until late in the 1960s.
But by then Judy and I had both left our High School in Dartmouth Nova Scotia - but Harper was not yet even in Middle School.
And in a growing prosperous Toronto suburb such as Harper lived in, I suspect that even his Middle School teachers were mostly a generation younger than the equivalent ones had been for me or Fingard.
(Because just a couple of years after I left High School, the high school teacher population in Dartmouth seemed to undergo an abrupt generational change --- a change that seemed to lag by a few years the situation in more rapidly growing and prosperous areas of North America.)
What Rogue Boomers like Harper mostly peddle is nostalgia for a super hero-like Modernity they never personally know.
And as usual in such circumstances, their very best customers are themselves.
So we First Wavers have a moral duty to our Second Wave fellow Boomers .
Because we are truly unique : once almost fully comfortable as modernists, we are now also almost fully comfortable as postmodernists.
To adapt George Orwell's (& Henry Miller's) famous phrase, we have been comfortable inside two whales.
We have successfully made the transition from the old way of thinking into the new - while knowing both.
Stephen Harper and his climate destruction denying buddies, 1930s hubris combined with 21st century high tech tools , will rampage across the entire planet and destroy it for all future generations - unless we other Boomers can help them make the needed transit into the new ways of regarding the world...
Stephen Harper, Rogue Boomer
But Fingard and myself actually knew Modernity at first hand, before easing ourselves into PostModernity - while Harper only read about Modernity in a book.
Even I, going through school eight years after Fingard , had plenty of teachers whose key formative years were during Edwardian times before the calamity of WWI - the age cohort that I consider the most ardently pro-Modernity of that entire era.
We both got Modernity's values both barrels in our schooling - and Modernity was still mostly in the driver's seat in the outside world, in areas like human rights and social values, until late in the 1960s.
But by then Judy and I had both left our High School in Dartmouth Nova Scotia - but Harper was not yet even in Middle School.
And in a growing prosperous Toronto suburb such as Harper lived in, I suspect that even his Middle School teachers were mostly a generation younger than the equivalent ones had been for me or Fingard.
(Because just a couple of years after I left High School, the high school teacher population in Dartmouth seemed to undergo an abrupt generational change --- a change that seemed to lag by a few years the situation in more rapidly growing and prosperous areas of North America.)
"Super Hero Modernity"
What Rogue Boomers like Harper mostly peddle is nostalgia for a super hero-like Modernity they never personally know.
And as usual in such circumstances, their very best customers are themselves.
So we First Wavers have a moral duty to our Second Wave fellow Boomers .
Because we are truly unique : once almost fully comfortable as modernists, we are now also almost fully comfortable as postmodernists.
To adapt George Orwell's (& Henry Miller's) famous phrase, we have been comfortable inside two whales.
We have successfully made the transition from the old way of thinking into the new - while knowing both.
Stephen Harper and his climate destruction denying buddies, 1930s hubris combined with 21st century high tech tools , will rampage across the entire planet and destroy it for all future generations - unless we other Boomers can help them make the needed transit into the new ways of regarding the world...
'Rogue Boomers' : Running our world ; ruining our planet
When one thinks of Rogue Boomers, one immediately thinks of people like prime ministers Stephen Harper (born 1959) and Tony Abbott (born 1957) --- and not just because they are currently leading the charge (from the rear) against doing anything substantial about man-made climate disaster.
Rather it is something so unexpected about the vivid contrast between their still-baby faces and their totally Old School ways of thinking that humans can control the natural world - thinking we'd might expect more from their grandfathers, let alone their fathers.
Yes, those I call Noir's Children , the most vocal (and regrettably the smallest) segment of the Boomer kids got it, successfully absorbed the dire lessons (on all sides) from WWII , and adjusted their thinking.
But the Rogue Boomers ( the silent majority of my Boomer generation) carried right on as if nothing had changed, still believing in the simplistic old pre-war ways , despite Science (reluctantly) revealing an ever more complicated world.
It was as if they were to be frozen in aspic, forever locked into a time warp with the first generation of comic book super heroes.
Entombed forever within WWII's golden age of superheroes, superpowers, super-weapons and super-easy solutions to controlling unpleasant reality....
Rather it is something so unexpected about the vivid contrast between their still-baby faces and their totally Old School ways of thinking that humans can control the natural world - thinking we'd might expect more from their grandfathers, let alone their fathers.
Yes, those I call Noir's Children , the most vocal (and regrettably the smallest) segment of the Boomer kids got it, successfully absorbed the dire lessons (on all sides) from WWII , and adjusted their thinking.
But the Rogue Boomers ( the silent majority of my Boomer generation) carried right on as if nothing had changed, still believing in the simplistic old pre-war ways , despite Science (reluctantly) revealing an ever more complicated world.
It was as if they were to be frozen in aspic, forever locked into a time warp with the first generation of comic book super heroes.
Entombed forever within WWII's golden age of superheroes, superpowers, super-weapons and super-easy solutions to controlling unpleasant reality....
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