The Worst Generation

Long, but a good read. Hit the link at the bottom for the full article.

I hate the Boomers.

I KNOW IT'S A SIN to hate, so let me put it this way: If they were animals, they'd be a plague of locusts, devouring everything in their path and leaving but a wasteland. If they were plants, they'd be kudzu, choking off every other living thing with their sheer mass. If they were artists, they'd be abstract expressionists, interested only in the emotions of that moment--not in the lasting result of the creative process. If they were a baseball club, they'd be the Florida Marlins: prefab prima donnas who bought their way to prominence, then disbanded--a temporary association but not a team. (...)

WHICH BRINGS ME BACK TO THE BOOMER IN CHIEF. It's not for nothing that Pulitzer-prize-winning author David Maraniss called his biography of Bill Clinton First in His Class. (It is interesting to note that the same Boomers who supported Reagan were less likely to vote for Clinton than the World War II generation was.)

Clinton's right-wing critics seize on his personal failings to paint a caricature of the ultimate sixties hippie: pot-smoking, draft-dodging womanizer; the Muhammad Ali of selfishness--the kind of guy Newt Gingrich called a "countercultural McGovernik." But Clinton's public agenda has, I believe, generally kept faith with old Professor Quigley. His basic political philosophy is to prefer the future to the present and to stress communitarian values over selfish individualism. His most profound emotion is empathy. To this day, he's widely mocked for declaring to a man who was dying of AIDS, "I feel your pain." But feeling someone's pain is true compassion, which literally means "to suffer with." A most un-Boomer sentiment, indeed.

In a classic example of preferring the future to the present, Clinton took a terrible political hit for raising taxes to pay down the deficit. His party lost the House and Senate, but over time the economic policies worked, and because he was willing to pay the short-term price, we enjoy the long-term economic benefits.

But if in his public policy Clinton has been anti-Boomer, in his personal failings he has given ample fodder to his critics and much heartbreak to those of us who love him. Having an affair with a young woman and lying about it is a stupid and selfish act. And Bill Clinton lives with the knowledge that he has caused his family immeasurable pain. But it was ultimately a sin against his family, not yours. You think he got away with it? Got away with it? Imagine how you'd feel if your daughter read a Starr report on the Internet, chronicling your worst, most shameful moment.

He didn't get away with shit.

And if I had to choose, I'd rather have a leader who was rotten to his family but good to the country than the other way around.

IT IS MY VIEW THAT THE TRULY CLASSIC Boomer politician is not Bill Clinton but the man who despises him: George W. Bush. A charming and disarming guy, Bush has coasted through life on his family's money and his daddy's name. He went to the best schools. And while at those elite schools, he served as the model for Otter in Animal House. He went into business (backed by family wealth) and failed. Tried again. Failed. And again--well, you get it. He finally struck it rich when his father's wealthy supporters made him the figurehead managing partner of the Texas Rangers. Bush used his Boomer charm to con the good people of Arlington, Texas, into raising their taxes to build his Rangers a new stadium. When the team was sold in 1998, Bush made a profit of more than $14 million.

And what does Bush offer us, after this life of wretched Boomer selfishness? Lectures about personal responsibility. We have a word for that in Texas: chutzpah.

The specter of Bush the Son striving to avenge Bush the Father brings us to the Question: How could the World War II generation--the Greatest Generation--have raised the Worst Generation?

I put that question to Tom Brokaw, chronicler of the Greatest Generation. Brokaw was born in 1940, so he's not a Boomer chronologically. Nor is he one attitudinally. "I have one foot on each side of the ice floe," he says. (...)

One reason the Boomers were so spoiled, Brokaw theorizes, was their parents' understandable desire to compensate for their own deprivation. "Even those who had not really known poverty in the Depression still had a harder life than most of us can imagine today," he says. "Think about it: Most men worked in manual labor. Most women did manual labor in the home as well. So many parents from that generation have said to me, 'We had so little, we wanted our children to have so much--and we spoiled them.'"

Esquire.com | read article

'Time' or 'time'?

I love reading about these kinds of things, even if its hard to wrap my head around some of the ideas. I read a Brief History of Time when I was 13, again it was way over my head but it blew my mind.

The trouble with time started a century ago, when Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity demolished the idea of time as a universal constant. One consequence is that the past, present, and future are not absolutes. Einstein’s theories also opened a rift in physics because the rules of general relativity (which describe gravity and the large-scale structure of the cosmos) seem incompatible with those of quantum physics (which govern the realm of the tiny).

Some four decades ago, the renowned physicist John Wheeler, then at Princeton, and the late Bryce DeWitt, then at the University of North Carolina, developed an extraordinary equation that provides a possible framework for unifying relativity and quantum mechanics. But the Wheeler-DeWitt equation has always been controversial, in part because it adds yet another, even more baffling twist to our understanding of time.

“One finds that time just disappears from the Wheeler-DeWitt equation,” says Carlo Rovelli, a physicist. “It is an issue that many theorists have puzzled about. It may be that the best way to think about quantum reality is to give up the notion of time—that the fundamental description of the universe must be timeless.” (…)

The possibility that time may not exist is known among physicists as the “problem of time.” (…)

The laws of physics don’t explain why time always points to the future. All the laws—whether Newton’s, Einstein’s, or the quirky quantum rules—would work equally well if time ran backward. As far as we can tell, though, time is a one-way process; it never reverses, even though no laws restrict it.

“It’s quite mysterious why we have such an obvious arrow of time,” says Seth Lloyd, a quantum mechanical engineer at MIT.

The mother of all initial conditions, Lloyd says, was the Big Bang. Physicists believe that the universe started as a very simple, extremely compact ball of energy. Although the laws of physics themselves don’t provide for an arrow of time, the ongoing expansion of the universe does. As the universe expands, it becomes ever more complex and disorderly. The growing disorder—physicists call it an increase in entropy—is driven by the expansion of the universe, which may be the origin of what we think of as the ceaseless forward march of time.

Time, in this view, is not something that exists apart from the universe. There is no clock ticking outside the cosmos. (…) Contrary to what Newton believed, our ordinary clocks don’t measure something that’s independent of the universe. In fact, says Lloyd, clocks don’t really measure time at all.

“I recently went to the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder,” says Lloyd. (NIST is the government lab that houses the atomic clock that standardizes time for the nation.) They told me, ‘Our clocks do not measure time. No, time is defined to be what our clocks measure.’ Which is true. They define the time standards for the globe: Time is defined by the number of clicks of their clocks.”

discovermagazine.com | read article